How Tall Was Og King of Bashan? Giants in the Bible

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Who Was King Og of Bashan?

Og wasn’t just a big man. He was a king — the king of the Amorites in Bashan, ruling a significant stretch of territory east of the Jordan River. His kingdom of Og included the region of Argob: sixty fortified cities with high walls, gates, and bronze bars (Deuteronomy 3:4–5). This wasn’t a village chieftain. He commanded armies and governed territory. In ancient times, Bashan was one of the most fertile and strategically significant regions in the ancient world.

What made him theologically significant in the Hebrew Bible is a single phrase from Deuteronomy 3:11:

“For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron…” — Deuteronomy 3:11 (KJV)

“Only Og king of Bashan remained.” He was the last of the Rephaim — the last of an ancient race of giants whose origins go all the way back to Genesis 6 and the land of Canaan. His defeat by Moses and the children of Israel wasn’t just a military victory. It was the end of a bloodline.

Og’s entire kingdom of Bashan was given to the half tribe of Manasseh as part of the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 3:13). The region of Argob — all sixty cities — was absorbed into Israel’s inheritance. His defeat cleared the way for the conquest of Canaan under Joshua.

The Iron Bed: The Only Hard Evidence

Here’s the honest starting point for any discussion of Og’s height: the Bible never directly tells us how tall he was. What it tells us is the dimensions of his bed.

Deuteronomy 3:11 says his iron bedstead was nine cubits long and four cubits wide — “after the cubit of a man.” This bed of iron was so famous it was kept as a monument in Rabbah of the Ammonites (modern-day Amman, Jordan), which is why the text points readers to it: “is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon?” The bed frame of iron served as proof — a display piece confirming the enormous size of the last of the Rephaim.

Two things make this verse interesting to scholars. First, the material: iron (or possibly basalt — “hard black rock” in some interpretations of the Hebrew word barzel). In the ancient world, iron beds were not common household furniture. This was a throne-sized structure. Second, the qualifier: “after the cubit of a man.” The text is specifically telling us which cubit to use — not the royal cubit of ancient Egypt or Babylon, but the ordinary human forearm measurement. That matters for our calculations.

The bed’s dimensions — roughly 13 feet by 6 feet at the standard cubit — suggest a man of enormous size. But a bed is always longer than the person who sleeps in it. Which means Og’s actual height was almost certainly less than nine cubits. How much less? That’s where the debate starts.

The Cubit Problem: Why Nobody Agrees on a Number

A cubit is the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. The problem is that this measurement varied across cultures, time periods, and contexts — and the Hebrew Bible uses several different cubit lengths.

Here’s what the different cubit measures give us for Og’s bed (and an estimated height assuming a man is roughly 90% of his bed’s length):

Since Deuteronomy 3:11 specifically says “the cubit of a man” (not a royal or architectural cubit), most bible scholars lean toward the standard or ordinary cubit — putting the bed at roughly 13 feet and Og himself at approximately 11–12 feet tall. At a minimum of around nine and a half feet, he would have been the tallest man — the most physically imposing tall man — in any room in the ancient world.

Some scholars take a more conservative approach, arguing that the bed may have been ceremonial — more like a throne-display piece than a sleeping surface — and that Og’s great height may have been closer to 9–10 feet. Men of great stature in the ancient world could achieve this without the need for miraculous origins.

Dead Sea Scrolls vs. Masoretic Text: Does It Change Anything?

What this means practically: the English translations you grew up with (King James Version, NIV, ESV) all follow the Masoretic text for Og. When you read “nine cubits,” that’s from the same manuscript tradition. It’s the earliest authoritative Hebrew text we have for this passage, and the Dead Sea Scrolls don’t contradict it here — but they do remind us that ancient numbers deserve careful handling.

So How Tall Was Og? The Numbers

Here’s the honest answer: approximately 9 to 13 feet tall, depending on which cubit you use and whether the bed length directly reflects his height.

The most widely accepted scholarly range is 9–12 feet. Using the “cubit of a man” that Deuteronomy 3:11 specifies — roughly 17.5 to 18 inches — and accounting for the fact that a man is typically a foot or two shorter than his bed, Og was likely somewhere around 10–12 feet tall. That is enormous. That is not a human you’d want to meet in a hill country fortified city.

For reference: the tallest man in recorded human history was Robert Wadlow at 8 feet 11.1 inches. Og, on this estimate, would have been 1–3 feet taller than the tallest documented human who ever lived.

