A people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; but the LORD destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead:

But the Lord destroyed them. The extinction of that branch of the ancient Rephaim, which was known by the name of the Zuzim, and provincially Zamzummim, is generally ascribed to their conquest by the Ammonites, who supplanted them in their Transjordanic possessions. But here it is distinctly asserted to have resulted from some unrecorded dispensations of Providence; and what these probably were, may now be learned from the monumental annals of Egypt, which relate the early wars waged by the Egyptian kings against the aborigines of the eastern desert, and by which their numbers and political strength were so reduced that they became an easy prey to the bands of roving Canaanites who were ready to colonize their lands.

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