Ancient Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan: Contexts, Traditions, and Influences (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament) 9783161545313, 9783161545320, 3161545311

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Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Herausgeber / Editor Jörg Frey (Zürich) Mitherausgeber / Associate Editors Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) · James A. Kelhoffer (Uppsala) Hans-Josef Klauck (Chicago, IL) · Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg) J. Ross Wagner (Durham, NC)

360

Ancient Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan Contexts, Traditions, and Influences

Edited by

Matthew Goff, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, and Enrico Morano

Mohr Siebeck

Matthew Goffis Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. Loren T. Stuckenbruck is Professor of New Testament and Second Temple Judaism in the Protestant Faculty of Theology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Enrico Moranois retired teacher of Classics in High Schools and the current President of the International Association of Manichaean Studies (IAMS).

e -ISBN PDF 978-3-16-154532-0 ISBN 978-3-16-154531-3 2 ISSN 0512-1604 (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2016  by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany. www.mohr.de This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset by Martin Fischer in Tübingen, printed by Gulde-Druck in Tübingen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany.

Preface The present volume contains the proceedings of a conference organized by ­Matthew Goff (Florida State University) and Loren Stuckenbruck (Ludwig-­ Maximilians-Universität). The colloquium was entitled “Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan: Ancient Contexts, Traditions, and Influences.” It convened on June 6–8, 2014, at the Studienhaus, an old farm house which has been renovated for conference use, located near Munich at the foothills of the Alps. It was a beautiful and relaxing venue for our meeting. Scholars from a range of countries participated, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Israel, and the United States. Loren Stuckenbruck first suggested holding a conference on the giants during the 2013–14 academic year, during which time Matthew Goff was at LMU as a Gastwissenschaftler, on a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The conference was generously supported by the Humboldt Foundation and the organizers are grateful for this funding. The conference would not have been possible without the assistance of the Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. In particular Ursula Danninger provided a great deal of highly effective organizational support, which was instrumental for the success of the conference. We thank her for her help. We are also grateful to Seth Bledsoe for his willingness to assist in myriad ways during the conference. The meeting was also enriched by the particpation of several attendees. They include Peter Machinist, Shani Tzoref, Seth Bledsoe, Matthias Hoffmann, Andrew Mein, and Ted Erho. In addition to the contributors of this volume, quality papers were also delivered at the conference by Walther Sallaberger, Annette Steudel, and Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst. Critical editorial support for the present volume was provided by Kyle Roark, a graduate student at FSU, who went through the entire manuscript and prepared the indices. We thank him for his work. Stuckenbruck and Goff are also grateful that Enrico Morano, one of the participants at the conference, agreed to serve as a co-editor for the proceedings volume, because of his expertise in Manichaeism and Central Asian languages. The editors would also like to express thanks to Mohr Siebeck for accepting the proceedings in its prestigious WUNT series. Henning Ziebritzki in particular deserves acknowledgment for his diligent leadership in seeing this book to press. We also thank the Israel Antiquities Authority for agreeing to have images of texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls published in this volume.

VI

Preface

We dedicate this book to the memory of Józef Milik and Walter Bruno Henning, two pioneers of research on the giants in ancient Judaism and Manichaeism, on whose mighty shoulders we stand. July 2015

The editors

Table of Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX Matthew Goff Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part One

Gibborim and Gigantes Antecedents, Reception, and Comparative Contexts from the Hebrew Bible and Greek Literature Brian R. Doak The Giant in a Thousand Years: Tracing Narratives of Gigantism in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Samantha Newington Greek Titans and Biblical Giants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Michael Tuval “Συναγωγὴ γιγάντων” (Prov 21:16): The Giants in the Jewish Literature in Greek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Part Two

Tales of Giants in their Ancient Jewish Context The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Watchers, and Daniel Joseph L. Angel The Humbling of the Arrogant and the “Wild Man” and “Tree Stump” Traditionsin the Book of Giants and Daniel 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

VIII

Table of Contents

Amanda M. Davis Bledsoe Throne Theophanies, Dream Visions, and Righteous(?) Seers: Daniel, the Book of Giants, and 1 Enoch Reconsidered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Ida Fröhlich Giants and Demons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Matthew Goff The Sons of the Watchers in the Book of Watchers and the Qumran Book of Giants: Contexts and Prospects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Loren T. Stuckenbruck The Book of Giants among the Dead Sea Scrolls: Considerations of Method and a New Proposal on the Reconstruction of 4Q530 . . . . . . . . . . 129

Part Three

Enochic Traditions in Central Asia and China Exploring Connections and Affinities between Giants in Ancient Judaism and Manichaeism Gábor Kósa The Book of Giants Tradition in the Chinese Manichaica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Enrico Morano Some New Sogdian Fragments Related to Mani’s Book of Giantsand the Problem of the Influence of Jewish Enochic Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 John C. Reeves Jacob of Edessa and the Manichaean Book of Giants? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Jens Wilkens Remarks on the Manichaean Book of Giants: Once Again on Mahaway’s Mission to Enoch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Index of Citations of Ancient Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Modern Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

List of Abbreviations AAWG AB ABD

Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen Anchor Bible The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols., ed. David N. Freedman (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992) Acta Antiqua ActAnt AfOB Archiv für Orientforschung: Beiheft American Journal of Archaeology AJA Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity AJEC Al alii Ancient Magic and Divination AMD Ancient Near Eastern Studies ANES AnOx Anecdota Oxonensia Anatolian Studies AnSt Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae AOASH AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament Altorientalische Forschungen AoF APAW.PH Abhandlungen der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ­Philosophisch-historische Klasse Aq Aquila Aramaic Studies AS Assyriological Studies AsSt ATANT Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments Aula Orientalis AuOr Biblical Archaeology Review BAR BCSMS Bulletin of the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies Biblotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium BETL Biblica et orientalia BibOr BIS Biblical Interpretation Series Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies BSOAS Berliner Turfantexte BTT CAD The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 21 vols., ed. Martha T. Roth et al. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956–2010) CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series CBQMS Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature CEJL CFM.S Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum. Subsidia Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum. Series Syriaca CFM.SS Culture and History of the Ancient Near East CHANE Classical Antiquity ClAnt CM Cuneiform Monographs Cologne Mani Codex CMC

X CP CRSAIBL CSCO DCLS DCLY DSD DJD DSSR

List of Abbreviations

Cosmology Painting Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook Dead Sea Discoveries Discoveries of the Judean Desert The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader, 6 vols., ed. Donald W. Parry and Emanuel Tov (Leiden: Brill, 2004–05) EeC Études et commentaires Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (London: Routledge & Kegan EIr Paul, 1982– ) ErIsr Eretz-Israel Forschungen zum Alten Testament FAT FB Forschung zur Bibel Formation and Interpretation of Old Testament Literature FIOTL Folia Orientalia FO FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments GCS Die griechische christliche Schriftsteller der ersten [drei] Jahrhunderte Handbuch zum Alten Testament HAT Harvard Dissertations in Religion HDR Hen Henoch Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 HOS8 History of Religions HR HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Harvard Semitic Monographs HSM Harvard Semitic Studies HSS HTR Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual HUCA Monographs of the Hebrew Union College HUCM IEJ Israel Exploration Journal Ilex Series IlSer Ira Iranica JAJ Journal of Ancient Judaism Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplement Series JAJSup Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society JANES JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature JBL Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society JETS JHS Journal of Hebrew Scriptures Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology JIAAA Journal of Jewish Studies JJS Journal of Near Eastern Studies JNES JPSTC JPS [Jewish Publication Society] Torah Commentary Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit JSHRZ Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman JSJ Periods JSJSup Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series

