The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims;
Deuteronomy is Moses' long farewell address to the Israelite people, recounting their history before they enter the land God had promised them. This verse appears as a parenthetical historical note — a brief aside explaining that the region east of the Jordan River was once inhabited by a people called the Emites. The Emites were ancient even by the standards of Moses' original audience: enormous in size, large in number, and comparable to the Anakites — a legendary group of giants who had so terrified Israel's scouts decades earlier that the people had refused to enter the Promised Land at all. The quiet point of the aside is significant: even these seemingly immovable, fearsome people are now gone, displaced, their dominance over.
Lord, I have started to believe that some things in my life will never change. Remind me that you are older than every giant I am facing, and that you have outlasted them all. Give me the stubborn, quiet hope that 'used to' is still a sentence you write. Amen.
What do you do with a verse that reads like a footnote? The Emites were here. They were huge, they were numerous, they were the kind of people who made scouts come home shaking. And now they're a parenthesis in someone else's story. That's the entire verse. Certain things in your life may feel permanent — a fear you've carried since childhood, a broken relationship that's been broken for decades, a pattern you've fed so long it feels like part of your identity, a situation so entrenched you've stopped imagining it differently. The Emites felt permanent too. They were real, they were powerful, and then — almost without ceremony — they became a 'used to.' This small, easily-skipped footnote is doing something quietly stubborn: it is insisting that 'used to' is a sentence that gets written more often than we think. Not every giant stays. Some of them, against all apparent evidence, simply end.
Why do you think the author of Deuteronomy included this historical aside, and what does the disappearance of the Emites contribute to the larger story Moses is telling?
What 'giants' in your own life — fears, patterns, entrenched obstacles — have you begun to treat as simply permanent features of your landscape?
Is hope that something could actually change sometimes harder to hold than resignation — and why might it feel safer to stop expecting things to shift?
How does the long sweep of history, including the disappearance of peoples and powers once considered unstoppable, shape your ability to trust God's purposes over time?
Identify one thing you have accepted as permanent that you could, this week, begin to approach differently — even if only in how you think and speak about it.
Yet destroyed I the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath.
Amos 2:9
And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.
Numbers 13:33
And Ishbibenob, which was of the sons of the giant, the weight of whose spear weighed three hundred shekels of brass in weight, he being girded with a new sword, thought to have slain David.
2 Samuel 21:16
(The Emim lived there in times past, a people great and numerous, and as tall as the Anakim.
AMP
(The Emim formerly lived there, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim.
ESV
(The Emim lived there formerly, a people as great, numerous, and tall as the Anakim.
NASB
(The Emites used to live there—a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites.
NIV
(The Emim had dwelt there in times past, a people as great and numerous and tall as the Anakim.
NKJV
(A race of giants called the Emites had once lived in the area of Ar. They were as strong and numerous and tall as the Anakites, another race of giants.
NLT
The Emites (Monsters) used to live there—mobs of hulking giants, like Anakites.
MSG