Sermon Tone Analysis

The Place of the Serpent

In Numbers 13, the Israelites had arrived at the border of Canaan.

Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan to report on the land and its inhabitants.

They came back with the news that what God had said was true -Numbers 13:27

but then they added, “there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them (ESV).”

The very next chapter of the book of Numbers tells us that, despite the miracles of their deliverance from Egypt, the people who refused to believe that God would help them defeat the Anakim (sons of Anak).

Because they rebelled, God sentenced them to wander in the desert forty years until all who did not believe had died off.

Only then would God bring them back to the promised land Numbers 14: 33-35

Who were the Anakim?

Were these giants the kind of monstrous beings we read about in the Greek literature of the ancient gods?

How many of them lived in the land?

The text clearly connects them to the Nephilim, but how exactly were they connected?

Answers to these questions can only be understood when framed by the original ancient context of the biblical writers who put the old testament account of Israel’s history in its final form.

It is no accident that, by all accounts, this work was finished in exile in Babylon.

The biblical writers deliberately connect the giant clan enemies Israel would face in the conquest back to the ancient apostasies that had Babylon at their root: the sons of God and the Nephilim, and the disinheritance of the nations at the tower of Babel.

These incidents inform the Israelite supernatural worldview.

They are at the heart of what is at stake in the war for the promised land.

Israel will encounter two deadly forces: the descendents of the Nephilim and the people of the nations under the dominion of hostile gods.

The two are at times conflated in the narrative.

Both must be defeated, but one in particular must be annihilated.

The Giants of the Transjordon

As the forty years of wandering neared completion, God directed Moses to lead the new generation of Israelites (and the few members of the old generation whose faith had not failed) back toward Canaan.

But instead of heading into Canaan from the south as before, God brought them alongside Canaan through territory to the east - the Transjordon.

This was no accident as we can see in Deut.

We learn several things of significance in this passage and its geography.

Proceeding from south to north, the Edomites, Moabites and Ammonites were to be left unmolested by the Israelites because God had long ago alloted that land to Abraham’s nephew Lot and his grandson, Esau, Jacob’s brother.

It is fascinating to note that giants had lived in those territories prior to the arrival of Moses, Joshua and the Israelites.

These giant clans were known among the Moabites and Ammonites as the Emim and the Zamzummim (Rephaim).

Other inhabitants had also be driven out: the Horites, the Avvim, and the Caphtorim.

These tribal groups are never themselves referred to as being unusually tall, though they surface in connection with giant clans in a number of other passages.

The thing to observe here is that these giant clans had already been removed from the land promised to Abraham’s descendants by the descendants of Esau and Lot, who were descended from Abraham, like Israel.

These giant clans were related to the Anakim, who were, of course, “from the Nephilim”.

We aren’t told specifically how the bloodline lineages worked, but we are told a relationship existed.

Additionally, all these groups seem to also have been referred to as Rephaim, a term that will take on more importance as we proceed.

Marching to Sihon … and Bashan

God told Moses to ask travel permission form the sons of Lot and Esau as the Israelites journeyed northward through the Transjordon.

They recieved that permission and passed through.

They were on their way at God’s leading to what was actually the last area under the dominion of the Nephilim bloodline in the Transjordon.

Moses is seemingly unaware of God’s aim in this leg of the journey.

Deut continues as Moses sends word to the enemy in God’s cross-hairs

Did you catch the last line?

God hardened the heart of Sihon.

The wording is designed to make us think of God’s battle with Pharaoh, the presumed god of Egypt.

It was time for Sihon to go.

But why target him?

The answer to that question requires a look back into biblical history, and then a look forward into the next chapter of Deut.

Let’s look back first - to Abraham.

In Gen 15, one of the passages where God appeared to Abraham to form a covenant relationship with him, god told Abraham the following in a dream:

God told Abraham that his descendents (the people of Edom, Ammon, Moab, and, of course, Israel) would live in bondage but would one return to the land of promise - at a time when the iniquity of the Amorites had reached the point when God was ready to judge it.

Why Sihon?

But why the Amorites?

This culture was Mesopotamian… and from Sumer and Babylon.

It is sort of messy in that its use is indiscriminate.

