The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

LATER HISTORY 335
'^[. . .] and they rinsed the tablet in order to de[lete . . .] ^and the water
rose above the tablet [. . • ^the angel]s( ?), and they lifted the tablet from the
water, (the tablet) in whi[ch(?) . . .y. . .to them all [. . .].'
The tablet mentioned in line i of this fragment is conceived as being of
wood (therefore like the 'board' of the Kawan), since [its writing] is effaced
by washing; the midrash transforms it into an engraved stone slab. The
tablet, which symbolizes the generation of the flood, is submerged by the
waters of the flood, just as in the Manichaean fragment the board is thrown
into the water. The tablet of line 3 seems to be a second or even a third
one, since it is the 'board' of salvation, the ark of Noah and his three sons.
There is an isolated reference to Km*? also in iQ23 312 (DJfD i, p. 98, and
pi. XIX).
According to the terms of the midrash the two sons of Semhazai, awakened
and startled, come to their father who at once explains the dreams to them.
This is a very drastic abridgement of the sequence of events as it is developed
in the Qumran Book of Giants, where first the sons come to Semihazah, who
sends them off to the assembly of the giants, where both of them relate their
dreams in detail ('Ohyah, moreover, adding yet another dream); and then
the giant Mahawai is sent to Enoch in paradise, it being the latter who will
ultimately provide the exact interpretation of these disturbing dreams (above
pp. 303-5). The Manichaean Book of Giants, too, shortened the Jewish
Aramaic original, but with more discrimination than the medieval rabbinical
midrash. The latter was rendered into Mishnaic Hebrew from an Aramaic
which was relatively close to Syriac (see above, p. 329, notes c and k to the
translation). It seems to me extremely likely, in fact, that it is directly dependent
on the Manichaean work on the Giants, and more exactly on its original
wording, in the Aramaic dialect used by the Manichaean writers, and not on
just any version; in any case it certainly is not based on an Arabic version
of the Persian Kawan, which kept the Iranian names of the two sons, Sam
and Nariman. A scholarly Babylonian rabbi could have found and understood
without difficulty the Syriac Book of Giants, as recently as the early Middle
Ages. This tallies with recent research on the origins of the Cabbala of
medieval Europe, the essential sources of which are oriental and more
precisely Babylonian.
Indeed it seems possible to establish beyond doubt that the Jews who lived
in Sassanid, and later Umajryad and Abbasid, Mesopotamia, were acquainted
with the contents of the Book of Giants in some detail. The magic bowls