Genesis 14:5: Three peoples beaten in one sentence, on a road running south

"In the fourteenth year Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him came and defeated the Rephaim in Ashteroth-karnaim, the Zuzim in Ham, and the Emim in Shaveh-kiriathaim." This is where Genesis 14 turns from a list of names into a campaign, and the map is the argument for taking it seriously. The three places are not scattered. They lie on one line, running roughly a hundred and forty miles north to south down the high tableland east of the Jordan — the road later called the King's Highway, the only through route on that side of the rift, and the one every army coming down out of Syria has used. Ashteroth-karnaim is in Bashan, north of the Yarmuk; Ham is in Gilead; Shaveh-kiriathaim is on the Moabite plateau above the Dead Sea. The kings are not raiding. They are clearing a corridor, in order, from the top. The three peoples are the ones Israelite memory filed as giants. Rephaim, Zuzim and Emim are all names Deuteronomy will use for the tall aboriginal population east of the Jordan whom the Ammonites and Moabites displaced — "a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim." Genesis 14 is the only place they are met as going concerns rather than as a memory, and they lose. The fourteenth year matters because the verse before it has set the clock: twelve years the five cities served Chedorlaomer, in the thirteenth they rebelled, and in the fourteenth the army came. This is a punitive expedition on a schedule, and it does not go straight at the rebels. It comes the long way, down the eastern road, taking out everything that might come in behind it, and only then swings west and south around the bottom of the Dead Sea. Lot has been living in Sodom for one chapter.