List of Abbreviations

XI

JSLBR The Journal of Sacred Literature and Biblical Record Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series JSNTSup JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha JSP JSPSup Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series KDVS.MFM Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Matematisk-fysiske Meddelelser KTU Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit Loeb Classical Library LCL The Literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls LDSS MAS Manichaean Studies Meg Megillot Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’école français de Rome MFOB MHSCB Manichäische Handschriften der Sammlung A. Chester Beatty Monographien zur indischen Archäologie, Kunst und Philologie MIAKP MMCBC Manichaean Manuscripts in the Chester Beatty Collection MOITAW Monographien des Orient-instituts der Tschechoslowakische Akademie der Wissenschaften MP Middle Persian Monographs of the Peshiṭta Institute, Leiden MPIL MSN Manichaean Studies Newsletter Masoretic Text MT Nouvelles assyriologiques brèves et utilitaires NABU NHMS Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies Nag Hammadi Studies NHS New Interpreter’s Bible, 12 vols., ed. Leander E. Keck et al. NIB (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994–2004) New International Commentary on the Old Testament NICOT NovTSup Supplements to Novum Testamentum Otto Kerns, Orphicorum Fragmenta (Berlin: Weidmann, 1922) OF Old Greek OG OLA Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta Ordia Prima OP OrChrAn Orientalia Christiana Analecta OTL Old Testament Library Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols., ed. James H. Charlesworth OTP (New York: Doubleday, 1983) Quint Quinta Pan Panopolitanus Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece PVTG RAC Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, ed. T. Klauser et al. (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1950– ) Revue biblique RB rec. reconstructed Revue des études juives REJ Revue de Qumrân RevQ RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions

XII ROC SAACT SAeth SANE SB SBLEJL SBS SBTS SECA SemClass SHR SJLA So. / ​Sogd. SPAW.PH

List of Abbreviations

Revue de l’orient chrétien State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts Scriptores Aethiopici Sources of the Ancient Near East Sources bibliques Society of Biblical Literature Early Judaism and Its Literature Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Sources for Biblical and Theological Study Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha Semitica et Classica Studies in the History of Religions Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity Sogdian Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse SS Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Scriptores Syri SSAWL.PH Sitzungsberichte der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philosophisch-historische Klasse ST Studia theologica Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah STDJ Studies in Oriental Religions StOR SVTP Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigraphica Sym Symmachus Syn Syncellus TAPS Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Themes in Biblical Narrative TBN Traditio Exegetica Graeca TEG Th Theodotion Transcultural Studies TrSt Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum TSAJ TUGAL Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur Turc Turcologica Uppsala Universitetsårskrift UUÅ UF Ugarit-Forschungen Utukkū Lemnūtu UL Vestnik drevnej istorii VDI VOHD Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland Vetus Testamentum Supplements VTSup Word Biblical Commentary WBC WBN Brisa Neo-Babylonian Inscription Brisa Old-Babylonian Inscription WBO WMANT Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament WUNT ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft ZDMG Zeitschrift für Religions‑ und Geistesgeschichte ZRGG ZS Zeitschrift für Semitistik und verwandte Gebiete

Introduction Matthew Goff Florida State University

The essays of this volume constitute the proceedings of a conference, the “Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan.” This was the first colloquium devoted specifically to the giants of Enochic tradition. As scholars of Second Temple Judaism are aware, over the past generation there has been a tremendous rise of interest in Enochic literature and traditions.1 In terms of scholarly attention devoted to 1 Enoch and related texts, researchers have naturally focused on the watchers myth, the descent of two hundred angels to earth. They have sex with women who sire children, who are commonly referred to as giants. The sons of the watchers, according to the Enochic Book of Watchers, were dangerous and violent “bastards” who rampaged across the earth, killing humans and even eating them (1 En. 10:9). This disturbing violence is presented as the iniquity that arose on the earth which triggered Noah’s flood. This tale, it is now widely recognized, was popular in antiquity and it has been studied from a variety of perspectives. Our conference was born out of the conviction that the giants deserve to be a more central topic of consideration in on-going scholarly discussion on Enochic literature. The crimes of the giants have often been considered in terms of the question of the “origin of evil,” a major theme of scholarly interest in Enochic literature and apocalypticism in general.2 Despite the growth of scholarship on Enochic literature and traditions, many basic questions and issues regarding the sons of the watchers require further analysis. Why are the children of the angels “giants” and how should we understand what a “giant” is? What, on the basis of the clues that are provided in Enochic literature, did people at that time think these giants looked like? While there has been much interest in exploring 1  For recent literature on this topic, see, for example, Angela Kim Harkins, Kelley Coblentz Bautch, and John C. Endres, S. J., eds., The Fallen Angels Traditions: Second Temple Developments and Reception History (CBQMS 53; Washington, D. C.: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2014); Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts (WUNT I.335; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). 2 Archie T. Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1–4 in Early Jewish Literature, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015); John J. Collins, “The Origin of Evil in Apocalyptic Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in idem, Seers, Sibyls and Sages in Hellenistic-Roman Judaism (JSJSup 54; Leiden: Brill, 1997), 287–99.

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the Mesopotamian cultural background of the watchers, what Mesopotamian texts and traditions can better illuminate the giants of Enochic tradition?3 How the giants of Enochic tradition should be understood in relation to the gigantes and Titans of Greek tradition has also, surprisingly, been relatively infrequently a topic of scholarly reflection.4 There are other basic questions regarding the Enochic giants that deserve more exploration.5 The “Tales of Giants” conference sought to assemble scholars who wanted to investigate in particular the fragmentary Aramaic composition from Qumran known as the Book of Giants.6 While most of the textual fragments associated with this composition were published in 2000 and 2001 (in DJD 36 and DJD 31, respectively), there has been relatively little scholarship devoted to this work.7 No monograph has been published on this composition since the official edition of the relevant fragments has been published.8 With the Book of Giants, one must wrestle with a host of textual and reconstructive issues, owing to the poor state of preservation of the relevant fragments (see the article by Stuckenbruck in this volume). It is thus a matter of scholarly debate how one understands the basic narrative and plot of the work. Fundamental questions such as the function of this document, or who may have produced it, deserve more attention. Also, there should be more assessment in terms of what the composition contributes to our understanding of Enochic tradition and the reception of the watchers myth in antiquity. While the Book of Giants clearly adapts tropes about the giants found in the Book of Watchers, several of the narrative elements of the text have no analogue in Watchers. For example, much of the extant plot of Giants revolves around two giants who are brothers (Ohyah and Hahyah) and the visions they receive through dreams (4Q530 2 ii).9 The giants do not have visions in Watch3 Henryk

Drawnel has recently contributed to this topic. See his “The Mesopotamian Background of the Enochic Giants and Evil Spirits,” DSD 21 (2014): 14–38. Note also the essay by Ida Fröhlich in this volume. 4 An important exception is Jan N. Bremmer, “Remember the Titans!” in The Fall of the Angels, ed. Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (TBN 6; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 35–61. Consult also the article by Samantha Newington in the present volume. 5 See the introduction to the essay in this volume by Matthew Goff. 6 The fragments generally identified as constituting the Qumran Book of Giants are 1Q23–24; 2Q26; 4Q203, 4Q530–33; 4Q206a 1–2 (= 4Q206 2–3) and 6Q8. 7  Émile Puech, Qumrân Grotte 4.XXII: Textes araméens, première partie: 4Q529–549 (DJD 31; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 9–115; Stephen J. Pfann et al., Qumran Cave 4.XXVI: Cryptic Texts and Miscellanea, Part 1 (DJD 36; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 8–94. 8  Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary (TSAJ 63; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997); John C. Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions (HUCM 14; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992). 9 4Q530 2 ii is a major text of the Book of Giants. It is a composite of several fragments of 4Q530, including 2 ii, 6, 7 i, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 (?), as presented in DJD 31, 28–31. To avoid cumbersome citations, this composite text is referred to in this volume as 4Q530 2 ii. See the article in this volume by Stuckenbruck.

