the stability of the East, and the peculiar nature of the soil of Hauran, they give a tolerably correct idea of the sixty towns of the kingdom of Og of Bashan, all of which were fortified with high walls, gates, and bars, or, as it is stated in 1Ki 4:13, “with walls and brazen bars.”[1]
The brazen bars were no doubt, like the gates themselves, of basalt or dolerite, which might easily be mistaken for brass. Besides the sixty fortified towns, the Israelites took a very large number of הפּרזי ערי, “towns of the inhabitants of the flat country,” i.e., unfortified open hamlets and villages in Bashan, and put them under the ban, like the towns of king Sihon (Deu 3:6, Deu 3:7; cf. Deu 2:34-35). The infinitive, החרם, is to be construed as a gerund (cf. Ges. §131, 2; Ewald, §280, a.). The expression, “kingdom of Og in Bashan,” implies that the kingdom of Og was not limited to the land of Bashan, but included the northern half of Gilead as well. In Deu 3:8-11, Moses takes a retrospective view of the whole of the land that had been taken on the other side of the Jordan; first of all (Deu 3:9) in its whole extent from the Arnon to Hermon, then (Deu 3:10) in its separate parts, to bring out in all its grandeur what the Lord had done for Israel. The notices of the different names of Hermon (Deu 3:9), and of the bed of king Og (Deu 3:11), are also subservient to this end. Hermon is the southernmost spur of Antilibanus, the present Jebel es Sheikh, or Jebel et Telj. The Hebrew name is not connected with חרם, anathema, as Hengstenberg supposes (Diss. pp. 197-8); nor was it first given by the Israelites to this mountain, which formed part of the northern boundary of the land which they had taken; but it is to be traced to an Arabic word signifying prominens montis vertex, and was a name which had long been current at that time, for which the Israelites used the Hebrew name שׂיאן (Sion = נשׂיאן, the high, eminent: Deu 4:48), though this name did not supplant the traditional name of Hermon. The Sidonians called it Siron, a modified form of שׁריון (1Sa 17:5), or נשׂיון (Jer 46:4), a “coat of mail;” the Amorites called it Senir, probably a word with the same meaning. In Psa 29:6, Sirion is used
- ↑ It is also by no means impossible, that many of the oldest dwellings in the ruined towers of Hauran date from a time anterior to the conquest of the land by the Israelites. “Simple, built of heavy blocks of basalt roughly hewn, and as hard as iron, with very thick walls, very strong stone gates and doors, many of which were about eighteen inches thick, and were formerly fastened with immense bolts, and of which traces still remain; such houses as these may have been the work of the old giant tribe of Rephaim, whose king, Og, was defeated by the Israelites 3000 years ago” (C. v. Raumer, Pal. p. 80, after Porter's Five Years in Damascus).
