Bashan

The shape of the country is not in dispute, because Scripture draws it four times and the four agree. Deuteronomy 3:8 to 3:10 runs the conquered land from the Arnon Valley as far as Mount Hermon and names Salecah and Edrei as the far cities of the kingdom of Og. Joshua 12:5 gives the same shape from the other side, with Og ruling Mount Hermon, Salecah, all of Bashan up to the border of the Geshurites and Maacathites, and half of Gilead. Joshua 13:11 repeats it, and 1 Chronicles 5:23 says the half tribe of Manasseh settled from Bashan to Baal-hermon. So the country runs from the Yarmuk country in the south to the foot of Hermon in the north, with Gilead beneath it. Its two royal cities are named in five passages and never vary: Ashtaroth and Edrei. The stone under it explains most of the rest. This is basalt country, and basalt is dark, heavy, hard to work and slow to weather. Albert Barnes, commenting on Deuteronomy 3:11, gives the reason the iron of the bed is worth a footnote: the iron "was probably the black basalt of the country, which not only contains a large proportion, about 20 percent, of iron, but was actually called iron, and is still so regarded by the Arabians." On Deuteronomy 3:5 he reports what he understood to be standing in his own century: "The stone doors of Bashan, their height pointing to a race of great stature, and the numerous cities (deserted) exist to illustrate the statements of these verses." That is a nineteenth-century observation with his name on it, and this page offers no modern count of ruined towns. The two royal cities have standard identifications and this page goes no further than naming them. Ashtaroth carries the plural of the goddess name Ashtoreth, and it is Og’s residence at Deuteronomy 1:4. It is standardly identified with the mound called Tell Ashtara in the Hauran plain. Ali Abou Assaf excavated Tell Ashtara in two seasons, 1966 and 1967, and published the results as excavation reports in the journal Annales Archeologiques Arabes Syriennes. Edrei, where the battle happened and the second royal city of Joshua 12:4, is standardly identified with the town of Dera’a on the southern edge of the same plain. No excavation director, season or find is claimed for Dera’a here, because none could be confirmed for this page. Joshua 21:27 calls a Levitical town in the same allotment Beeshterah, commonly read as a contracted form of Beth-Ashtaroth, and that too is a reading rather than a settled fact. For Salecah, the far marker of the country, Barnes places it "seven hours’ journey to the southeast of Bostra or Bozrah of Moab" and adds that "as the eastern border city of the kingdom of Bashan it was no doubt strongly fortified." Both are his estimates in his own words. The sixty cities are the number readers most often assume is a flourish. Deuteronomy 3:4 to 3:5 gives sixty walled cities with gates and bars plus many unwalled villages, Joshua 13:30 repeats the figure in the allotment, and 1 Kings 4:13 repeats it again in Solomon’s administrative list generations later. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note at Deuteronomy 3:4 that Argob "was the capital of a district in Bashan of the same name, which, together with other fifty-nine cities in the same province, were conspicuous for their lofty and fortified walls." John Gill, at Deuteronomy 3:5, adds the point the text itself is making, that the height of the walls "hindered not their falling into the hands of the Israelites; and this might serve to encourage them against those fears they were possessed of by the spies." Argob itself has been identified, and the identifications are the commentators’ own. Barnes, on Deuteronomy 3:4, records what the Hebrew word carries: it "means literally rope or cable," is used elsewhere for a portion or district, and "has a special propriety in reference to Argob," whose name he glosses as stone-heap and whose Targumic paraphrase is Trachonitis, "the rough country." Adam Clarke reports the same identification more cautiously: "Some think that it was the region of Argob that was afterwards called the region of Trachonites." Neither man is corrected here and no modern geographical confirmation is asserted. The uplands east of the Jordan rift carry large numbers of dolmens, which are chambers built of upright stone slabs under a capstone. They are a real feature of the country, and popular writing regularly calls them the graves of the giants and ties them to Og and the Rephaim. Treat that as folk attribution rather than as evidence. No biblical text mentions a dolmen, and the size of the stones tells a reader how a community moved stone, not how big the people buried under them were. This page gives no count, no date range and no excavator for the dolmen fields, because none could be confirmed. The one measured object Scripture supplies is the bed of Deuteronomy 3:11, and the text places it in Rabbah of the Ammonites, outside Bashan. The name Bashan has been read two ways, and the wording here matches the Mount Hermon page, which handles the same material. Bashan is glossed in the lexicon this site uses as a region east of the Jordan, with no further meaning, and the standard derivation associates it with smooth or fertile ground, which fits the country’s reputation for cattle and oaks. Michael Heiser proposed a connection with the Ugaritic word for serpent, reading Bashan as the place of the serpent and tying the region’s associations with the dead in Ugaritic texts to the Rephaim, to Psalm 68, and to Genesis 3:15. He sets the case out in The Unseen Realm and in Reversing Hermon. In its favor: the Ugaritic word exists, the Rephaim appear in Ugaritic texts in connection with the dead, and Psalm 68:22 pairs Bashan with the depths of the sea. Against it: the sound correspondences between Hebrew and Ugaritic do not run smoothly, no biblical text glosses the name that way, and the lexicon floor does not carry it. It is a proposal with a holder, and it is not this page’s assertion. One more claim is worth settling by search rather than by impression. The site’s copy of 1 Enoch, the R. H. Charles text of 1917, held as a Second Temple study resource and never as Scripture, contains no occurrence of Bashan, of Og or of the Rephaim across its 108 chapters. What it says is that two hundred "descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it." The oath tradition attaches to Hermon. Bashan lies at Hermon’s foot, so what a reader has usually met is geographical adjacency plus the Rephaim chain in Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Mount Hermon page carries the Watchers tradition in full.