Introduction

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ers. The Qumran Book of Giants presents new opportunities to understand the variety of stories people told in antiquity about the sons of the watchers. The “Tales of Giants” conference and the subsequent proceedings are not intended to provide a final answer to such questions but rather to encourage further study of the sons of the watchers. The second distinctive feature of the conference and resulting proceedings is that they are both collaborative efforts by scholars of ancient Judaism and Manichaeism. Our colloquium near Munich is, to the best of our knowledge, the first devoted to bringing scholars of both traditions together. Manichaeism is an important religion of late antiquity that constitutes a unique synthesis of a variety of traditions, including Persian religion, the gnostic tradition, and Jewish apocalypticism.10 It flourished in the West and the East, with evidence for the spread of this religion attested from Rome to China. Manichaeism is generally not an important topic of study among scholars in the field of Second Temple Judaism. Experts in this area have, however, come to recognize the value of studying sources that date much later than the Second Temple period itself, such as the writings of the Church Fathers or rabbinic midrash, since such materials may preserve forms of traditions that flourished before the turn of the common era. By and large this insight has not been applied to Manichaeism by scholars of ancient Judaism. One of the overarching ideas that shaped the “Tales of Giants” conference is that scholars of both traditions can benefit from inter-disciplinary dialogue. This is particularly clear with regard to the giants. It had long been known through canon lists of the Manichaean scriptures that among them was a work entitled the Book of Giants. But for a long time very little was known about this text. This changed when an important site of Manichaean documents, written in a variety of Central Asian languages such as Sogdian, Uyghur (Old Turkic), and Middle Persian, was discovered around 1900 in Turfan, in western China, in what is now Xinjiang Province.11 Among this horde of texts are fragmentary remains of what appears to be the Manichaean Book of Giants. These fragments were published by the Iranist Walter Henning in the 1940s.12 10 For a basic overview of this religion, see Nicholas J. Baker-Brian, Manichaeism: An Ancient Faith Rediscovered (London: T&T Clark, 2011). 11  The manuscripts copied at Turfan generally date to the eighth and ninth centuries. For an overview of Turfan, see Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83–112. For an engaging account of the discoveries at Turfan by one of the archaeologists involved, see Albert von Le Coq, Auf Hellas Spuren in Ostturkistan. Berichte und Abenteuer der II. und III. deutschen Turfan-Expedition (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1926). This appeared in English as Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan: An Account of the Activities and Adventures of the Second and Third German Turfan Expeditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 [orig. pub., 1928]). See also Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst et al., Turfan Revisited: The First Century of Research into the Arts and Cultures of the Silk Road (MIAKP 17; Berlin: Reimer, 2004). 12 Walter B. Henning, “The Book of the Giants,” BSOAS 11 (1943–46): 52–74. As several

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Milik realized in the 1970s that the Turfan Book of Giants not only contained direct references to Enochic traditions, such as the descent of the watchers and the figure of Enoch himself, but also that the composition includes details that resonate with the Qumran Book of Giants much more than Watchers or other Enochic texts.13 For example, several of the names of the giants, such as Ohyah and Mahaway, found only in the Qumran scrolls in the Book of Giants, also appear as the names of sons of angels in the Turfan Book of Giants. In fact, the name Milik gave to the Qumran Book of Giants is based on that of the Manichaean composition. Milik’s awareness of the Turfan giant fragments was critical for his realization that the Qumran fragments now classified as the Book of Giants constitute a distinct composition.14 While some scholars of Second Temple Judaism have, following Milik’s original insight, turned to the Manichaean Book of Giants when interpreting the Qumran Book of Giants, in particular Stuckenbruck and Reeves, there needs to be further analysis with regard to the parallels between the two works, as well as more exploration as to how and why the Turfan work, generally regarded as later translations of a Book of Giants originally written by Mani, appropriated and transformed Enochic traditions. Also merited is a more extensive review of the Turfan horde in general to assess what other texts and traditions it contains that may be relevant to the study of Second Temple Judaism. For example, the Turfan corpus includes a version of the instruction of Ahiqar and a story about the figure of Daniel, as well as several biblical psalms, all in the Sogdian language, none of which to my knowledge has been substantively examined by scholars of ancient Judaism.15 The editors hope that the present volume will be received as one step toward future collaboration among experts of ancient Judaism and Manichaeism, borne out of the perspective that dialogue and exchange of ideas can help scholarship better understand essays in the present volume discuss, several other fragments of this work have been published in more recent years, including by contributors to this volume, Enrico Morano and Jens Wilkens. 13 Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 298–339. See also idem, “Turfan et Qumran: Livre des Géants juif et manichéen,” in Tradition und Glaube: Das frühe Christentum in seiner Umwelt, ed. Gert Jeremias, Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, and Hartmut Stegemann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 117–27; idem, “Problèmes de la littérature hénochique à la lumière des fragments araméens de Qumrân,” HTR 64 (1971): 333–78 (366–70). 14 Before he had this insight the Qumran texts in question were often referred to as 4QPseudo-­ Enoch. For discussion of this issue, see Matthew J. Goff, “When Giants Dreamed about the Flood: The Book of Giants and its Relationship to the Book of Watchers,” in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and The Scriptures, ed. Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (BETL 270; Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 61–88 (61–64). 15  Daniel and Ahiqar, like Watchers and the Qumran Book of Giants, circulated in Aramaic, a common language in antiquity throughout vast sections of Asia, which helps explain their transmission into Sogdian, a language with many similarities to Aramaic. See Nicolas Sims-Williams, Biblical and Other Christian Sogdian Texts from the Turfan Collection (BTT 32; Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

Introduction

5

the Enochic traditions of ancient Judaism and their reception, and how Jewish and scriptural traditions in general were appropriated and transformed in the Manichaean tradition. The essays of this volume fall into three sections. Part One is entitled “Gibborim and Gigantes: Antecedents, Reception, and Comparative Contexts from the Hebrew Bible and Greek Literature.” It begins with an essay by Brian R. Doak, who is well known for his scholarship on giants in the Hebrew Bible.16 In “The Giant in a Thousand Years: Tracing Narratives of Gigantism in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond” he argues that the giant serves several thematic functions in the literature of the Hebrew Bible: “the giant as divine or semi-­ divine figure, as anti-law and anti-king, as elite adversary and elite animal, as unruly vegetation, and as the defeated past.” He examines major texts such as Gen 6:1–4 and also the accounts in the Hebrew Bible of the Rephaim, the colossal aboriginal inhabitants of Canaan. A common function of giants in this literature is that they help demarcate various types of boundaries, such as a distinction between one historical period and another, or help signify one group as favored and another as rejected (Israel vis-à-vis Canaan). Doak applies these insights to the giants of Early Judaism. He stresses that stories about giants from this period are not simply entertaining tales but also that these giants “seem to encode a broadly applicable political theology” and were employed to signify different social actors, particularly political enemies of Israel such as the Roman Empire. Samantha Newington, in her article “Greek Titans and Biblical Giants,” encourages the appreciation of the diversity of Titan traditions in Greek mythology. Their presentation in Orphic tradition, as evident from authors such as Nonnus and Olympiodorus, is quite different from the account of the Titans in Hesiod’s Theogony. Olympiodorus, for example, claims that humankind was formed from the ashes of the Titans, whom Zeus punished for dismembering Dionysus. The author examines Hesiod’s account of the Titans and finds a number of thematic parallels between them and the Enochic giants; both, for example, are perpetrators of excessive violence. The author also explores broad affinities between the Orphic tradition and Christianity, including themes such as punishment and original sin. The last article of Part One is by Michael Tuval. His “‘Συναγωγὴ γιγάντων’ (Prov 21:16): The Giants in the Jewish Literature in Greek,” offers a helpful survey of the term “giant” in ancient Jewish literature. His review incorporates a wide range of Greek materials, including the Wisdom of Solomon, 3 Maccabees, Baruch, 3 Baruch, Pseudo-Eupolemus, the Sibylline Oracles, and the writings of Philo and Josephus. He concludes that the basic contours of the watchers myth 16  Brian R. Doak, The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel (ILSer 7; Boston/Washington, D. C.: Ilex Foundation/Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012).

