The Book of Giants


The Book of Giants is an apocryphal Manichaeism book, Influenced by Judaism which expands the Urzeit to Endzeit narrative of the Hebrew Bible and, by its multifaceted elaborations on divine decrees of warning and doom, ties the ancient prophet Enoch closer to his generally recognized 'storyline' than does even the story's principal treatise of 1 Enoch. Together with 1 Enoch's Book of Watchers, as Enochian scholar James C. VanderKam maintains, "it stands as an attempt to explain how it was that wickedness had become so widespread and muscular before the flood; in so doing, it also supplies the reason why God was more than justified in sending that flood." The Giants discovery at Qumran dates the text's creation to before the 2nd century BC.
The Book of Giants is an antediluvian narrative that was received primarily in Manichaean literature and known at Turfan. However, the earliest known traditions for the book originate in Aramaic copies of a Book of Giants among the Dead Sea Scrolls. References to the Giants mythology are found in: Genesis 6:1-4, the books of Enoch, Jubilees, Genesis Apocryphon, 2 and 3 Baruch, the Damascus Document, and visions in Daniel 7:9-14. This book tells of the background and fate of these ante-deluvial giants and their fathers, the Watchers, the 'sons of God' or 'holy ones' who rebelled against heaven when — in forbidden violation of the strict "" — they commingled, in their lust, with the 'daughters of men.'
Their even more corrupt offspring, the giants, were variously called thereafter nephilim, gibborim, or rephaim, being the earthly half-breed races that fought against God and his righteous followers whose numbers diminished as the world was overwhelmed with corruption and evil; the Manichaean fragments give these wicked ones the general name demons. Though the terms for the Watchers and their offspring are often confused in their various translations and iterations, collectively these rebellious races are referred to as the "fallen angels" in the apocryphal sources, as also in the biblical narratives that reference them.

Origins in ancient Jewish tradition

Since before the latter half of the twentieth century, the 'Book of Giants' had long been known as a 'Middle Iranian' work that circulated among the Manichaeans as a composition attributed to Mani — a Parthian citizen of southern Mesopotamia who appears to have been a follower of Elkesai, a Jewish-Christian prophet and visionary who lived in the early years of the second century. Some scholars, concordant with supporting evidence for the ancient sect's geographical distribution, have posited both genetic and ritual-custom similarities between the Elcesaites and the earlier Second Temple Jewish sect of the Essenes.
During the twentieth century a number of finds shed considerable light on the literary evidence for the Book of Giants. The 1943 publication by W. B. Henning of the Manichaean fragments from the Book of Giants discovered at Turfan in Western China have substantiated the many references to its circulation among, and use by, the Manichaeans. Further identification of the Manichaean Book of Giants was revealed in 1971 when Jósef T. Milik discovered several additional Aramaic fragments of Enochic works among the Dead Sea Scrolls; he astonished the scholarly world upon announcing that the fragments bore close resemblance to Mani's Book of Giants, then added to the astonishment his belief, too, that Giants was originally an integral part of 1 Enoch itself. These fragmentary scrolls in Aramaic, which represented an Enochic tradition that was likely introduced to Mani in his sojourn with the Ecesaites, appeared to have been the primary source utilized by Mani in the compilation of his book, in which he made the legend of the Watchers and the giants "a cornerstone of his theological speculations." And for many scholars, the Qumran fragments confirmed the Book of Giants to originally have been an independent composition from the Second Temple period.
Among the fragments discovered at Qumran, ten manuscripts of the Book of Giants are identified by Stuckenbruck. These fragments were found in caves 1, 2, 4, and 6 at the site. These discoveries led to further classification of the Enochic works. In the third group of classification, ten Aramaic manuscripts contain parts of the Book of Giants which were only known through the Manichaean sources until the recognition of them at Qumran.
There has been much speculation regarding the original language of the Book of Giants. It was generally believed to have had a Semitic origin. Indeed, the discovery of this text at Qumran led scholars, such as C. P. van Andel and Rudolf Otto, to believe that while these ancient Aramaic compositions of the book were the earliest known, the work probably had even earlier Hebrew antecedents. It was of course the great R. H. Charles, translator and publisher in 1906 of The Book of Enoch, who asserted that Enoch was "built upon the debris of" an older Noah saga than that in Genesis which only cryptically refers to the Enoch myth. But Milik himself offered his own hypothesis that Enoch's 'creation story' and law of God account naturally predate the Mosaic Sinai accounts in Genesis: He saw Genesis 6:1-4 — long a puzzling passage to biblical scholars — as a quotation from what he believed ultimately to have been the earlier Enoch source. More recent scholarship, such as that of Klaus Beyer, indicates that the Book of Giants was "originally composed in Hebrew during the 3rd century BCE, while the names of the giants Gilgamesh and Hobabish betray a Babylonian provenance" — which Babylonian-origins claim based on the name appearances, however, is refuted by Martínez. But whatever the reality, one thing remains certain: the Qumran books and their fragments are now the oldest known Enochic manuscripts in existence.

