(1) We made our way up the road toward Bashan, and King Og of Bashan with all his troops took the field against us at Edrei. (2) But יהוה said to me: Do not fear him, for I am delivering him and all his troops and his country into your power, and you will do to him as you did to Sihon king of the Amorites, who lived in Heshbon. (3) So our God יהוה also delivered into our power King Og of Bashan, with all his troops, and we dealt them such a blow that no survivor was left. (4) At that time we captured all his towns; there was not a town that we did not take from them: sixty towns, the whole district of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan— (5) all those towns were fortified with high walls, gates, and bars—apart from a great number of unwalled towns. (6) We doomed them as we had done in the case of King Sihon of Heshbon; we doomed every town—men, women, and children— (7) and retained as booty all the cattle and the spoil of the towns. (8) Thus we seized, at that time, from the two Amorite kings, the country beyond the Jordan, from the wadi Arnon to Mount Hermon— (9) Sidonians called Hermon Sirion, and the Amorites call it Senir— (10) all the towns of the Tableland and the whole of Gilead and Bashan as far as Salcah and Edrei, the towns of Og’s kingdom in Bashan. (11) Only King Og of Bashan was left of the remaining Rephaim. His bedstead, an iron bedstead, is now in Rabbah of the Ammonites; it is nine cubits long and four cubits wide, by the standard cubit! (12) And this is the land which we apportioned at that time: The part from Aroer along the wadi Arnon, with part of the hill country of Gilead and its towns, I assigned to the Reubenites and the Gadites. (13) The rest of Gilead, and all of Bashan under Og’s rule—the whole Argob district, all that part of Bashan which is called Rephaim country—I assigned to the half-tribe of Manasseh.

It is found in the Talmud: Abba Shaul Omer (Abba Shaul Says): I used to be an undertaker. Once, while chasing after a deer, I entered the thigh bone of a dead man. I chased after it for three parasangs but met up with no deer, nor did the thigh bone end. When I returned, they said to me: That was [the thigh] of King Og of the Bashan. (Niddah 24b)

Og uprooted a mountain as wide as the entire Israelite camp, intending to drop it on them. By intending to kill the entire Jewish people, he lost all the merit he had earned by helping Abraham. Therefore, Moses no longer required his own merit to counterbalance Og’s; he approached Og as the people’s emissary, fulfilling their collective obligation to defend themselves. Moses smote Og as follows: God sent ants to bore a hole in the mountain Og was carrying on his head, and it sank around his neck. When he tried to pull it off, God made his teeth grow out, keeping the mountain stuck on his head. In the meantime, Moses took a huge ax, jumped into the air, and struck Og in the ankle. Miraculously, this was enough to kill him. The rest of the people killed Og’s sons and all his people, leaving no survivors, and they took possession of his land and plundered the cities.

(30) Caleb hushed the people before Moses and said, “Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.” (31) But the other men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” (32) Thus they spread calumnies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are of great size; (33) we saw the Nephilim there—the Anakites are part of the Nephilim—and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” (1) The whole community broke into loud cries, and the people wept that night. (2) All the Israelites railed against Moses and Aaron. “If only we had died in the land of Egypt,” the whole community shouted at them, “or if only we might die in this wilderness!” (3) “Why is יהוה taking us to that land to fall by the sword?” “Our wives and children will be carried off!” “It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!”