Rephaite

Canaanite People Group

In the Hebrew Bible, "Rephaites" or "Rephaim" can describe an ancient race of giants in Iron Age Israel, or the places where these individuals were thought to have lived. According to Genesis 14:5, King Chedorlaomer and his allies attacked and defeated the Rephaites at Ashteroth-Karnaim. Rephaites are also mentioned at Genesis 15:20; Deuteronomy 2:10-21, 3:11; Joshua 12:4, 13:12, 15:8, 17:15, 18:16; 2 Samuel 5:18-22, 23:13; and 1 Chronicles 11:15, 14:9 and 20:4.

In the biblical narrative, the Israelites were instructed to exterminate the previous inhabitants of the "promised land", i.e. Canaan, which include various named peoples, including some unusually tall/large individuals. Several passages in the Book of Joshua, and also Deuteronomy 3:11, suggest that Og, the King of Bashan, was one of the last survivors of the Rephaim, and that his bed was 9 cubits long in ordinary cubits. (An ordinary cubit is the length of a man's forearm according to the New American Standard Bible, or approximately 18 inches, which differs from a royal cubit. This makes the bed over 13 feet long, even longer if the cubit was based on a giant's forearm). Anak, according to 2:11, was a Rephaite.

The area of Moab at Ar (the region east of the Jordan), before the time of Moses, was also considered the land of the Rephaites. Deuteronomy 2:18-21 notes that the Ammonites called the Rephaites "Zamzummim". In Arabic the word زمزم (zamzama) translates as "to rumble, roll (thunder); murmur". In Deuteronomy 2:11, the Moabites referred to them as the "Emim".

Long dead ancestors

Rephaim have also been considered the residents of the Netherworld (Sheol in the Hebrew Bible) in more recent scholarship. Possible examples of this usage appear as "shades", "spirits" or "dead" in various translations of the Bible. See: Isa 14:9, 26:14, 26:19; Ps 88:11; Prov 2:18, 9:18, 21:16; Job 26:5, and possibly 2 Chron 16:12, where we may read Repha'im as “dead ancestors” or "weakeners", as opposed to Rophe’im, “doctors.” The Heb. root רפא means “heal,” and thus the masculine plural nominalized form of this root may indicate that these “deceased ancestors” could be invoked for ritual purposes that would benefit the living.

Various ancient Northwest Semitic texts are also replete with references to terms evidently cognate with Rephaim as the dead or dead kings. Lewis (1989) undertakes a detailed study of several enigmatic funerary ritual texts from the ancient coastal city of Ugarit. Lewis concludes that the “Ugaritic Funerary Text” provides important evidence for understanding Ugarit's cult of the dead, wherein beings called rapi'uma, the long dead, and malakuma, recently dead kings, were invoked in a funeral liturgy, presented with food/drink offerings, and asked to provide blessings for the reign of the current king. The many references to repha'im in the Hebrew Bible in contexts involving Sheol and dead spirits strongly suggests that many ancient Israelites imagined the spirits of the dead as playing an active and important role in securing blessings, healing, or other benefits in the lives of the living.

“The link between Titan and Poltergeist may very well be adduced from the verb stem, raphah, which means to sink or relax. In Isaiah 5:24 it is the sinking down of hay in flame, in Judges 19:9 the decline of the day, and in Nehemiah 6:9 the sinking motion is attributed to the hands, as in ‘Their hands shall be weakened from the work.’ The list of usages goes on: to withdraw, to abate, to lose heart, to let drop, to abandon or forsake, to let alone. The Repha’im-as-Giants may loom large, but only in the metaphoric sense. They are gigantic precisely because they have withdrawn into the mythic past. Having relaxed their grip on the real world, they’ve become, as the saying goes, mere ghosts of their former selves.” (Levin, 1997, p. 17)[iv]