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Deuteronomy describes the giant king Og with his nine-cubit iron bed. Jubilees echoes that detail to give a whole race of Rephaim heights of seven to ten cubits, making even its shortest giant taller than Goliath.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Deuteronomy 3:11
Hebrew Bible
10 all the cities of the plateau, all of Gilead and Bashan as far as Salecah and Edrei, cities of the kingdom of Og in Bashan. 11 Only King Og of Bashan was left of the remaining Rephaites. (It is noteworthy that his sarcophagus was made of iron. Does it not, indeed, still remain in Rabbath of the Ammonites? It is 13½ feet long and 6 feet wide according to standard measure.) 12 This is the land we brought under our control at that time: The territory extending from Aroer by the Wadi Arnon and half the Gilead hill country with its cities I gave to the Reubenites and Gadites.
Jubilees 29:9
Pseudepigrapha
8 There he made a mound as a testimony; for this reason that place is named the mound of testimony after this mound. 9 But at first the land of Gilead was named the land of Rafaem because it was the land of the Rafaim. The Rafaim were born, giants whose heights were ten cubits, nine cubits, eight cubits, and down to seven cubits. 10 The places where they lived extended from the land of the Ammonites as far as Mt. Hermon. Their royal centers were Karnaim, Ashtarot, Edrei, Misur, and Beon.
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Notes and References
... In Jubilees, the narrating angel first notes that, as in Deuteronomy 2:20, the territory once bore the name of its early inhabitants, the Rephaim, and they were giants. Deuteronomy does not supply their specific height (saying only that they were ‘as tall as the Anakim’), but Jubilees does. It may be that the writer took one indication of their statures—nine cubits—from the notice about the length of the bed belonging to King Og of Bashan (who is ‘of the remnant of the Rephaim’ [Deuteronomy 2:11]). If the Rephaim ranged in height from ten down to seven cubits, even the shortest among them were taller than Goliath, who, according to the Masoretic Text, was six cubits and a span (1 Samuel 17:4). ...
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