The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

3IO THE BOOK OF GIANTS
This Jewish work fell into the hands of a young Parthian aristocrat,
a member of a strict Christian sect. Delighted with its narrative charm and
moved by some underlying metaphysical truths, Mani decided to give it a
place among his own literary works. He confined himself to an adaptation
which seems to me not very thoroughgoing: in places a word-for-word translation,
in places resumes of the narrative sections, in places slight elaborations.
The terminology peculiar to the Manichaean system appears fairly
unobtrusively in it. Enoch is not 'the distinguished scribe' but 'the apostle';
the young women, no doubt the daughters of the Sethites ravished by the
giants, are called 'electae et auditrices'; in a list of peoples are found names
such as Mesenians and Khuzians.
The extraordinary missionary zeal of the Manichaeans carried the knowledge
of the Book of Giants from the shores of the Atlantic as far as the plains
of China. The Syriac original has been translated into numerous languages
of Asia, of Europe, of Africa. We have today the remains of the Kawdn
in Middle Persian, in Sogdian, in Uigur. Extracts, quotations, allusions,
are evidence of the existence of Parthian, Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Arabic
versions. Some versions must have existed in other languages used by the
Manichaeans, such as Chinese or Tokharian B (Kushan.) No religion of the
Byzantine era and the early Middle Ages had such a large ethnic and linguistic
expansion as Manichaeism. No work of ancient Jewish literature had in
antiquity a circulation comparable with that of the Book of Giants.
FIRST COPY (4QEnGiants% Pis. XXX-XXXII)
The first copy of the Book of Giants from Cave 4 of Qumran (4QGiants*)
was written by the same scribe as the important scroll which is the third
copy of the Book of Enoch (4QEn*^), edited above, pp. 178-2x7. Furthermore,
the quality of the skin and its state of preservation, the arrangement
of the text and its orthography (e.g. superfluous Aleph in KintS?, fr. 8, line 14)
are likewise identical in the two manuscripts. It is thus quite certain that
4QEnGiants* formed part of the same scroll as that of En*". We have established
that this scroll contained the original text of three parts of the Ethiopic
Enoch: the first (En. i to 36, 'the Book of Watchers'), the fourth (En. 83-90,
'the Book of Dreams' or the zoomorphic history of the world), and the
fifth (En. 91-107, 'the Epistle of Enoch'); our copy of the Book of Giants
would have come after the first part; see pp. 181-4.