The Book of Giants: The Lost Book Where Gilgamesh Appears

In shortThe Book of Giants is a Jewish work written in Aramaic in the Second Temple period. It tells of the giants, the sons of the angels who came down to earth: of their ominous dreams, and of their appeal to Enoch to interpret them. It is not part of the Book of Enoch as we have it, and it survives only in fragments.

In the early years of the twentieth century, German expeditions came home from Turfan, an oasis on the Silk Road in western China, with crates holding thousands of scraps of manuscript. Some were written in Middle Persian, some in Sogdian, some in Old Turkic, and it took decades to read them. In 1943 the scholar Walter Bruno Henning published one group of these scraps. They told of giants who dream bad dreams, and of a wise man named Enoch.

How did Enoch end up on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert? The answer runs through a Persian prophet, through a cave near the Dead Sea, and through a book that was lost twice.

The prophet who loved giants

The prophet is Mani, born in Babylonia in the year 216 and raised in a sect of baptizers with Jewish and Christian roots. The religion he founded, Manichaeism, spread within a few generations from North Africa to China, and for centuries it was one of the most widespread faiths in the world. Among its holy books was a work called the Book of Giants.

When Henning published the Turfan scraps, it became clear that Mani's book rested on an older Jewish tradition, close to the Book of Enoch. But the source itself was missing. No one had seen it for more than a thousand years.

The scraps from Cave 4

The source turned up at the other end of Asia. Among the thousands of fragments taken out of the caves of Qumran were pieces of Aramaic parchment that nobody could place. In the early 1970s the scholar Józef Milik noticed that the names appearing in them were familiar to him from Henning's publication. He realized that he was looking at the original Book of Giants, some four hundred years older than Mani's.

The scraps are very small, sometimes only a few words, and scholars are still reconstructing the order of the plot like a jigsaw puzzle with most of its pieces missing. Even so, the remains of about ten copies of the book have been identified at Qumran. A number like that suggests the work was well loved by the people who lived there. Milik even proposed that the Book of Giants had originally been one of the parts of the Book of Enoch itself, and was removed later. Most scholars did not accept the proposal, but it shows how close the two works are.

The story as the monsters tell it

In the Book of Enoch the giants are a problem to be solved. They devour, they shed blood, and they have no names and no lines of their own. When their sentence is passed, they are not even in the room:

And to Gabriel God said: Go out against the bastards and the depraved, against the children of fornication, and destroy them. Bring the children of fornication and the sons of the Watchers out from among humankind, and set them against one another, so that they destroy each other in slaughter. They will not live long.

1 Enoch 10:9

The Book of Giants tells the same story from the other side. Here the giants have names: Ohyah and Hahyah, the sons of Shemihazah, and Mahaway, the son of Baraqel. They talk to one another, and they are afraid. The fear comes to them in dreams. One of them sees a tablet dipped in water. Another sees a great garden where gardeners are watering the trees, until fire comes down and burns everything. A third dream shows the ruler of heaven descending to earth, thrones being set out, and books being opened.

The giants do not understand the dreams, but they understand that the dreams mean nothing good. They decide to turn to the one man who knows how to interpret them, Enoch the scribe, and they send Mahaway, who flies like an eagle over the great desert. Enoch answers with a written tablet, and the answer is not reassuring: the flood is on its way.

It is hard to read these scraps without feeling something for the giants. They did not choose to be born. They are the result of a sin their fathers committed, and they are the first who will pay for it. The Book of Enoch says as much in a single sentence, addressed to the angels: first you will see the destruction of your beloved sons. The Book of Giants wrote a whole work about that sentence.

Gilgamesh changes sides

Among the giants are two names that surprise anyone who has ever studied the ancient Near East: Gilgamesh and Hobabish.

Gilgamesh is the hero of the great epic of Mesopotamia, the king of Uruk, two thirds god and one third man. Hobabish is Humbaba, the terrifying guardian of the Cedar Forest, whom Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu set out to kill. The epic was known across the Near East for some two thousand years, and tablets of it have been found from Mesopotamia to Megiddo.

The author of the Book of Giants, a Jew writing in Aramaic, knew these names, and he did something clever with them. He did not argue with the epic, and he did not ignore it. He simply placed the great hero of the neighbouring culture on the list of giants, the sons of the angels who sinned, who are destined to drown. This is how one culture digests the heroes of another. It does not erase them. It gives them a small part in its own story.

Mani's translators later did exactly the same thing, in the opposite direction. In the Persian version of the book the names of Ohyah and his brother were replaced with Sam and Nariman, two heroes of Iranian legend, so that readers in the East would meet characters they already knew. The giants of Qumran were given new names, and went on their way.

Traces in the Talmud

The book was lost, but something of it remained in Jewish tradition as well. The Babylonian Talmud mentions in passing that Sihon and Og, the giant kings whom Moses fought, were the sons of Ahiah son of Shamhazai. In a medieval midrash the two sons of Shamhazai appear, and they dream dreams about a garden that is cut down and a tablet that is scraped clean. Whoever told that midrash no longer knew that it had a written source more than a thousand years old.

A book lost twice

The Book of Giants was written in the Land of Israel, stored away in a cave, translated and reworked in Babylonia, carried east by merchants and monks, and forgotten there too. It was found again twice within seventy years, in two languages and on two edges of a continent, and only when the two finds were laid side by side did it become clear that they were the same book.

We tend to think that books belong to whoever wrote them. The fate of the Book of Giants suggests that they belong to whoever carries them. A Jew wrote it, a Persian prophet adopted it, translators in Central Asia preserved it, and a Polish scholar and a German scholar brought its two halves together. And at its centre, all along the way, a few giants went on dreaming a bad dream and asking someone to explain it to them.