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were available to Jewish authors writing in Greek, and that they express a range of reactions to this story, some positive, some negative. Part Two of the volume focuses on giants in their late Second Temple Jewish context. The articles in this section examine texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Watchers, and Daniel. The first essay of this section is by Joseph L. Angel. His essay, “The Humbling of the Arrogant and the ‘Wild Man’ and ‘Tree Stump’ Traditions in the Book of Giants and Daniel 4,” engages the relationship between Enochic and Danielic traditions. Angel seeks to show that the points of similarity between Daniel and the Qumran Book of Giants are more extensive than the well established parallel regarding their throne-theophanies (see the essay by Bledsoe). He focuses on the visions in Giants recounted in 4Q530 2 ii, one of which involves the destruction of trees (ll. 6–12; Hahyah’s vision) and Daniel 4, which contains a vision of a tree that is chopped down and the transformation of Nebuchadnezzar into a wild man removed from human society. Angel argues that both Giants and Daniel re-work older Mesopotamian traditions that are appropriated in Daniel 4 to polemicize against Babylonian kingship. This suggests that Giants can be analogously understood as developing anti-imperialist formulations of Mesopotamian tradition in the Hellenistic age. Amanda M. Davis Bledsoe, in her “Throne Theophanies, Dream Visions, and Righteous(?) Seers: Daniel, the Book of Giants, and 1 Enoch Reconsidered,” offers a close analysis of the throne theophany disclosed in a vision to the giant Ohyah (4Q530 2 ii 15–20). This passage includes several details that are quite similar to the throne theophany which is part of the vision of the four beasts in Daniel (7:9–10) and also to the account in Watchers of Enoch’s journey to the heavenly throne room (1 Enoch 14). These parallels have been noted and constitute a key focus of scholarship on the Qumran Book of Giants. Bledsoe helpfully reviews the major parallels between these texts and leading scholarly assessments of them. While previous studies have focused on the question of influence and how to trace a line of development regarding the throne visions of Watchers, Giants, and Daniel, she prefers to examine the function and purpose of these visions in their respective texts. Ida Fröhlich, in her essay “Giants and Demons,” examines the watchers of Enochic tradition and their sons the giants. She emphasizes that these figures should be interpreted against the background of Mesopotamian culture. This is particularly the case with regard to demons. Watchers offers an etiology of evil spirits and asserts that they originated as the spirits of the giants, whose physical bodies were destroyed for their crimes (1 Enoch 15). Fröhlich argues that the descriptions of the giants in Watchers and Giants draw upon Mesopotamian demonological traditions as evident in cuneiform texts such as Utukkū Lemnūtu. She also stresses that the watchers myth should be understood in terms of the origin of evil, which the author associates with impurity.

Introduction

7

The article by Matthew Goff, “The Sons of the Watchers in the Book of Watchers and the Qumran Book of Giants: Contexts and Prospects,” lays out a series of questions and topics that deserve more scholarly reflection with regard to the Qumran Book of Giants and the broader topic of the sons of the watchers in ancient Judaism. The article also explores the value of the Manichaean Book of Giants for the study of the Qumran Book of Giants. He argues that instances in the Qumran text in which characters express a fear of death and acknowledge sin, which are too fragmentary in terms of the extant Qumran fragments of the document themselves to interpret sufficiently, can be better understood by turning to the Manichaean Book of Giants. In one fragment of this work (Mainz 344a) one giant (Sāhm) explicitly expresses remorse for his previous crimes and prays for forgiveness. It is plausible to argue that in the Qumran composition some giants may have likewise acknowledged their sins and may have even asked for forgiveness. The Qumran Book of Giants problematizes the widely held view that the giants of Enochic tradition were always regarded in the late Second Temple period as heinous, evil creatures who deservedly perished in the flood for their crimes. Loren T. Stuckenbruck, in his “The Book of Giants among the Dead Sea Scrolls: Considerations of Method and a New Proposal on the Reconstruction of 4Q530,” tackles the difficult issue of the material reconstruction of the Qumran Book of Giants. He stresses that the physical textual evidence should guide reconstruction of the narrative whenever possible. Stuckenbruck puts forward a possible sequence of the extant fragments of Giants. Among these texts 4Q530 is crucial. Fragments of this manuscript preserve remnants of three sequential columns, which contain the core of the extant narrative of the composition, which centers on visions disclosed to the brothers Hahyah and Ohyah. Stuckenbruck, applying Stegemann’s method of material reconstruction, suggests that these important columns occurred near the end of the scroll. Part Three is devoted to essays that explore the reception and transformation of Enochic giant traditions in Manichaeism. Gábor Kósa, in his “The Book of Giants Tradition in the Chinese Manichaica,” offers an extensive and insightful discussion of Manichaean written and visual texts from China. While such materials are far removed from the ken of most biblical scholars, Kósa adroitly demonstrates that scholars of Enochic literature should be interested in Chinese Manichaean sources. He shows that a recently discovered corpus of Manichaean texts from Xiapu (Fujian) preserves in Chinese, as mediated through Middle Persian, the names of the four archangels who defeat the rebellious watchers and their sons in 1 Enoch: Raphael, Michael, Sariel, and Gabriel. Moreover, in recent years a medieval silk Chinese painting has emerged that provides a visual depiction of the intricate and nuanced Manichaean conception of the cosmos. It has long been known that among the scriptures of this religion was a so-called Picture-Book, which consisted of illustrations that helped explain the compli-

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Matthew Goff

cated details of Manichaean cosmology. It appears that the silk painting, which Kósa calls the “Cosmology Painting,” is a medieval version of the late antique Manichaean ‘scriptural’ book of images. Several images from this painting are available at the end of Kósa’s article. Since Enochic traditions were an important influence on Mani’s thought, this silk painting constitutes an important resource not simply for understanding Manichaean cosmology but also how Manichaeans adapted and incorporated Enochic tropes, including the giants, in the formulation of their cosmological beliefs. The article by Enrico Morano, “Some New Sogdian Fragments Related to Mani’s Book of Giants and the Problem of the Influence of Jewish Enochic Literature,” publishes for the first time two Turfan fragments written in Sogdian. One of them discusses the giants and mentions the name Sāhm several times; this is also the name of a giant in the Manichaean Book of Giants which, according to Text H, is a Sogdian rendering of Ohya, a name which in turn derives from that of Ohyah known from the Qumran Book of Giants. This newly published fragment may be from the Turfan giants book. Morano also illustrates the reception of Enochic tradition in Sogdian literature by publishing a text written in this language entitled the “Autumn Sermon.” While it is not clear that this text should be identified as a fragment of the Manichaean Book of Giants, the document likely has some connection to Enochic tradition, since it discusses stars that have been bound and imprisoned. The essay by John C. Reeves, “Jacob of Edessa and the Manichaean Book of Giants?,” examines and makes available a translation of a little known scholion to Gen 6:1–4 in Syriac by Jacob of Edessa. This scholion describes the giants dying before the flood by waging war against one another. This resonates with the major Enochic trope that the giants perished by fighting one another in a “war of destruction” (1 En. 10:9). The Syriac text preserves the traditions that large heaps of the bones of the giants remained on the earth until the flood and that the earth was formed with their excrement. The scholion asserts that foolish and heretical people believe such fables. Reeves plausibly argues that this document constitutes important evidence for the watchers myth in Syriac Christianity and that Jacob had access to traditions found in 1 Enoch and Jubilees. Reeves also suggests that the heretical people mentioned in the text is a direct reference to the Manichaeans. It is an important element of Manichaean cosmogony that the sons of darkness were destroyed and their bodies were used to make the cosmos. The “fables” which the text derides may be a reference to the Manichaean Book of Giants. The essay “Remarks on the Manichaean Book of Giants: Once Again on Mahaway’s Mission to Enoch” by Jens Wilkens offers a discussion and new edition of Mainz 317, a Uyghur text of Mani’s Book of Giants. The fragment in question is Text B in Henning’s edition of the composition. The Qumran Book of Giants contains a passage in which one of the giants, Mahaway, the son of the watcher

Introduction

9

Baraqel, flies (using his wings) a great distance to reach Enoch so that he may interpret the visions disclosed to the brothers Ohyah and Hahyah (4Q530 7 ii). In Text B of the Manichaean Book of Giants a “son of Virōgdād” flies and hears the voice of Enoch, who urges him to turn back. “Virōgdād” is Middle Persian for “gift of lightning,” a name that thus resonates with that of Mahaway’s father according to Enochic tradition, whose name means “lightning of God.”17 It is reasonable to understand the figure who flies in the Uyghur text as Mahaway, whose name appears elsewhere in the Turfan Book of Giants (Māhawai; e.g., M101c). In the Qumran giants work, the journey of this giant to Enoch is his second such visit, since the text refers to a previous visit to Enoch by Mahaway that is not preserved among the extant fragments. Wilkens argues that his new reading of Mainz 317 clarifies that it recounts a version of the first journey of Mahaway to Enoch. The essays in the present volume examine giants in ancient Jewish literature, in particular the depiction of the sons of the watchers in the Book of Watchers and the Book of Giants from Qumran. Many papers in this collection also explore how ancient Jewish traditions regarding the sons of the watchers were adapted by adherents of Manichaeism, focusing on the Turfan fragments of the Manichaean Book of Giants. The editors hope that this volume will help spark interest and encourage future scholarship in the giants of Enochic tradition and their Nachleben, in particular the appropriation and re-formulation of the sons of the watchers in Manichaeism.