If Og Walked Into an NBA Locker Room

To put Og’s height in modern terms, here’s how he would compare to some of the tallest men alive today — and in recorded history.

Even on the conservative end — 9 feet — Og would be a full foot taller than Robert Wadlow. Even the tallest basketball players today would come up to roughly his chest. At the higher estimates of 12–13 feet, he would be in a category of physical size that has no modern parallel.

Giants of the Bible: The Full Comparison

Og wasn’t alone. The Hebrew Bible describes several races and individuals of extraordinary size, mostly concentrated in the land of Canaan during the time of Moses and the conquest under Joshua. Here’s how the major groups and individuals compare:

*Giant Goliath’s height: Masoretic Text reads “six cubits and a span” (~9.5 ft); Dead Sea Scrolls (4QSam) reads “four cubits and a span” (~6.5 ft). Most contemporary scholars favor the shorter DSS reading. For comparison, even King Saul — described as the tallest man among the people of Israel in 1 Samuel 9:2 — stood only head and shoulders above ordinary men, putting him around 6.5–7 feet at most.

The question of whether Og was the tallest person in the Bible depends on which cubit you use for Goliath. If Goliath was only 6.5 feet (the DSS reading), then Og at 9–12 feet was far taller. If the Masoretic Text’s 9.5 feet for Goliath is correct, they’re in the same general category — with Og’s bed still implying the greater enormous size.

Where Did the Giants Come From?

This is the question behind the question. Og was the last of the Rephaim — but the Rephaim didn’t appear from nowhere. Understanding who they were means tracing a thread that goes back to Genesis 6 and one of the most debated passages in the Hebrew Bible.

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them.” — Genesis 6:4 (NIV)

The “sons of God” and “daughters of men” (or daughters of man) passage is the origin point for most discussions of biblical giants. Whether the sons of God were angels, fallen divine beings, or simply the godly line of Seth depends heavily on which biblical tradition you’re reading. But the result is the Nephilim — described as “mighty men” of great height. These descendants of the Nephilim are what the people of Israel found waiting for them when the Israelite spies entered the land of giants.

The Rephaim appear to be the Canaanite branch of this giant heritage — this race of Rephaites was a group of men of great stature who occupied the land of Canaan and the surrounding regions before and during Israel’s entry into the Promised Land. The Anakim (sons of Anak) were a subgroup of this same ancient race of giants. Numbers 13:33 says the Israelite spies felt like grasshoppers next to them. The biblical references to this group span from Genesis through the books of Samuel and Chronicles, describing a remnant of giants that persisted for centuries as kings of the Amorites and other Canaanite peoples.

Three Hebrew words sit at the heart of this entire conversation:

The land of the Rephaim stretched across much of Transjordan — the region east of the Jordan River that included Bashan, Gilead, and Ammon. When the children of Israel came through this land in the time of Moses, they weren’t encountering a forgotten fairy tale. They were walking into a landscape that had been occupied by men of great stature for generations.

What Og’s Size Actually Tells Us

Here’s the verse that changes how I read the whole story. It’s in Numbers 21:34, right before the battle with Og:

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Do not be afraid of him, for I have delivered him into your hands, along with his whole army and his land.'” — Numbers 21:34 (NIV)

God had to say that. “Do not be afraid of him.”

That tells you everything about how intimidating Og was. Israel had already been through forty years in the desert — partly because their ancestors saw the descendants of Anak and refused to go in (Numbers 13–14). The giants had cost them an entire generation. Now here they were again, facing the last and greatest of them. God didn’t downplay Og’s size. He acknowledged it and said “go anyway.”

The enormous size of Og isn’t in the Bible to satisfy curiosity about ancient giants. It’s there to make the victory meaningful. If Og had been a normal-sized man, his defeat would have been a footnote. Because he was the last of the Rephaim — a king of enormous size with sixty fortified cities and a kingdom stretching from Mount Hermon to the Jordan River — his defeat was a statement.

God’s faithfulness doesn’t shrink in proportion to the size of what you’re facing.

If you want to sit with that theme further, our piece on how many times “fear not” appears in the Bible walks through that repeated command from God in exactly the situations that felt most impossible. Og shows up in that pattern.

For more on the kind of faith Israel needed in this moment — and what it takes to walk toward something that overwhelms you — our collection of Bible verses about strength and courage gathers the passages that shaped that kind of trust.

What the Bible Does NOT Say About Og

Frequently Asked Questions About Og