Contents

Dead Sea Scrolls version

The text unearthed at Qumran in 1948 was composed of fragments in Aramaic. Because of the book's fragmentation, it was difficult for the documents' linguistic researchers and specialists to know, in its subsequently varied permutations, the exact order of the content. The 'Giants' work is closely related to the 1 Enoch analogue, which also tells a story of the giants, but one which is far more elaborate. The Qumran Book of Giants also bears resemblance to the Manichaean Book of Giants that came after it. Scholars, beyond their many questions of the Enochic tradition's oral or written transmission, still don't know why the Qumran community considered the Enochic texts so important that they possessed and retained so many copies in comparison to other textual traditions found there.
The Book of Giants is an expansive narrative of the biblical story of the birth of 'giants' in Genesis 6.1-4. In this story, the giants came into being when the Watcher 'sons of God' were seduced by and had sexual intercourse with mortal women, who then birthed a hybrid race of giants. These Watchers and giants engaged in destructive and grossly immoral actions which devastated humanity, including the revealing of heaven's holy "secrets" or "mysteries to their wives and children" and to mankind generally.
When Enoch heard of this, he was distressed and petitioned God, who in his longsuffering and by divine revelation and counsel called Enoch to preach repentance unto them, that the earthly races might avoid God's wrath and destruction. In his mercy, God chose also to give the fallen Watchers an additional chance to repent by transmitting dreams to several of their giant-sons, including two brothers named Ohyah and Hahyah who relayed the dreams to an assembly of their grigori and nephilim companions. This assembly of Watcher-giant associates were perplexed by the dreams, so they sent a giant named Mahway to Enoch’s abode and to the places of his preaching. Enoch, in his attempt to intercede on their behalf, provided not only the oracle that the Watchers and giants had requested, but also twin "tablets" that revealed the full meaning of their dreams and God’s future judgment against them.
When the Watchers and giants had at last heard heaven's response, many chose, in their transcendent pride and arrogance, rather than to turn from their evil ways, to act in defiance against God. The Qumran fragments are incomplete at this point.

Manichaean version

The Manichaean version is similar to the one found in Qumran, only adapted to Mani's story of the cosmos. The fallen angels are here archontic demons escaped from their prisons in the sky, where they were placed when the world was constructed. They would have caused a brief revolt, and in the process, two hundred of them escaped to the Earth. While most given names are simply translated into Iranian language, Ohyah and Hahyah are renamed Sam and Nariman. This version also contains a complete ending, telling how the forces of the Light, led by four angels identified with Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Istrael, subdue the demons and their offspring in battle.

Other texts

Much of the content in the Book of Giants is similar, and most closely relates, to 1 Enoch 7:3-6, a passage which sheds light on the characterizing features of the giants. It reveals that the giants were born of the Watcher 'sons of God' and the 'daughters of men.' The giants, as their 'prostituted' half-breed offspring, began to devour the works of what they perceived to be a lesser race and went on to kill and to viciously exploit them in slavery and sexual debauchery. They also sinned against nature, in the most defiling and violent of ways against the beasts and birds of the sky, creeping things and the fish of the sea, but also against one another. They murdered on a massive scale, and also aborted their own children. The Qumran documents also mention that the giants devoured the flesh of those they exploited and of one another, and drank the blood . This act of drinking blood would have horrified the people . This offence is also mentioned in Leviticus 17:10-16, wherein strict rules are laid forth regarding the blood of animals and all living creatures; verses 10 and 11 warn, “I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood and I will cut them off from the people. For the life of the creature is in the blood.”