17 Milik,

The Books of Enoch, 300, 311.

Part One

Gibborim and Gigantes Antecedents, Reception, and Comparative Contexts from the Hebrew Bible and Greek Literature

The Giant in a Thousand Years Tracing Narratives of Gigantism in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond* Brian R. Doak George Fox University

I. The Embarrassing and Alluring Giant The giants of the Hebrew Bible received very little independent scholarly attention during the twentieth century, and only within the last decade have these figures begun to attract serious focus.1 This situation is at least somewhat surprising, given the immense popular interest in giants for many readers of the Bible – though it should come as little shock to see that again biblical scholars * I am sincerely thankful to the participants in the “Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan: Ancient Contexts, Traditions and Influences” conference (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, June 2014) for their hospitality and feedback. Many of the arguments and sources in this essay appear in more elaborate form in my book The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel (ILSer 7; Boston/Washington, D. C.: Ilex Foundation/Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012). 1  For recent work approaching the topic from a variety of angles and time periods, see Joseph L. Angel, “Reading the Book of Giants in Literary and Historical Context,” DSD 21 (2014): 313–46; Doak, Last of the Rephaim; Deane Galbraith, “Manufacturing Judean Myth: The Spy Narrative in Numbers 13–14 as Rewritten Tradition” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Otago, 2013); Matthew Goff, “Monstrous Appetites: Giants, Cannibalism, and Insatiable Eating,” JAJ 1 (2010): 19–42 (34–37); idem, “Gilgamesh the Giant: The Qumran Book of Giants’ Appropriation of Gilgamesh Motifs,” DSD 16 (2009): 221–53; Christophe Lemardelé, “Une Gigantomachie dans la Genìse? Géants et héros dans les textes bibliques compiles,” RHR 227 (2010): 155–74; Lothar Perlitt, “Riesen im Alten Testament: Ein literarisches Motiv im Wirkungsfeld des Deuteronomiums,” in idem, Deuteronomium-Studien (FAT 8; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 205–46; Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translations and Commentary (TSAJ 63; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997); idem, “The ‘Angels’ and ‘Giants’ of Genesis 6:1–4 in Second and Third Century BCE Jewish Interpretation: Reflections on the Posture of Early Apocalyptic Traditions,” DSD 7 (2000): 354–77; idem, “The Origins of Evil in Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition: The Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4 in the Second and Third Centuries B. C. E.,” in The Fall of the Angels, ed. Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (TBN 6; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 87–118 (now available in updated form in Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts [WUNT I.335; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014], 1–35).

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have neglected those things most important to the readership of the church, synagogue, or general public. Indeed, the popular or even cartoonish appeal of giant or monstrous beings may have actively repelled the academy in the past, as the sheer popularity of conspiracy theories about burials of giant bones or fantastical creatures does not lend scholarly gravitas to this field of study.2 To put it bluntly, giants can be embarrassing. From time to time, scholars have succumbed to the lure of explaining stories of giants in the Bible through historicizing or medicalizing interpretations. One may find, for example, attempts to analyze a character like Goliath (1 Samuel 17) on the basis of hypopituitarism or other physical pathologies.3 Even scant examples of larger-than-normal physical remains in the Levant provoke speculation about the origins of giant stories, and Adrienne Mayor’s fascinating study of ancient folk science in The First Fossil Hunters gives a plausible etiology for at least some tales of the monstrous and gigantic: fossils of extinct animals appeared to ancient observers as “real” monsters or giants that must have once interacted with human heroes in the distant past.4 To be sure, along these lines the ruins of the Late Bronze Age urban centers in Israel/Palestine, whose giant walls and inhabitantless structures were visible during the biblical period, could have appeared to later Israelites as evidence of some by-gone Canaanite race.5 Well into the modern period, giant structures and mysterious monuments captivated 2 See attempts to prove the historicity of the Bible’s giants stories in different ways by Charles DeLoach, Giants: A Reference Guide from History, the Bible, and Recorded Legend (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1995) and Clyde E. Billington, “Goliath and the Exodus Giants: How Tall Were They?” JETS 50 (2007): 489–508. 3  See, e.g., Diether Kellermann, “Die Geschichte von David und Goliath im Lichte der Endokrinologie,” ZAW 102 (1990): 344–57; James N. Ford, “The ‘Living Rephaim’ of Ugarit: Quick or Defunct?” UF 24 (1992): 73–101 (88). In recent popular literature, see Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013), 3–15; Gladwell (p. 14) claims that “many medical experts now believe” (?) that “Goliath had a serious medical condition.” 4 Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. the list of ancient testimonia on pp. 260–81. On the giant-fossil theory of giant stories, see also Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1920), 1:385–87. Already in antiquity, Augustine of Hippo cites a fossil tooth as evidence of the reality of giant offspring from the episode in Gen 6:1–4. See Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 2000), esp. the examples in book 15, and the extended discussion of the fossil tooth in Maura Nolan, “Historicism After Historicism,” in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 63–86 (64–69). 5  In Joshua 7–8, the very name of the city of Ai (“ruins”) indicates a connection between the conquest narratives and prominent ruins. See Ronald S. Hendel, “Biblical Views: Giants at Jericho,” BAR 35 (2009; accessed online at http://basarchive.org, 23 December 2009), and the well-documented existence of giant fortification structures from the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2500–1460 BCE) by Aaron Burke, “Walled Up To Heaven”: The Evolution of Middle Bronze Age Fortification Strategies in the Levant (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008).

The Giant in a Thousand Years

15

romantic travelers in the region, proving the allure of the giant over millennia. One example of such a traveler, the Irish Presbyterian missionary Josias Porter (1823–1889), ornately wrote of the “memorials of … primeval giants” that he saw “in almost every section of Palestine,” ranging from enormous graves to massive city architecture.6 Porter identified the “wild and wondrous panorama” of the Argob region in southern Syria as the site of past giant activity, and felt certain that the remains he saw there were “the very cities erected and inhabited by the Rephaim.”7 Neither the historicizing/medicalizing nor the fossils/ruins approach can go very far toward explaining the power these giant traditions came to have in the Hebrew Bible and in so many other literatures over such a long period of time. When taken to extremes, these interpretations can obviously become fantastical or problematically reductionist, and at best the medical-gigantism and fossil-inspiration approaches could only account for the initial motivation for giant stories in selected cases. In this paper, I would like to attempt a very broad view of the giant in the Hebrew Bible, with the goal of tracing the appearance of giants through several lenses: the giant as divine or semi-divine figure, as anti-law and anti-king, as elite adversary and elite animal, as unruly vegetation, and as the defeated past. It is precisely this kind of thematic overview that has been lacking in the literature, as giants have more typically been treated piecemeal, as mere footnotes or oddities in their narrative contexts. The very rubric of the “biblical giant” could automatically obscure the variety of gigantic figures and their roles throughout time, but it is still the case that giants appear prominently and repeatedly in the Bible, forcing us to consider whether there is something unique or uniquely “biblical” about the Bible’s giants. Though the giant has recently and justifiably received more attention from those working with the Enochic corpus and the Qumran traditions, as well as from those studying the medieval engagement with giants,8 we ignore the Ursprung of these later materials in the Hebrew Bible to the det6 Josias L. Porter, The Giant Cities of Bashan, and Syria’s Holy Places (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1884), 12. 7  Ibid., 84. 8  On 1 Enoch and the various materials from Qumran related to giants, see Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, and the relevant sections of George W. E. Nickelsburg 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001); Angel, “Reading the Book of Giants”; Goff, “Monstrous Appetites”; idem, “Gilgamesh the Giant.” For the medieval giant and more recent literary presentations, see the major studies of Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1952); Walter R. Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989); Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1984); Jeffrey J. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999).

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riment of the field of giants in Judaism conceived as a whole. Thus, this essay is an attempt to organize the Bible’s giants by category and to continue to elevate these figures as a rightful object of scholarly attention.

