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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Rephaim
A people of giants in some texts and the shades of the dead in others.
Genesis 14:5, in every translation this tool compares.
One word doing two jobs that seem unrelated: a people of giants in the conquest accounts, and the shades of the dead in the poetry. Isaiah has the grave stirring up the Rephaim to greet a king arriving there. The overlap is not a translation accident.
A pre-Israelite population in the conquest texts and the shades of the dead in the poetry, and the overlap is no accident of translation. Isaiah 14:9 has Sheol stirring up the Rephaim to meet the arriving king. Proverbs uses the term three times as a byword for death: Lady Folly's house "sinks down to death" (2:18), where the Hebrew behind the parallel line is rephaim, her guests are already "in the depths of Sheol" (9:18), and the man who strays "will rest in the assembly of the dead" (21:16), which in Hebrew is the assembly of the rephaim. Job 26:5 puts them "beneath the waters," under Sheol, and Psalm 88:10 asks whether the departed will ever rise up to praise God, expecting the answer no. The Valley of Rephaim near Jerusalem (Joshua 15:8; 18:16; 2 Samuel 5:18) adjoins the Valley of Hinnom, where the name Gehenna comes from, so the underworld association is geographic as well as poetic.
H7497 (רְפָאִים), 19 occ
The Ugaritic rpum are a company of the honored dead tied to the royal cult in Bashan, among other places. Og of Bashan, "a survivor of the Rephaim," lived at Ashtaroth and Edrei, which the Ugaritic tablets name as the seat of mlk, the deified king and eponym of the mlkm, the rpum, so "the land of the Rephaim" could as easily read "the underworld of the Rephaim." DDD's contributor argues that Baal himself carries the epithet rpu, "healer," as lord over the rpum in three fragmentary Ugaritic ritual texts: KTU 1.20-22, "the Rephaim text"; KTU 1.108, a banquet liturgy for the royal dead; and KTU 1.161, a funeral rite for a recently dead king. All three are built around invitations to the rpum to come up and feast, and scholars read them variously as evidence for periodic communion between the living king and his royal ancestors or as commemoration only.
The ancient versions merge the Rephaim and the Nephilim. The LXX and Vulgate usually render repha'im as "giants," and rabbinic tradition (Bereshit Rabbah 26:7; 31:12; Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer 34) holds that Rephaim was simply another name for the Nephilim, whose monstrous offspring were cast into the netherworld according to 1 Enoch 6-14, offered as the reason they could be called "healers" at all.
- Genesis 14:5
- Genesis 15:20
- Deuteronomy 2:11,20
- Deuteronomy 3:11,13
- Joshua 12:4
- Joshua 13:12
- 2 Samuel 21:16-22
- Isaiah 14:9
- Isaiah 26:14
- Job 26:5
- Psalm 88:10
- Proverbs 2:18
- Proverbs 9:18
- Proverbs 21:16
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/sheol\/","n":"sheol","s":"The realm of the dead. Not hell, and not nothing.","r":"Genesis 37:35"}
- H. Rouillard, DDD s.v. "Rephaim," 692-699
- Heiser, *Demons*, 10-11
- Heiser, *Reversing Hermon*, 91-92, ch. 6 ("Old Testament Bashan: Giants and the Underworld")
