Rephaim: Were They Giants or the Ghosts of the Dead?

The giant peoples of the Bible's borderlands, whose name also meant the ghosts of the dead.

In Deuteronomy the Rephaim are giant peoples who once lived east of the Jordan, called Emim by the Moabites and Zamzummim in Ammonite lands. In poetic books the same Hebrew word names the shades of the dead.

Deuteronomy 2 pauses its travel narrative to describe who used to live in the lands east of the Jordan. "The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; which also were accounted giants, as the Anakims; but the Moabites called them Emims." Farther north, in Ammonite territory, the same kind of people were called Zamzummims. The general name was Rephaim, translated "giants" in the King James Version.

Genesis 14 describes an ancient war in which eastern kings "smote the Rephaims in Ashteroth Karnaim, and the Zuzims in Ham, and the Emims in Shaveh Kiriathaim." Og of Bashan was the last of the Rephaim. A valley just southwest of Jerusalem was called the Valley of Rephaim, and David's warriors fought men described as descendants of "the giant," ha-rapha.

The word has a second, eerier meaning. In poetic books, the Rephaim are the shades of the dead. Isaiah 14:9 says the underworld "stirreth up the dead for thee," and Isaiah 26:14 says "they are deceased, they shall not rise." In the Hebrew, both of those words are rephaim. Texts from the ancient city of Ugarit in Syria speak of the rpum, deified royal ancestors who are summoned to feasts. So the Rephaim sit on the boundary between history and myth: a lost people of great size, and the powerful dead of the underworld.