Fallen Angels among Men: a genesis of evil

The Qumran texts that make up its so-called Book of Giants seem to offer, for various faiths, a more complete picture of the beginnings of evil than perhaps its rather truncated counterpart — the biblical Eden story — is able to give. The Genesis story we read today, as is well known, was greatly altered by ancient Deuteronomist scribes and historians according to their own religious and political agendas and does not, therefore, represent the pristine form of whatever may have been its primordial message. And while the Book of Giants cannot, by any means, heal that breach, it does begin to answer questions, fill in gaps, and make more clear, perhaps, what was originally intended.
The Qumran fragments that began to be discovered in 1948 relate how a small cadre of giants – offspring of the 'fallen angels' called Watchers – including Ohyah and Hahyah, who were both sons of Shemihazah, chieftain of the Watchers, and also Mahway, giant-son of the Watcher Baraq'el, experience dreams that foresee the biblical Flood . These disturbing omens are told to the assembly of fallen angels that had originally organized their secret society upon Mount Hermon as a body of 200 members, bound together by a dark combination of clandestine oaths and operational pacts by which they might ruthlessly achieve their personal and collective aims. A brief mention of the giant Ohya, is found in the Babylonian Talmud, which gives the following: "סיחון ועוג אחי הוו דאמר מר סיחון ועוג בני אחיה בר שמחזאי הוו" Thus are provided, it would seem, the names of the sons of Ohyah, grandsons of Shemihazah. "Og king of Bashan," ostensibly a giant, presumably escaped the flood.
ic Book of Giants tells the story of pre-diluvian origins of evil and the fate of the Watchers and their giant offspring. Fallen Angel by Odilon Redon, 1872.
The giant Mahway, an associate of Ohyah, is summoned to the assembly of the fallen angels and put under secret oath 'under pain of death' to approach Enoch, the "distinguished scribe" and "apostle from the south", in order to obtain prophetic interpretation of their sons' ominous visions of what appears threateningly to them as an imminent catastrophe: "An oracle here," declares Mahway, after listening to Enoch's message to the people. "From you, a second time, ask for the oracle: your words, all the nephilim of the earth also. If God is going to take away... from the days of their ... that they may be punished... should like to know from you their explanation."
The elements of Hahyah's troubling dream include 200 garden-trees and gardeners, an Emperor, mighty winds, water, and fire. Enoch obliges the messenger of the Shemihazah-led assembly with his interpretation of the dreams: the 200 trees watered by corrupt angelic 'gardeners' are, against their original nature, demon-defiled and unfruitful — their waterers are the Watchers and the "great" shoots issuing from them, their bad-seed giant progeny — upon whom the "Emperor of heaven" will descend as a "burning Sun" in great judgment: "O ye lamentable ones, do not die now prematurely, but turn quickly back!" is the declaration Mahway claims to have heard in his own dream. The other visionary elements, as interpreted by Enoch, represent future exterminations by fire and water. Mahway had also claimed to have heard Enoch "speaking my name very lovingly" in his desperate plea and call that the giant follow Enoch to safety.
Later, after the fallen angels of Watchers and giants had asked Enoch to make petition and to intercede for them before God, Enoch returned from that heavenly attempt with two tablets — an 'Epistle' written in 'the distinguished scribe's own hand' from the Lord of Spirits and 'the Holy One,' giving God's answer "to Shemihazah and all his companions":
Let it be known to you that... your works and those of your wives and your children by your prostitution on the earth ... It now befalls you the earth complains and accuses you , and the works of your children also, and her voice rises to the very portals of heaven, complaining and accusing you of the corruption by which you have corrupted her. until the coming of Raphael . For lo! a destruction upon men and on animals: the birds which fly upon the face of heaven, and the animals which live on the earth, and those which live in the deserts, and those which live in the seas. And the interpretation of your you for the worst.

Whereupon, after the assembly of fallen angels are read the words of the Epistle, the giants and Watchers, gathered together at the place Abel-mayyâ, straightaway 'prostrated themselves and began to weep before Enoch,' for their request to heaven for clemency had been rejected, and God had cast them off : all was now 'for the worst.' The only solace that Enoch could therefore offer them at that point, for theirs appears to have been a point of 'no return,' was to "loosen your bonds which tie you up... and begin to pray."
The archangel Raphael was, according to Milik, charged by God to bind Asael hand and foot, and to heal the earth which the fallen angels had corrupted. Milik notes the word-play on the double meaning of the verb rafa 'to tie' and 'to heal.' Reflecting upon God's decree in rejecting the fallen angels' petition, Milik says that "the Watchers seem to be already chained up by the angels; in order to be able to pray, to lift their arms in the gesture of suppliants, they have to have their bonds loosened" — that is, spiritually, if they will, through repentance.
the roaring of the wild beasts came and the multitude of the wild animals began to cry out... And Ohyah spoke... My dream has overwhelmed me... and the sleep of my eyes has fled... Then God punished... the sons of the Watchers, the giants, and all beloved ones not be spared... he has imprisoned us and you he has subdued ...

