The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION 309
{page 2) . . . all . . . carried off . . . severally they were subjected to tasks
and services. And they . . . from each city . . . and were ordered to serve
the . . . Mesenians [were directed] to prepare, the Khuzians to sweep and
water, the Persians to . . .'
To the story of the dream of 'Ahya about the world-garden destroyed by
water and fire (above, p. 304) undoubtedly belongs the small scrap of papyrus
6Q82:
Xtm
.. . ] ^7\WyD T\ThT\
Jinx n 1S7 nnn
'[...] ^his three shoots [. . . and I was looking] ^until there came [. . .]
3this whole garden and no[thing of it remained . . .]'.
The reference to 'his three shoots', doubtless three sons of Noah, is significant.
It seems to me highly probable that the end of the Book of Giants
contained a detailed reference to the birth and the future saving action
of Noah.
Up to the present I have located six copies of the Book of Giants among
the manuscripts of Qumran: the four manuscripts cited above (iQ23,
6Q8, 4QEnGiants^,^), a third manuscript from the Starcky collection, and
4QEnGiants* published below. There are also five other manuscripts too
poorly represented to allow a sufficiently certain identification of the fragments:
En* 2-3 (above, pp. 236-8), iQ24 {DJD i, p. 99 and pi. IX),
2Q26 {DJD iii, pp. 90-1 and pi. XVII; see below, pp. 334-5), and two groups
of small fragments entrusted to the Starcky edition. The Book of Giants
would thus have enjoyed a fairly wide popularity in the Jewish-Essene
milieu, greater than that of any other Enochic documents that we know of also
through the Greek and Ethiopic versions, a popularity equal to that of the
book of Jubilees and several Hebrew books canonized later by the Pharisees.
The existence of its text in the various literary languages of the Roman and
Byzantine empires shows that it was widely known and read in those areas too
(see below, pp. 317 ff.). It must also have been greatly appreciated amongst
other nations who lived in the northern parts of the Near East, in other words
in the Arsacid and Sassanid empires, although its language must have been
adapted to only a limited extent to the particular characteristics of the various
Aramaic dialects spoken in the lands of Two Rivers and beyond them.