Devotional Short Notes on Deuteronomy 3 Og
and his troops came to confront at Edre’i. Og was not an Arab but an Amorite.
For those interested in anti-colonialism of the modern era, the concept
Canaanites is not a nation or the Arabic nation or one particular nation,
they are a conglomerate of nations. Amorites one of them who came from a
region where they actually belong to settle for trade reasons at first but
then secondary reasons since it is a nice are to live at. God
told Moses not to be afraid of Og (3:2). God gave them over to the
Israelites. They got the message from God that they will win and then they
won. They did not first win the Amorites and then attached God to the picture
saying that they were given permission to do so to clear their conscience.
God was directly involved in all here. The Bible is not Jewish propaganda as even
some Jewish scholars today are maintaining. The
cities that were taken were many and they had high walls in those days. In
the end of the Middle Bronze period and start of the Late Bronze period, the
city of Ashkelon, for example, had large mudbrick walls. Jericho too. Why did
archaeology not find any mudbrick walls at Heshbon for example and other
cities in Transjordan? Did Moses lie? Is he fabricating data? This is the
year 1411-1410 BCE and the answer is that not enough archaeology was done in
both Israel and Transjordan to establish a conclusion on the matter. Megiddo
also had a high wall. Gezer too. It was the fashion of those days to have
high walls. “They were all cities fortified with high walls, gates and bars,
and there were also very many ‘cities of the furious ones’ (הַרְבֵּ֥ה מְאֹֽד מֵֽעָרֵ֥י
הַפְּרָזִ֖י)”. The words ‘cities of the furious ones’
(for the Hebrew מֵֽעָרֵ֥י
הַפְּרָזִ֖י) is my own reading and it is seen as the
Perizzites by the Septuagint since the noun looks like that in the original.
But the Septuagint is a translation and only the corrupt text has survived
from the Byzantine period and onwards. Constantine insisted that 50 copies of
the Septuagint must be made for him with high speed and thus every Uncial of
the Old Testament has a different face due to slips of all kinds, eye, ear,
tongue, memory, hand. Laziness caused omissions and alcohol use caused
additions as well, probably. This is called the Septuagint. The Targum and
Rashi of the Middle Ages wondered if the word means “open towns” (3:5). The
etymology was deduced from Arabic by the Targum and Rashi which disqualify
because in the 7th century it was a space between two mountains
which will be open. Moses in 1411 BCE is too remote from 690 A.D. or Rashi’s
12th century A.D. existence. Even F. Delitszch fell in the trap of
relying on 7th century A.D. Arabic to dictate for him what Moses meant
in 1410 BCE. There is a word prt or prš in Late Egyptian (Moses was Middle Egyptian Grammar)
that meant “to break open” or “furious” which can be also a meaning that it
was the “furious ones of the cities”. They were furious that is why they all
came out to fight and that is why all of them got killed. Violence breeds
violence. They
destroyed men, women and children (3:6) and took “all the animals” and “all
the spoils” in the cities (3:7). Two
Amorite kings were in control of a region between the Arnon and Mount Hermon
(3:8). Hermon is the mountain to the north of Israel. It is a very high
mountain “At 9232 feet high, it is the highest mountain of the southern
Lebanon range” says Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan in his online commentary (ORT 2000). Keil
and Delitzsch in their commentary also wanted to elaborate on mount Hermon
and mentioned the different names it was known for: Sirion by the people of
Sidon; the Amorites according to him, called it Senir. The first is in Psalm
29 and the last form is in Canticles 4:8, they say. That is what Moses knew
in 1411 BCE of the place names at his time (3:9). Ice was brought from mount
Hermon to help the people to have underground refrigerators in biblical
times, according to Izak Cornelius of Stellenbosch University. The etymology
of Hermon may have been through Moses and the Middle Egyptian hr meaning “pleasing
or pleasant” with cn and m meaning “to a person”. Thus with the
methathesis of the m the meaning was “pleasant to a person” = Heronm >
Hermon. Moses
knew well for he was educated in the University of Egypt under Hatshepsut
from 1518 BCE. He was a learned person fluent in Egyptian and other languages
like Akkadian. The Amarna corpus is after Moses but near enough to say that
he knew the customs of writing of the Amarna Akkadian corpus. |
It
is not correct for Aryeh Kaplan to add in his 2000 commentary online that the
whole Gilead and the whole Bashan was “the occupied territory” (3:10). The
modern slang or colloquial phrases for Israel controlled areas was not in the
vocabulary of the Bible. One must remember that when Lot chose Sodom and
Gemorrah, the descendants of them lived in those areas ever since 2154 BCE.
