Chapter 32. The Perizzim
Perizzim were unaccounted-for Aboriginals of Canaan known for their agricultural prowess, and renowned as the “cultivators of the plain.” As such, Canaanites, and seemingly the Canaanite confederacy of clans, were grouped with the Perizzim as distinct and with equal power, indicating that Perizzim were Aboriginal Rephaim. The Perizzim anecdote dropped in Genesis 13 is not coincidental or incidental, but an elemental detail purposefully positioned at the nascence of the Sodom and Gommorah narrative (chapters 13–19), which included the war of giants, but oddly Perizzim were not mentioned in that war. Nor were Perizzim mentioned in the destruction by God of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the cities of the plain, but they were included in the mighty ten of Genesis 15, and later the mighty seven nations. Perizzim seem to have melded into the Canaanite civilization yet remained distinct, a people renowned for their power. Canaanites, and by implication then Perizzim, were flagrant practitioners of Nephilim, Rephaim, and Hamite sexual sins and idolatry, which utterly defiled the entire Covenant Land.
One deduces Perizzim were included among the Rephaim tribes that provided impassioned patriarchs for the daughters of Canaan, Sidon, and Heth to create the nine Canaanite families—and by implication, Rephaim daughters for Canaan, Sidon, and Heth to intermarry for the creation of their eponymously named hybrid nations. Further, one deduces the Canaanite pentapolis of city-state fortresses were led by Rephaim kings, and likely Perizzim kings by virtue of the Perizzim’s close relationship with Canaanites both before and after the war of giants. One ponders if this is why the Perizzim in Genesis 15, after the war of giants, were listed apart from the “Rephaims” for the above reasons as important context.
Second Esdras, in the apocrypha of the original KJV, additionally identified the Perizzim as a distinct nation from the Canaanites but included them among the Canaanites and the Philistines; the latter also dwelled among many giant tribes.
