2. Do not fear him, for . . . you shall do to him as you did to Sihon. Although Moses has already prevailed over Sihon, he has special reason to be afraid of Og, for, as we learn in verse 11, Og, alone among these trans-Jordanian kings, is a gigantic figure, the last scion of a legendary race.

5. fortified towns with high walls, double gates and bolt. The looming aspect of the trans-Jordanian towns, which was stressed before, is here given architectural specification: despite the high walls and the firmly bolted gates, the Israelites found ways to breach the defenses and capture every one of the enemies’ towns. These passages might well be a wishful turning around of the strategic telescope, for in the period in which they were composed—the last century of the First Commonwealth—it was the towns of Israel and Judah that repeatedly faced assault and sometimes succumbed.

open towns. That is, without walls or other fortifications.

8. as far as Mount Hermon. Repeatedly in these rehearsals of the Israelite conquest, the eye of the narrator—Moses—swings in a grand panorama from trans-Jordan, where he and the people are standing and where the first victories took place, across the Jordan, and all the way to the fertile mountainous region in the north of Canaan. The lushness of the Mount Hermon region is attested by its invocation in erotic contexts in the Song of Songs.

11. For only Og king of the Bashan remained from the rest of the Rephaim. Since the Rephaim, as we had occasion to note in 2:10, are a race of giants, and also dwellers of the underworld, this makes Og virtually a mythological figure. In a Phoenician mortuary inscription from the sixth or fifth century B.C.E., would-be violators of the tomb are warned that the great Og will exact retribution from them. He would appear to be some sort of fierce underworld god or demon in the common lore of the region, and our text seeks to historicize him while clinging to his legendary lineaments. Because of the link between the Rephaim and the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4, several traditional commentators see Og as the last of the antediluvians.

his bedstead, an iron bedstead. The Hebrew noun ʿeres is a poetic term for bed, perhaps used here (instead of the more prosaic mishkav or mitah) to give this declaration an epic flourish. Moshe Weinfeld proposes that it means “bier,” a secondary meaning that mitah has. Several scholars have noted that late in the second millennium B.C.E., iron had been only recently introduced and was still regarded as a rare metal. But the sheer hardness of the substance might be meant to indicate the martial toughness of the gigantic king.

is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? The speaker points to this relic of the gargantuan Og as concrete evidence of his actual existence, available for inspection by the curious tourist.

by the cubit of a man. The disproportion between the giant and an ordinary man is highlighted by giving the measurements of his bed according to “the cubit of a man,” that is, the length in an average man from the elbow to the beginning of the knuckles. (The royal cubit was longer.) This would make the bedstead around thirteen and a half feet long and approximately as wide as a modern queen-size bed (in an era when all beds were single couches).

12. And this land we took hold of at that time. One of the earmarks of the Deuteronomic style is the fondness it exhibits for demonstrative pronouns. Moses, recapitulating the recent history of the Israelites for the benefit of the people, likes to use what linguists call deictics—“pointing words”—to indicate what is before their eyes, the familiar objects of their collective experience.

14. until this day. This little flourish is an inadvertent hint that for the moment the writer is probably not thinking of Moses’s time but of his own.

17. the Arabah Sea, the Dead Sea. The latter designation in the Hebrew is literally the Salt Sea.

Pisgah. The other name for this mountain, from whose peak Moses will look out on the promised land and then die, is Nebo.

19. Only your wives and your little ones and your livestock. Most of the details here of the military role assigned to the trans-Jordanian tribes correspond to the account in Numbers 32, though this version is a good deal more succinct and omits the indications of divine instruction in Numbers.

22. it is the LORD your God Who does battle for you. This clause, picked up from Exodus 14:14, serves as a kind of refrain through this whole narrative of the conquest.

23. I pleaded. Richard Elliott Friedman, noting the linkage between this verb and “did not listen” in verse 26, interestingly detects an allusion to Genesis 42:21, where Joseph’s brothers recall how he pleaded to them and they did not listen when they sold him into slavery. Perhaps the point of the allusion is that it recalls the moment when Joseph is violently thrust away from his homeland of Canaan: Moses, who began where Joseph ended, in Egypt, will not be permitted to enter the homeland though, as we may recall, Joseph’s bones will be carried into the promised land to be buried there.

24. My Master, LORD. The Hebrew, as it is vocalized in the Masoretic Text, reads ʾadonai YHWH, the first of these two words being another appellation of God. This translation follows Weinfeld’s persuasive suggestion that either the original vocalization of the first word was ʾadoni, “my Master,” a form of address often used in supplications, or that the plural suffix ʾadonai is a plural of majesty.

for what god is there in the heavens and on the earth. Given the Deuteronomist’s rigorous monotheism, the plausible sense of these words is that the supposed gods of heaven and earth have no real substance and therefore no power to perform any acts. Nevertheless, the formulation, perhaps as a kind of verbal fossil, carries a trace of the older view that there may be other gods, but ones that are no match for YHWH.

25. this goodly high country. Still again one sees the Deuteronomist’s fondness for the demonstrative pronoun, here used with considerable poignancy as Moses points verbally to the sweet land before him that he will not be allowed to enter.

26. And the LORD was cross. Although the verb used in this translation—as by Friedman—is a little too mild for the Hebrew hitʿaber, which is closer to “was angered,” it has the virtue of preserving the pun, transparent in the Hebrew, on the same verb (ʿ-b-r) in the qal conjugation, “to cross” or “cross over,” used both for the advance of the Israelites (verse 21) and in Moses’s plea to God (verse 25). Such punning switches of meaning are a regular technique of biblical narrative employed to effect transitions and do not necessarily reflect thematic significance. (Compare, for example, Judges 3, in which Ehud first stabs [taqaʿ] the Midianite king Eglon in the belly and then, having effected his escape, blasts [taqaʿ] the ram’s horn to muster the Israelites to rebellion.)

Enough for you. This impatient phrase, rav lekha, pointedly echoes rav lakhem, “Long enough you . . .” addressed by God to the Israelites in 1:6 and 2:3.