So the Amorites were invaders from outside taking over control of lands that
their ancestors were not living at. When God gave these territories to
Israel, He was giving them merely what their ancestors had way back then
scooping away the in-betweeners. Anti-colonialism in modern days will not
work here. There is no need to superimpose these political driven sideshows
over the religious designed Bible that God gave us. |
When
one talks about the events in Genesis 15 and the Rephaim are mentioned living
in Bashan, Og is a connection to those in 2154 BCE living there through
blood-lines. “Of all the Rephaim, only Og had survived” (3:11). “His bed was
made of iron” = בַּרְזֶ֔ל (3:11) which is remarkable because
scholars believe that iron (בַּרְזֶ֔ל) only entered Israel in the Iron Ages
from the 14th centuries and onward. The Philistines were the iron
producers. Is it an anomaly? By no means. In the publication of A. Perrot of
Mari Palace II page 173 at fig.96 is an Iron? Bull? This is the period of
1764 BCE? Have to confirm again. But my catalogue (Van Wyk Notes Vol. 27)
indicates that. In Anatolia XIII (1986): 27 there is a discussion of 13th
to 14th centuries BCE iron. It is still 100 years short of Moses’
1410 BCE mention of it. See also Anatolia XXXV of 1985 page 67ff. and
Anatolia XLI of 1991: 182? Iron ore was known earlier than the Philistines.
They did refine the art of iron tools and weapons, of course. It is not a
later writer who included an anachronism here in Moses’ writing. |
Moses
saw the bed and measured it so he could give the exact size. Keil and
Delitzsch (p. 302) in their commentary mentioned that it was the custom of
Alexander the Great to make for each soldier two beds the size of 5 cubits
and two stalls size for the horses to give the impression that the Greeks
were gigantic. Is that the image that Og tried to convey to his enemies by
this oversize bed? Moses
then distributed the land to the Reubenites and Gadites between Aro’er and
the Arnon Gorge and half of the Gilead highlands (3:12). The
other half of Gilead and Bashan was given to Manasseh. This was historically
known as the land of the Rephaim. Moses knew about it since he wrote Genesis
in 1460 BCE while in Midian. Moses
recorded that Yair, who was a descendant of Manasseh, took the Argov group
and gave the area of Bashan the name Chavvath Yair. On the day Moses compiled
the book of Deuteronomy, that name was still used. Why did Moses say that it
was still in use? Because when Habiru took over a city and gave it new names,
the danger was always there that the name swtich or change back again. But,
Moses witnessed that it remained the same. The
name Havoth Jair has been translated as “villages of JaIr” by some. Keil and
Delitzsch suggested that the word חַוֹּ֣ת יָאִ֔יר is from the
Hebrew word “life”. This expression is just used for Jair’s area. A better
solution is to see it as a Hebraizing of an Egyptian word ḥ3wtyw
which meant “foremost” or “leader”. They were seen as the “foremost of Jair”.
A second generation Exodus kid would still use Egytpianisms and Egyptian
language alongside with the Hebrew just like any second generation returnees
are using when they return to Israel today. Some even suggested that it means
a tentdweller utilizing the Arabic word for it. But, Arabic is to late and
distant from the time of Moses to be involved in unlocking difficult words in
Moses’ usage. Gesenius once gave an excellent lecture on this very same
matter of lexicography and the insuffiencency of Arabic. And he was not the
only one. Moses may have been surprised that an Egyptian-Hebraized loanword
could still remain the name of a city, seeing that they just escaped the hard
conditions of Egypt. Whereas all tries to unlock the meaning with Arabic via
Hebrew modern dictionaries, I rather say, go and look at Middle Egyptian
Dictionaries. The
Gilead region was given to Makhir (3:15). Moses
repeated what he gave to the Reubenites and Gaddites since he remembered that
he gave them also the “interior of the river and its boundary as far as the river
of the Jabbok, which use to be the border of the Ammonites” (3:16). Because
of present-day dryness, people try to translate “river” as “gorge” but
climate today was not climate back then. It was a wet period globally with
more melted ice at the poles and wetter conditions in the Levant. Transjordan
was green. As the 2012 article on “Climate Change during and After the Roman
Empire” indicates on page 175, the Alpine glaciers were retreating between
200 BCE to 100 A.D. Weather was favorable. Temparatures in Greenland were
warm between 20 BCE to 75 A.D. The
Aravah Sea (3:17) in connection with the Dead Sea must have been a large
water basin existing in the good climate and even better climate of Israel in
those days of Moses. Of course, with the dry hot climate of today, it is no
longer extant. Moses
told them that God gave them the land and that they should all participate to
take it (3:18). If you look at the territory today, people would not consider
it a gift but back then everything was green woods. David
for example, running from Saul in the book of 1 Samuel, hid in one wood after
another and they must have been large to be able to effectively hide from
armies. Although
they got their lion’s share of land from God, their woman and children are to
stay in the cities with their livestock but they are to help their bretheren
to get theirs as well (3:19-20). Moses
turned his attention to Joshua to give him the instructions of leadership and
command over Israel (3:21). “Do
not fear them, since God your Lord is the One who will be fighting for you”
(3:22). Then
follows a special diary note of Moses how he pleaded with God about the entry
(3:23). Moses
wanted to go into the land but God said: “Enough. Do not speak to Me any more
about this” (3:26). He was to climb the cliff and gaze to the west, north,
south and east. His eyes were to “feast on it” but he was not to cross the
Jordan (3:27). God
then handed the powers of leadership over from Moses to Joshua, and he was to
encourage him and he was the one who will divide the land that Moses will see
on the mountain (3:28-29). Moses
made the footnote to this chapter by saying that navigationally they were
staying in the valley facing Beth-Peor.
Dear
God Moses
wanted to see the promised land and You gave him the Promised Land. The real
one promised to Abraham and his faithful seed in all nations, the remnant of
spiritual Israel. Save us through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. |