The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE BOOK OF GIANTS
THE edition of a dozen fragments—all except one fairly small—which belong
to the Enochic document 4QEnGiants*, demands a rather long introduction.
We shall be dealing here with other copies of the same work which come
from Cave 4 at Qumran and are still unpublished, and also with some fragments
already published which likewise form part of the Book of Giants.^
PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION FROM VARIOUS
SOURCES
Among the seven canonical books composed by Mani himself there
figures one work which is entitled the *Book of Giants'. Beyond this
title which appears in several Manichaean and anti-Manichaean documents
scattered throughout Europe and through Africa as far as Asia Minor and
Chinese Turkistan, almost nothing was known of the contents of this document
before the appearance of the remarkable article by W. B. Henning,
'The Book of Giants', in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
StudieSy xi (1943-6), 52-74. That eminent scholar there published, or republished,
numerous fragments and passages, written in Middle Persian,
in Sogdian, in Parthian, in Uigur, and in Coptic, which actually belong to the
Book of Giants, or else are extracts, quotations from, and allusions to it.
That the Book of Giants is related to the Book of Enoch has been suspected
since the time of Isaac de Beausobre, the eighteenth-century Huguenot
author of one of the best studies on Manichaeism ever written. Indeed, the
Book of Giants does no more than develop, with a considerable number of
details, the story of the fallen angels told in the first part of the Ethiopic
Enoch (En. i to 36). The latter, if we are to believe Syncellus, bore an
analogous title, *Book of Watchers'. En. 6: 7 contains a list of the names of
twenty Watchers. They are the chiefs of ten of the two hundred angels
who had come down from heaven to earth in the days of Yared, father of
Enoch. This list, terribly corrupt in the Greek and Ethiopic texts, has come
down to us in its original state, and (apart from the name of the fifth angel)
' A preliminary, and more circumscribed, Qumran, Livre des Geants juif et manich^en*,
version of this chapter appeared in the Fest- Gottingen 1971, pp. 117-27 and pi. 1.
gahe K, G. Kuhn under the title *Turfan et