Deuteronomy 2:24-3:11

Living Bible

²⁴ “Then the Lord said, ‘Cross the Arnon River into the land of King Sihon the Amorite, king of Heshbon. War against him and begin to take possession of his land. ²⁵ Beginning today I will make people throughout the whole earth tremble with fear because of you, and dread your arrival.’

²⁶ “Then from the wilderness of Kedemoth I sent ambassadors to King Sihon of Heshbon with a proposal of peace. ²⁷ ‘Let us pass through your land,’ we said. ‘We will stay on the main road and won’t turn off into the fields on either side. ²⁸ We will not steal food as we go, but will purchase every bite we eat and everything we drink; all we want is permission to pass through. ²⁹ The Edomites at Seir allowed us to go through their country, and so did the Moabites, whose capital is at Ar. We are on our way across the Jordan into the land the Lord our God has given us.’

³⁰ “But King Sihon refused because Jehovah your God made him obstinate, so that he could destroy Sihon by the hands of Israel, as has now been done.

³¹ “Then the Lord said to me, ‘I have begun to give you the land of King Sihon; when you possess it, it shall belong to Israel forever.’

³² “King Sihon then declared war on us and mobilized his forces at Jahaz. ^33-34 But the Lord our God crushed him, and we conquered all his cities and utterly destroyed everything, including the women and babies. We left nothing alive ^35-36 except the cattle, which we took as our reward, along with the booty gained from ransacking the cities we had taken. We conquered everything from Aroer to Gilead—from the edge of the Arnon River Valley, and including all the cities in the valley. Not one city was too strong for us, for the Lord our God gave all of them to us. ³⁷ However, we stayed away from the people of Ammon and from the Jabbok River and the hill country cities, the places Jehovah our God had forbidden us to enter.

3 ^1-2 “Next we turned toward King Og’s land of Bashan. He immediately mobilized his army and attacked us at Edrei. But the Lord told me not to be afraid of him. ‘All his people and his land are yours,’ the Lord told me. ‘You will do to him as you did to King Sihon of the Amorites at Heshbon.’ ³ So the Lord helped us fight against King Og and his people, and we killed them all. ⁴ We conquered all sixty of his cities, the entire Argob region of Bashan. ⁵ These were well-fortified cities with high walls and barred gates. Of course we also took all of the unwalled towns. ⁶ We utterly destroyed the kingdom of Bashan just as we had destroyed King Sihon’s kingdom at Heshbon, killing the entire population—men, women, and children alike. ⁷ But we kept the cattle and loot for ourselves.

⁸ “We now possessed all the land of the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan River—all the land from the valley of the Arnon to Mount Hermon. ⁹ (The Sidonians called Mount Hermon ‘Sirion,’ while the Amorites called it ‘Senir.’) ¹⁰ We had now conquered all the cities on the plateau, and all of Gilead and Bashan as far as the cities of Salecah and Edrei.

¹¹ “Incidentally, King Og of Bashan was the last of the giant Rephaim. His iron bedstead is kept in a museum at Rabbah, one of the cities of the Ammonites, and measures thirteen and a half feet long by six feet wide.