II. Five Categories of Giant Thinking in the Hebrew Bible The five categories of thinking about the Hebrew Bible’s giants presented below reflect the wide range of meanings these figures elicit, though other configurations are obviously possible and there is overlap among several of the categories. The biblical giant is not limited to appearing in either “mythical” (divine or semi-divine) or “historical” (human) forms, but in many cases straddles these boundaries as a reflection of the intermingling of myth and history in the Bible generally. Following Walter Stephens’ study of gigantism folklore and theology in Latin Europe, where the giant stood as “the most fundamental figure of the Other,” we might say that the biblical giant primarily embodies otherness vis-àvis God and Israel.9 This sense of otherness and opposition permeates all biblical presentations of giants, and stands in stark contrast to other Mediterranean and Near Eastern literatures of the Iron Age in which gigantic height can take on positive qualities of dominance or heroism.10 Therefore, following Stephens again, if the giant can represent such different qualities in societies across time – say, dominant and heroic in some parts of the ancient world but corrupted and defeated in others – then it is fair to say that giants cannot merely be viewed simplistically, as ogres or dummies, but rather they must be scrutinized as loaded ideological figures that communicate ideals and anxieties on many fronts.11 Though the first two categories discussed here are common starting points for thinking about giants (giant as divine figure and giant as anti-king), the last three categories remain under-explored and represent rich points of engagement with the figure of the giant (giant as elite animal adversary, giant as unruly vegetation, and giant as defeated past). 9 Stephens,

Giants in Those Days, 58. Gilgamesh can properly be called a giant by reason of his stature in the Gilgamesh Epic (I.53–61), where each of his feet is three cubits long and each stride six cubits. Likewise, the “Stele of Vultures” records a height of 5.5 cubits for the Sumerian king Eannatum. See Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1:447, 540–41. Ancient Near Eastern art often depicts the king as a heroic figure who gigantically towers over others, such as Naram-Sin on his famous stele (ca. 2220 BCE) and the Egyptian Ramses II on a temple relief commemorating his victory at Qadesh (ca. 1274 BCE); see, respectively, Irene Winter, “Sex, Rhetoric, and the Public Monument: The Alluring Body of Naram-Sîn of Agade,” in Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece and Italy, ed. Natalie B. Kampen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–26; Othmar Keel, “Kanaanäische Sühneriten auf ägyptischen Tempelreliefs,” VT 25 (1975): 413–69 (see especially 419, fig. 2 and other images on pp. 421, 427, 440, 446, 448). 11 Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 5. 10 If

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17

1. The giant as divine or semi-divine figure The Bible’s own starting point for reflection on the giant occurs in the primeval history of Genesis. Though no word for gigantic size/height appears in the passage, Gen 6:1–4 has always played a prominent role for defining the origins of gigantic beings through illicit sexual congress between divine and human realms.12 1 When humans began to increase upon the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, 2 certain divine beings (‫ )בני האלהים‬saw how beautiful the human women (‫בנות‬ ‫ )האדם‬were, and so they took wives for themselves from among them, whomever they chose. 3 YHWH said, “My spirit will not remain (‫ )ידון‬with humans forever, for they are but flesh; their lifetime will be 120 years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days – and also afterward – when the divine beings procreated with human women. They bore children to them; they were the heroes of old, famous men (‫הגברים אשר מעולם אנשי‬ ‫)השם‬.

A basic narrative crux that has bedeviled generations of scholars involves the relationship between the “divine beings” and the “Nephilim.” Does the author insert the Nephilim here in order to associate the primeval era of the “heroes of old” with the time of the Nephilim? Or does the comingling of divine beings and human women result in the birth of the Nephilim? In his Genesis commentary Gunkel set the tone for much twentieth century scholarship, calling the reference to the Nephilim in verse 4 “eine beiläufige Notiz, ohne inneren Zusammenhang hinzugefügt” (an incidental note, added without inner connection).13 Von Rad took the reference as more coherent, citing etiological purposes – explaining the existence of heroic figures  – and supposed the author wanted to ensure these heroes were seen as a “‘demonic’ invasion” into the natural order.14 On purely literary grounds, there is no reason to see any aspect of this particular passage as more “incidental” than any of the other cryptic fragments of tradition in Genesis 1–11; more than other passages, though, this text seems to provoke a particular interpretive anxiety, manifesting itself in more or less arbitrary source-critical judgments or sheer dismissal (e.g., Brevard Childs calls Gen 6:1–4 “a foreign particle of pagan mythology … a mutilated and half-digested particle” that

12  See, e.g., John J. Collins, “The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men,” in Sacred Marriages: The Divine-Human Sexual Metaphor from Sumer to Early Christianity, ed. Marti Nissinen and Risto Uro (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 259–74; Ron Hendel, “The Nephilim were on the Earth: Genesis 6:1–4 and its Ancient Near Eastern Context,” in Auffarth and Stuckenbruck, The Fall of the Angels, 11–34; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11, trans. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg: 1984), 363–83. 13  Hermann Gunkel, Genesis: übersetzt und erklärt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1901), 53. 14  Gerhard von Rad, Genesis, rev. ed., trans. J. H. Marks (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1972), 115. See also Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 365, 369, who sees Gen 6:4 as a secondary accretion meant only to explain the birth of heroic warriors (‫)גבורים‬.

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“struggles with independent life against the role to which it has been assigned within the Hebrew tradition.”).15 Others venture to see the relative clause in Gen 6:4 (‫ )אשר‬with nuances of result, purpose, or cause, thus drawing the otherwise isolated verse into narrative conversation with the passage as a whole: the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, with the result being that the divine beings procreated with human women.16 Rüdiger Bartelmus proposed just such a translation already several decades ago, which allows more space for viewing Gen 6:1–4 (as Bartelmus does) as a tale recounting the beginning of the ongoing battle between the hero and the giant that would reverberate throughout the Hebrew Bible.17 Whether the Nephilim are to be conflated with the “divine beings” in verses 2 and 4 or whether the Nephilim somehow incited the transgression as a third party, the explanatory note in verse 4 makes the Nephilim a part of the divine-human union. Some readings already in antiquity placed the Nephilim themselves as the result of the union – divine beings + human women = Nephilim (giants) – but the grammar of ‫ אשר‬as a resultant clause probably cannot work in this manner. More than mere etiology, then, the incident in Gen 6:1–4 allows mythical and narrative space for the origin of giants. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the report of the Hebrew spies in Num 13:31–33:18 But the men who went up with him [Caleb] said, “We are not able to go up against the people, because they are stronger than us.” 32 So they brought a bad report of the land that they had spied out to the sons of Israel, saying, “The land that we have gone through as spies – it is a land that eats up its inhabitants! And the people we saw in its midst are huge (‫)אנשי מדות‬.19 33 We also saw the Nephilim there – the sons of Anaq are from the Nephilim – and we seemed like grasshoppers in our eyes and likewise we were in their eyes!” 31

Here an explanatory note in the midst of the report identifies the Anaqim (‫בני‬ ‫ )ענק‬as ‫מן הנפילים‬, “from the Nephilim.” But in what sense? Despite frequent protests to the contrary, the ‫ מן‬in Num 13:33 can only indicate genealogical 15 Brevard Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 1962), 54, 57. 16 For this use of ‫אשר‬, see Ronald J. Williams, Williams’ Hebrew Syntax, 3rd ed., rev. and expanded by John C. Beckman (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007), 163–66; P. Joüon and T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, 2 vols. (Rome: Pontifico Istituto Biblico, 2005), 2:595–98. In the Hebrew Bible, see Gen 13:16; Exod 20:26; Deut 4:40; 1 Sam 15:15; 1 Kgs 3:13; 2 Kgs 9:37, and other examples in Williams, Williams’ Hebrew Syntax, 165–66, as well as W. Gesenius, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006), 165b, 166b. 17 “Die Riesen waren in jenen Tagen auf Erden, so daß die Göttersöhne zu den Töchtern der Menschen eingingen und diese ihnen Kinder gebaren, nämlich die Heroen der Vorzeit.” See Rüdiger Bartelmus, Heroentum in Israel und seiner Umwelt (ATANT 65; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1979), 23. 18  See now Galbraith, “Manufacturing Judean Myth.” 19  Literally “men of [notable] measure.” Compare with ‫ איש מדה‬in Isa 45:14; 1 Chr 11:23; 20:6.