Sometimes it is the population of the promised land, like the Canaanites and in others is is specific.

These are generic terms to describe the enemies of Israel.

Of the two the Amorites take a more sinister tone in the context of Babylonian polemic that precedes this point in Israel’s story.

Tarring and feathering the inhabitants of Canaan with a label that would take an Israelite reader back to the supernatural disasters of Gen 6 and 11 would have a profound theological effect.

But the connection is actually more direct than rhetoric.

One passage in Scripture specifically connects the Amorites (Canaanites) to the giants that were derivative of the Nephilim.

God say through the prophet Amos: Amos 2: 9-10

Note that the context for this statement is the exodus and the conquest.

That at least some Amorites were unusually tall would have been proof to the Israelites they had descended from the Nephilim - and that case, of course, was made in the report of the spies.

For an Israelite, all this meant that the native population of Canaan had a supernaturally sinister point of origin.

This wouldn’t just be a battle for land.

It was a battle between Yahweh and rebellious watcher-gods who had raised up competing human bloodlines there was opposed to God’s plan and people.

Something else about Sihon factors into this interpretation.

He was allied to a fellow names Og, another king of the Amorites who ruled in the region of Bashan.

Og was a giant.

Let’s look at Deut 3: 1-11

For an ancient Israelite reader with a command of Hebrew and a worldview that included the idea that supernatural opposition to Israel had something to do with pre-flood events in Mesopotamia, several things in this short passage would have jumped out immediately.

None of them are obvious in English translation.

First, the most immediate link is Og’s bed.

It’s dimensions (9x4 cubits) are precisely those of the cultic bed in the ziggurat called Etemenanki — which is the ziggurat most archaeologist identify as the Tower of Babel referred to in the Bible.

Ziggurats functioned as temples and divine abodes.

The unusually large bed at Etemenanki was housed in “the house of the bed”.

It was the place were the god Marduk and his divine wife, Zarpanitu, met annually for ritual lovemaking, the purpose of which was divine blessing on the land.

We must note the precise correlation.

It is hard not to conclude that, as with Gen. 6: 1-4, so with Deut 3, those who put the finishing touches of the OT during the exile in Babylon were connecting Marduk and Og in some way.

the most transparent path is in fact giant stature.

Og is said to be the last of the Rephaim — a term connected to the giant Anakim and other ancient giant clans in the Transjordon.

Marduk, like other deities in antiquity, was portrayed as superhuman in size.

However, the real matrix of ideas in the mind of the biblical author may be derived form wordplay based on Babylonian hierohistory (myth).

here Joshua looking back at the battle mentions Og as king of Bashan and living at Ashtaroth and Edrei.

These terms were theologically loaded terms for an Israelite, and even for their neighbors who were worshipping other gods.

Ashtaroth, Edrei, and the Rephaim are mentioned by name in Ugaritic texts.

The Rephaim of Ugarit are not described as giants.

Rather they are quasi-divine dead warrior kings who inhabit the underworld.

In the Ugaritic language the location of these places was not spelled Bashan but Bathan.

This linguistic note is intriguing since Bashan/Bathan both also mean serpent, so this region was “the place of the serpent.”

As we saw earlier, the divine serpentine being, the Nachash, became lord of the dead after his rebellion in Eden.

In effect, Bashan was considered (to use a New Testament term) to be the location of “the gates of hell.”

Later Jewish writers understood these conceptual connections.

Their intersection is at the heart of why books like 1st Enoch teach that demons are actually the spirits of dead Nephilim.

Lastly, aside from Bashan being the gateway to the underworld, the region has another sinister feature mentioned in the Deut 3 passage: Mount Hermon.

According to 1 Enoch 6: 1-6, Mount Hermon was the place where the sons of God of Gen 6 descended when they came to earth to cohabit with human women —the episode that produced the Nephilim.

Look at how Joshua unites all the threads.

Just the name “Hermon” would have caught the attention of Israelite and Jewish readers.

In Hebrew it is pronounced khermon.

The noun has the same root as a verb that is of central importance in Deut 3 and the conquest narratives: kharam, “to devote to destruction.”

This is the distinct verb of holy war, the verb of extermination.