The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION 303
Here there are fairly distinct references to knowledge of mysteries (line 2),
to great impiety( ?) on the earth (line 3), to the massacre of men committed
by the giants (lines 4-5)—themes well known from the Jewish Enoch and
from the Manichaean Book of Giants.
The end of fragment j of the Middle Persian Kawan contains the account
of a vision which had been seen by 'Ahyah, the second son of Semihazah
(Henning, pp. 57 and 60). In the note, the editor suggests that another
Persian fragment should be inserted after fragment/, the fragment which he
himself had published in 1934 under the title 'Ein manichaisches Henochbuch'.^
Here is the text of these two fragments:
*Nariman (read: 'Ahya) saw a gar[den full of] trees in rows. Two hundred
. . . came out, the trees . . .
{page i) . . . outside . . . and . . . left. . . {coL ii) . . . explain the dream we
have seen. Thereupon Enoch (hwnwx) thus . . .
(page 2) . . . and the trees that came out, those are the Watchers {'yr)
and the giants (q^w) that came out of the women. And . . . {col. ii) . . . over
. . . pulled out . . . over . .
Note that the Persian text faithfully preserves the Aramaic term 7r,
'Watcher', known through the Book of Daniel, 4QEnoch, QEnGiants, etc.,
but also through Syriac literature. It is well known that Mani, with one
exception, wrote his treatises in an eastern Aramaic dialect relatively close
to Syriac. This may also be an indication, it is true a rather slight one,
that Mani knew the Jewish Book of Giants through an Aramaic text, rather
than through a Greek version.
Now this dream of 'Ahya and Enoch's explanation of it appear in a much
more detailed context that I have discovered in an Aramaic manuscript
from Cave 4 of Qumran, the editing of which was entrusted to abbe
Jean Starcky. With his kind permission and having his transcriptions at my
disposal, I take the liberty here of quoting several passages which belong to
three successive columns. This group is composed of six fragments which
I have already put together; their linking up seems to me fairly certain.
The reading of this manuscript is rather difficult, as much on account of the
deterioration of the written surface as through the fading of the ink and the
writing, a semi-cursive of small dimensions and spidery appearance. There
* Sitzungsherichte der preussischen Akade- Klasse, Berlin 1934, pp. 27-35 (cf. BSOAS xi,
mie der Wissenschaften, Philologisch-historische p. 66).