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derivation;20 the Hebrew conquest of the land now participates in the divine acts of control and ordering from the Torah’s primeval history.21 These Nephilim descendants in the land are not pure gods, but neither are they normal humans. Though we lack any certain manner of historically situating these only references to the Nephilim in the Bible to one another,22 the note in Num 13:33 makes no sense for an audience that does not know of either Gen 6:4 or another Nephilim tradition, and therefore it seems reasonable to assume that the huge inhabitants from the spies’ report were drawn into the Nephilim tradition later. If anything is “secondary” in Gen 6:4, it is the “and also afterward” clause (‫וגם‬ ‫)אחרי כן‬, which could have been easily added to make sense of the fact that these Nephilim – understood superordinately as “giants” (on parallel with “Rephaim” in Deut 2:11) – clearly appear later in the storyline (not only in Num 13:33, but also in the figure of Og of Bashan and others in the conquest, not to mention Goliath). Another avenue by which giants could be viewed as divine or semi-divine figures involves the identity of the Rephaim as mythical shades of the dead or powerful embodied spirits inhabiting the land.23 The prominence of Og – king of the land of the Rephaim – as an adversary in the memory of the wilderness wandering and conquest led biblical authors to gesture toward both a gigantic stature for this king as well as his semi-divine identity.24 A fragmentary and debated Ugaritic reference (KTU 1.108.1–3) suggests that the territory the Bible ascribes to Og and the Rephaim was viewed by at least the fourteenth or thirteenth century BCE as the habitation of a certain Rapiu, patron deity of the Rapiuma in Ugaritic myth:25 20  Ephraim A. Speiser, Genesis (AB 1; New York: Doubleday, 1964), 44, Nahum Sarna, Genesis (JPSTC; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 46, and Timothy R. Ashley, The Book of Numbers (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 243, all attempt to differentiate the Anaqim from “actual” (?) Nephilim and claim the ‫ מן‬in Num 13:33 is a term of comparison. However, nowhere in the Hebrew Bible does ‫ מן‬function in this exact kind of comparative manner (see Williams, Williams’ Hebrew Syntax, 10–25, and sources cited there), but ‫מן‬ frequently does function as a normal indicator of genealogical derivation (e.g., Gen 15:4; 35:11; 1 Sam 2:20, and the description of Og of Bashan as “from” [‫ ]מן‬the Rephaim in Josh 12:4). 21 Emil G. Kraeling, “The Significance and Origin of Gen. 6:1–4,” JNES 6 (1947): 193–208 (195). 22  Doak, Last of the Rephaim, 78–79. 23  For a review of this problem, see Doak, ibid., 153–99. 24 See references to Og in Num 21:26–35; 32:33; Deut 1:4; 3:1–3; 4:47; 29:7, 31:4; Josh 2:10; 9:10; 12:2–5; 13:12, 30; 1 Kgs 4:19; Pss 135:11; 136:19–20; Neh 9:22. Og is associated specifically with the Rephaim in Deut 3:11; Josh 12:4; 13:12. 25 On the most debated phrase in question here (ʾil yṯb bʾṯtrt ʾil ṯpṭ bhdrʾy), see, among many to weigh in on the topic, John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (JSOTSup 265; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 50; Nicholas Wyatt, “À la Recherche de Rephaïm Perdus,” in idem, The Archaeology of Myth: Papers in Old Testament Tradition (London: Routledge, 2010), 69–95 (88 n. 16); Anson Rainey, “The Ugaritic Texts in Ugaritica 5,” JAOS 94 (1974): 184–94 (187), who finds KTU 1.108.3 to be “certainly reminiscent” of Gen 14:5, Josh 12:4, and 13:12; Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Vener-

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May Rapiu (rpʾu), king of eternity, drink wine, may he drink, the powerful and noble god, the one who rules in Athtarat (bʿṯtrt), the god who reigns in Edrei (?) (ʾil ṯpṭ bhdrʿy), who sings and plays on the lyre …

The fact that either/both Og or/and the Rephaim are said to dwell at Ashteroth-karnaim (Gen 14:5) or Ashtaroth and Edrei (Josh 12:4; 13:12) suggests continuity between the region of Ashtaroth and Edrei, Og, and the deity Rapiu. In Deut 1:4 and Josh 12:4, Og is described as “reigning” or “enthroned” in the same location as Rapiu using the same language (‫ = יושב‬yṯb in KTU 1.108.2), further suggesting reliance on earlier tradition in the Bible’s memory of Og as a shadowy, fearsome leader with connections to the divine realm. As such, and as one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Levant, Og would also then be a giant, as would his people, the Rephaim (see Deut 2:11, 20; 3:11). Two other aspects of the Og-Rephaim presentation in the Hebrew Bible draw these figures into comparison with divine beings. First, the famous description of Og’s giant bed in Deut 3:11 makes Og not only a giant but compares him with a divine figure, as some have recently shown that the dimensions of Og’s bed correspond exactly to the dimensions of the ritual sex bed used by Marduk and Zarpanitu at the Etemenanki ziggurat in Babylon (nine cubits by four cubits).26 The comparison could be polemical, but more likely reflects the awe and stature attached to the Og tradition, and elevates Og to a supernatural level, requiring the powerful deliverance of Israel’s God to cross into the land. Second, we should also notice that the paradoxical descriptions of Rephaim in the Bible as living warriors and as shades of the dead parallels the existence of ation in Biblical Land Claims (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 68; and now Mark S. Smith, Poetic Heroes: Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 138–39, who sees no problem in the geographical correlation between this Rapiu and the biblical Rephaim. Since I do not think the fifth century BCE Byblos coffin inscription refers to Og, I do not discuss it here, but some think the term hʿg in this text refers to “Og” (or “the Og”) as a haunting spirit of some kind (hʿg ytbqšn hʾdr; “the mighty Og himself will take revenge”). This Og reading has been reasonably discredited by Frank M. Cross, “A Newly Published Inscription of the Persian Age from Byblos,” in idem, Leaves from an Epigrapher’s Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Paleography and Epigraphy (HSS 51; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 282–85, but cf. Jean Starcky, “Une inscription phénicienne de Byblos,” in Mélanges offerts à M. Maurice Dunand (MFOB 45; Beruit: Imprimerie Catholique, 1969), 259–73; Karel van der Toorn, “Funerary Rituals and Beatific Afterlife in Ugaritic Texts and in the Bible,” BibOr 48 (1991): 80–101 (93); Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11 (AB 5; New York: Doubleday, 1991), 184; Klaus Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (AOAT 219; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1986), 210–11. 26  Maria Lindquist, “King Og’s Iron Bed,” CBQ 73 (2011): 477–92, building on the work of Timo Veijola, “King Og’s Iron Bed (Deut 3:11): Once Again,” in Studies in the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, and the Septuagint Presented to Eugene Ulrich, ed. Peter W. Flint et al. (VTSup 101; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 60–76, and Ulrich Hübner, “Og von Baschan und sein Bett in Rabbat-Ammon (Deuteronomium 3,11),” ZAW 105 (1993): 86–92.

