Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
Sihon and Og
Deuteronomy 2:26-37
26 I sent messengers out of the wilderness of Kedemoth to Sihon king of Heshbon with words of peace, saying, · WEB
The war east of the Jordan begins with an offer to buy passage, and the refusal is attributed both to a king and to God.
Even the campaign that is commanded begins with an attempt to avoid it. Messengers go out with words of peace Deuteronomy 2:26, and the terms are modest to the point of self-effacement.
Let me pass through your land. I will go along by the highway. I will turn neither to the right hand nor to the left Deuteronomy 2:27. Nobody will leave the road. Food and water will be bought, not requisitioned Deuteronomy 2:28. And a precedent is cited: Edom and Moab had already allowed it Deuteronomy 2:29.
That request is made to a king God has just said will be handed over. The offer of peace is genuine even though the outcome is announced, and the passage does not treat the two as inconsistent.
The refusal is then explained twice in one sentence. Sihon king of Heshbon would not let us pass by him, for Yahweh your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate, that he might deliver him into your hand Deuteronomy 2:30.
The grammar holds a decision and a permission together, in the way Scripture does elsewhere with the same word. Pharaoh hardens his own heart in the narrative that also says God hardened it Exodus 8:15 Exodus 9:12, and the two statements are never presented as competing. A king who had already chosen his course is confirmed in it, and the confirming is credited to God because it happened inside his government.
What follows is the destruction of Sihon's cities and then Og's, and the accounts are deliberately parallel: as we did to Sihon king of Heshbon Deuteronomy 3:6. Both are total, including the women and the little ones Deuteronomy 2:34 Deuteronomy 3:6.
The book does not soften those verses and nothing is gained by softening them here. What the text supplies is the frame: these are two kings who attacked an army passing on a road after being offered payment, in a war Israel did not open, on land that had been withheld from three neighboring nations for the sake of prior gifts. The same chapter that records the destruction records three refusals to take anything at all.
And the boundary is respected even in victory. Only to the land of the children of Ammon you didn't come near... and wherever Yahweh our God forbade us Deuteronomy 2:37. A victorious army stops at a line drawn by somebody else, having just been told the whole country south of it was theirs.
The note about Og's iron bed, nine cubits long and still on display in a foreign capital Deuteronomy 3:11, is the kind of detail a speaker adds because his audience has heard of it.
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