Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets: And Other Old Testament Characters from Various SourcesBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets: And Other Old Testament Characters from Various Sources
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Bible. Old Testament -- Legends
At one meal, Og ate a thousand oxen and as many wild roes, and his
drink was a thousand firkins; one drop of the sweat from his brow
weighed thirty-six pounds.[564] Of his size the following authentic
details are given. The Rabbi Johanan said, “I was once a grave-digger,
and I ran after a deer, and went in at one end of a shin-bone of a dead
man, and I ran for three miles and could not catch the deer or reach
the end of the bone. When I went back, I inquired, and was told that
this was the shin-bone of Og, king of Bashan.”[565] The sole of his
foot was forty miles long. Once, when he was quarrelling with Abraham,
one of his teeth fell out, and Abraham made a bed out of the tooth, and
slept in it; but some say he made a chair out of it.[566]
When the Israelites came to Edrei and fought against it, in the night
Og came and sat down on the wall, and his feet reached the ground. Next
morning Moses looked out and said, “I do not understand how the men of
Edrei can have built a second wall so high during the night.”
Then it was revealed to him that what he had taken for a wall was
Og.[567] Og had built sixty cities, and the smallest was sixty miles
high. These cities were in Argob.[568]
The Moabites also resisted Israel, and they were encouraged by Balaam
the son of Beor.
Balak, king of Moab, sent to Balaam to curse Israel. Then Balaam rose
in the morning and made ready his ass, and went with the princes of
Moab. The Mussulman account is that Balaam, having been told by God
not to go, resolved to obey, but the princes of Moab bribed his wife,
and she gave him no peace till he consented to go to Balak with his
messengers.[569] But the anger of the Lord was kindled, because he
would go to curse them, and the angel of the Lord stood in the way to
be an adversary to him. But he sat upon his ass, and his two sons,
Jannes and Jambres, were with him.
And the ass discerned the angel of the Lord standing in the way with a
drawn sword in his hand, and the ass turned aside out of the road to
go into the field; and Balaam smote the ass. And the angel of the Lord
stood in a narrow path that was in the midst between the vineyards,
in the place where Jacob and Laban raised the mound, the pillars on
this side and the observatory on that side,[570] that neither should
pass the limit to do evil to the other. And as the ass discerned the
angel of the Lord, and thrust herself against the hedge, and bruised
Balaam’s foot by the hedge, he smote her again. Ten things were created
after the world had been founded at the coming in of the Sabbath
between sunset and sunrise,--the manna, the well, the rod of Moses, the
diamond, the rainbow, the cloud of glory, the mouth of the earth, the
writing on the tables of the covenant, the demons, and the speaking ass.
Then the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said to Balaam,
“What have I done to thee, that thou hast smitten me twice?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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