, Enoch's 'star guide' through the cosmos and, traditionally, the seraph set to guard the Edenic paradise. Bearing a sceptre of power, his garments vested with astronomical signs, this 'illuminator of the mind' holds one of his legend-ascribed symbols, a secret book of Wisdom. Nineteenth century stained glass window by Ford Madox Brown, the Holy Trinity Church, Tansley, Derbyshire, England.
In the Manichaean Book of Giants, Milik explains, Raphael is the conqueror of Ohyah and of all the other Watchers and of their giant-sons. The same work intimates that all four archangels were engaged in the struggle with the 200 Watchers and their offspring: "and those two hundred demons fought a hard battle with the four angels, until the angels used fire, naphtha, and brimstone..." The Enochic literature records the collusion of the archangels with the righteous against their demon-foes: "Four hundred thousand Righteous... with fire, naphtha, and brimstone... And the angels moved out of sight of Enoch". Then, after the course of more than three hundred years dwelling amidst his "holy people", when the patriarch-warrior-king suddenly "was not; for God took him", the archangelic Raphael-Metatron sent to Shemihazah a warning-message that brought complete fulfilment to heaven's former decree: "The Holy One is about to destroy His world, and bring upon it a flood".
The archangel Uriel, beyond his role of instructing Enoch among the stars, directs Noah to prepare his escape from the Flood, and figures prominently in the final Judgement of the world in the end times that will be administered by the 'Son of Man' figure as foretold in Enoch's Book of Dreams and Apocalypse of Weeks. Two other archangels, Raguel and Phanuel, are also mentioned in the Enochic material. With respect to the archangel Sariel, it is the Manichaean tradition, drawing on the Book of Giants, that preserves that archangelic name more faithfully than do the Greek and Ethiopic traditions.
The Qumran Book of Giants, like its Manichaean counterpart, affiliates the names of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh and the monster Humbaba with the Watchers and giants.

Interpretive issues between Qumran and Turfan

Although we can glean much information from the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls narrative, there are still many unknowns and issues that scholars heavily debate. Clearly, the authorship of the Qumran Book of Giants is still a question among scholars. Some initially believed that the manuscript to have been little used among the desert sectaries; but more recent scholarship declares: "We know that the Qumran Essenes copied, studied, and valued the writings and teachings ascribed to Enoch". The Qumran discoveries decidedly ruled out any possibility that the Manicheans were the composers of the Book of Giants, for their work followed later.
However, the historical transmission of 1 Enoch assumes that the basis of the text must likewise fall to unknown authors, or tend to the idea that it was a pseudepigraphon text. For some scholars, this lends itself, as such texts invariably have, to questioning the originality and legitimacy of the book. But bearing in mind the eleven Enochic manuscripts discovered at Qumran, which contain one or several of the various Enochic 'booklets' known there — totals "higher than for most of the books that became parts of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament," and recalling also "the cost and labor involved in producing a manuscript in antiquity" — such inordinate numbers representing the Enochic stockpile "say much about the value accorded" such writings.
As far as comparisons that might be made with 'canonical' texts, the books of Daniel and 1 Enoch both have similarities in their visionary elements: taking up the visions of both Daniel and Enoch, or even of the giants Ohyah, Hahyah, and Mahway. Indeed, Stuckenbruck suggests that "these similarities... allow for the possibility that the author of Daniel 7 knew the early Enochic traditions well enough to draw on and then adapt them for his own purposes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the throne-theophany itself". The biblical and apocryphal accounts speak of a king of heaven sitting upon his throne, and the Aramaic text A12 has other corresponding elements. The texts differ, however, in that, in the giants' account, God comes down from heaven.
Several such textual variants of the different 'Book of Giants' versions, moreover, raise many other points of ongoing debate among scholars and experts. For although all are said to derive in some measure from the same 'script,' they are, ultimately, very different in their content, particularly in the way that the Manichaean and Aramaic versions differ — even from later Jewish midrash retellings — in the elements of the giants' dreams or visions.
In the giant Ohyah's dream, for instance, he apparently sees a large inscribed-stone representation of the 'Book of Life' and/or the that covers the whole earth "like a table." In the midrash retelling, a great angel descends, but in the Qumranic version, the Lord of Heaven himself descends with a knife to scrape and efface all of its character-rows, save one, at the end of which only four words remain.
J.T. Milik believed the Book of Giants originally to have been a part of the entire Enochic work, the five-sectioned 'Enochic Pentateuch' as it is sometimes called, including the Book of Watchers, the Astronomical Book, the Book of Dreams, and the Epistle of Enoch ; Milik felt that the Qumran Giants'' had actually been replaced by the Ethiopic 1 Enoch's 'Similitudes' section.
All of these Enochic writings would have held significance from the beginning of the first century. Indeed, the early Christian church treasured Enoch and held it canonical. However, during the Christian era after the Apostles, the collection was altered and part of its narrative replaced by the Book of Parables. Also, due in no small part to the influence of the Alexandrian philosophers who ill-favored it — its contents thought by many of the Hellenistic era to be foolish or strange — the overall Enochic work rapidly ran afoul of ideas held by the Christian and Jewish doctors, who damned it forever as a tainted product of the Essenes of Qumran. Milik has speculated the reason why the book was censored by Christian authors was its popular usage by Manichaeans. The book was soon banned by such orthodox authorities as Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth century and it gradually passed out of circulation, finally becoming lost to the knowledge of Western Christendom — only sundry 'fragments' remained. The few copies left of the Enoch literature, if indeed they could be found, was therefore attributable, it is thought, to the Christian doctors' suppression of it and their partial replacement with the Book of Parables.