The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE BOOK OF GIANTS 57
ceding text by a long space of one and a half lines (En^ 5 i 24-5). This scroll
(and probably En^ and En^, as well) contained a collection of four Enochic
documents: Book of Watchers, Book of Giants, Book of Dreams, Epistle
of Enoch. The section 106-7 was, I think, an appendix, not to the Epistle
itself, but very probably to the whole Enochic corpus. At the end of a collection
of pseudo-antediluvian Wisdom it was natural to refer forward, as
these chapters do, to the writings attributed to the hero of the flood, and
particularly to the 'Book of Noah' itself. ^
The Chester Beatty-Michigan papyrus, in which only the ^ETTLGTOXTI ^EVCOX
has been copied, none the less contains 106-7. So it must be supposed that
the Epistle was excerpted from a more comprehensive Greek collection which
included several Enochic documents (see below, p. 76). On the other hand,
the origin of En. 108 is enigmatic, and the reason for its late addition (it is
missing in CM) to the Christian Enochic corpus is obscure.
Below (pp. 298-339) I deal in detail with the fifth work from Qumran
attributed to Enoch, a Jewish Aramaic document entitled, at least in the
Manichaean adaptation, the Book of Giants. However, we must await the
publication of all the fragments from Qumran Cave 4 belonging to the various
copies of EnGiants before it is possible to tackle in a more systematic
way all the problems concerning this very interesting work. Here it is enough
to pose two questions, that of the date of its composition and that of its place
in the Enochic collections—^Jewish and Christian. The Book of Giants must
have been composed at some time between the date of Jubilees (since it does
not appear among the works attributed to the patriarch in Jub. 4: 17-24) and
that of the earliest manuscript of 4QEnGiants^, written in an unusual semicursive
alphabet (Cross, p. 149, Fig. 4, line 3), which was copied in the first
half of the first century B.C. This range would be narrower if one could look
upon the passage of the Damascus Document, CD 2: 18, as a quotation from
the Book of Giants. The sons of the Watchers of heaven (WWTl "^^SS
according to a copy of 4QD) are described in CD as follows: ^B^X DiT'iai
Dn^TlVU D^'inDI DnaJ D'^nX OnD, 'and their sons whose height was like
the tallness of cedars and whose bodies were like mountains'. In the Book
of Watchers (En. 7: 2) they are measured, prosaically, in cubits: yiyavras
[leydXovs iK TTTJXCOV rpiaxf^Xlcov. The number of 3,000 cubits, reduced to 30
cubits, corresponds approximately to the maximum height of the cedars of
^ Jub. 10: 12-14 speaks of a medical herbal the angels. See also the Introduction to En%
which Noah wrote down at the dictation of pp. 183-4.