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21

the Rapiuma as deified ancestor kings in the Ugaritic corpus, suggesting that the biblical authors thought of the Rephaim as an ambiguous, powerful contingent of heroic warriors.27 Scholars have approached this odd dichotomy between the living and dead Rephaim in various ways, usually assuming some transfer of meaning from one realm to the other – e.g., Rephaim originally referred to the dead, but was transferred to the Rephaim of the conquest, or it originally referred to living warriors in the conquest who were demoted to impotent shades of the dead in later tradition. A more productive and holistic approach to the question, however, would be to see the Rephaim as semi-divine heroic figures, along the lines of archaic and classical Greek hero concepts as well as at Late Bronze Age Ugarit, where great warriors of bygone eras not only claimed divine parentage but also continued to function through the hero cult as a force of fertility, protection, and legitimation for contemporary devotees.28 Hartmut Gese provocatively argued that even Gen 6:1–4 contributed to this hero cult ideology, as it sought to simultaneously provide a legitimate explanation for the birth of semi-divine heroic figures while still limiting their life-spans and circumscribing their power under YHWH’s purview.29 If the hero cult interpretation has any merit for the Rephaim and for the Nephilim in Gen 6:1–4, then it may be most productive to understand the etymology of the Hebrew ‫ נפלים‬from the verb ‫נפל‬ with connotations of falling in heroic battle.30 In summary of this strand of biblical giant thinking, giants are not simply abnormally big humans, but rather they function as anti-gods who transgress boundaries (human and divine miscegenation in Gen 6:1–4) or guard geographical boundaries with cosmic significance (Og and the Rephaim in the Transjordan blocking God’s people, the Israelites). In Gen 6:1–4, the Nephilim incident is a coherent and integral part of the boundary transgression pattern in Genesis 1–11. 2. The giant as anti-law and anti-king Perhaps the most famous giant story in the Bible – indeed in all literature – is the battle between David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. Notable text-critical problems abound in this chapter, including the question of Goliath’s height at either six 27  For the living Rephaim in the Bible, see Gen 14:5; 15:20; Deut 2:11, 20; 3:11, 13; Josh 12:4; 13:12; 17:15; 1 Chr 20:4; for Rephaim as the dead, see Isa 14:9; 26:14, 19; Ps 88:11; Job 26:5; Prov 2:18; 9:18; 21:16; as a geographical description (the “valley of Rephaim”), see Josh 15:8; 18:16; 2 Sam 5:22; 23:13; Isa 17:5; 1 Chr 14:9. 28 See my review of the relevant literature in Doak, Last of the Rephaim, 153–99. 29  Hartmut Gese, “Der bewachte Lebensbaum und die Heroen. Zwei mythologische Ergänzungen zur Urgeschichte der Quelle J,” in Wort und Geschichte: Festschrift für Karl Elliger zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Hartmut Gese and Hans Peter Rüger (AOAT 18; Zurich: Kevelaer, Butzon & Bercker, 1973), 77–85 (83–85). 30  Brian R. Doak, “Ezekiel’s Topography of the (Un‑)Heroic Dead in Ezek 32:17–32,” JBL 132 (2013): 607–24; idem, Last of the Rephaim, 63–65.

22

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cubits and a span (in the Masoretic text) or four cubits and a span (4QSama and Greek).31 The difference between six cubits and four cubits is the difference between a strikingly tall person in this context and an impossible physiology in any period, but in either reading Goliath certainly qualifies as a “giant,” not just with respect to his extraordinary height but also considering his embodiment of otherness (as Philistine), political opposition to Israel, and arrogance. To be sure, the Philistines are the quintessential political “other” for Israel in the memory of the early monarchy, and Goliath’s non-Semitic name encodes foreignness for an Israelite audience, as do the multiple and unique technical terms used for the giant’s armament.32 With regard to arrogance, Goliath is the Bible’s only speaking giant, and his only words are boasts and taunts, even delving into humor (“Am I a dog that you come at me with sticks!”; 1 Sam 17:43). Moreover, there is something comic and grotesque about the fight scene: David’s slingshot stone to the forehead – which apparently does not immediately kill Goliath – followed by hacking off the giant’s entire head certainly achieve their desired ends, but they do so in a way that makes Goliath a gruesomely beheaded object of derision and loathing. There is something bathetic and gratuitous about the scene, and many classical artistic depictions captured these features in striking ways.33 David’s encounter with Goliath is so significant because, until this point in the basic (canonical) narrative of the Hebrew Bible, giants had been a recurring problem that resisted permanent solution. Even God’s own flood in Genesis 6–9, putatively destroying every breathing thing, did not resolve the problem of the Nephilim  – they appear again, subsumed within or as ancestors of the Anaqim in Num 13:33 – and Joshua’s conquest, though seemingly totalizing in a cursory reading of the book of Joshua, failed to eradicate the giants in Philistine territory. Only David’s stunning victory over Goliath ensures that giants never again threaten Israel. As David’s first act of warfare in 1–2 Samuel, the killing of the giant initiates and legitimizes David’s status as king vis-à-vis Saul so as to overshadow (rather than merely illustrate) the narrative of David’s election in 1 Sam 16:1–13. True, David and his men fight Goliath and other giants later in 31 Frank M. Cross et al., Qumran Cave 4.XII: 1–2 Samuel (DJD 17; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 32  ‫ גלית‬is probably linguistically Anatolian (compare ‫ת‬- with ‑wattaš and Lydian ‑uattes). See Peter Machinist, “Biblical Traditions: The Philistines and Israelite History,” in The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment, ed. Eliezer D. Oren (Philadelphia: The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 53–83 (63–64); P. Kyle McCarter, I Samuel (AB 8; New York: Doubleday, 1980), 291–93. 33  Here I am thinking of Caravaggio’s “David with the Head of Goliath” (1606–07; Rome, Museo e Galleria Borghese), but note also Sebastiano Ricci, “The Victory of David over Goliath” (date unknown; New York, Moretti Fine Art Gallery), and Giuseppe Vermiglio (1587–1635), “David Holding Goliath’s Head” (date unknown; Bolonga, Publio Podio collection). Much more recent examples would include, e.g., the photograph of Charlie White, “Champion,” in his “Everything is American” series (2006; http://charliewhite.info/everything-is-american/).

The Giant in a Thousand Years

23

the narrative (2 Sam 21:15–22//1 Chr 20:4–8), but these accounts are presented in retrospect and serve to highlight the importance of David’s giant battles as a central aspect of his military career. As in many different literatures throughout the medieval period, at least, legitimate kingship requires the defeat of the giant or other monstrous forces of which the giant is one prominent representative. The king must become a counter-giant, an anti-giant, to defeat the anti-king and anti-order giant. There are few better representations of this dynamic than the frontispiece to modernity’s most towering statement of political control and monarchy, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), which portrays the king lurching over the horizon as the gigantic solution (the Leviathan) to the monster of brutish natural competition and violence. Only a giant can defeat a giant. David’s victory over Goliath is a symbol of the order and law David can establish, superior to the temporary and failed leadership cycles that characterize the period after Moses but before David (the judges and Saul). This same dynamic is also present in the giving of the law and narratives of conquest over giants in Exodus–Joshua: the law and the victory over Canaan’s gigantic population are drawn into interpretive relationship, as the Israelites are to practice the justice and righteousness that the native inhabitants could not achieve. The previous inhabitants (represented at some points as giants, such as the Anaqim and Rephaim) had polluted the land and made it unclean, but the Torah is to transform it into something clean (see, e.g., Gen 15:16; Leviticus 18; Deut 9:1–5). If the giant is kept in check by the king, then the nation is safe. The Bible’s narrative presents the singular monarchy of David as the official solution to giants, and David’s victory acts as a mythical mirror of not only the giant-killings by Moses, Joshua, and Caleb in the conquest (Numbers 13; Deut 1:28, 1:46–2:1, 14; Joshua 11–15), but of God’s own cataclysm directed against the Nephilim and others in Genesis 6–9.34 The flood’s leveling effect must be repeated as a return to the divine primeval order, a concept reminiscent of Mircea Eliade’s categorization of religions in their “cosmogonic” function, i.e., creating an ordered, pristine world of the founding creation ritual.35 In this way, we may think of the royal defeat of the giant in illo tempore (in the creative founding rituals of the past mythic world) as connected to the defeat of the giant illud tempus (now and forever).36

34  In reading the Gen 6:1–4 episode as the cause for the flood, I follow Ronald Hendel, “Of Demigods and the Deluge: Toward an Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4,” JBL 106 (1987): 13–26. 35 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), 20–48. 36  Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996 [orig. pub., 1958]), 395–96.

24

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3. The giant as elite adversary and elite animal As human-like embodiments of that which is wild and untamed, the biblical giant takes on the role of “wild man,” “freak,” and “elite adversary” for heroic displays of fighting prowess.37 In the pre-modern world, as Richard Bernheimer argues, “wildness” was a very potent category, encompassing all that “was uncanny, unruly, raw, unpredictable, foreign, uncultured, and uncultivated. It included the unfamiliar as well as the unintelligible.”38 Moreover, the giant’s “wild” status, at least in the developed anthropological theology of the Middle Ages, posed difficult questions about the giant’s origins, and thus questions about the status of the giant’s soul (do giants have a soul or not?) and the categorization of giants as a type of non-human animal.39 Ancient Mesopotamian kings routinely bragged of their hunting exploits, the prey being exotic animals in faraway lands; the Assyrian royal lion hunt represents the apex of this tradition insofar as it has been passed down to us visually.40 I conflate these potentially distinct categories of the “elite adversary” and the “elite animal” in order to highlight the correspondence between elite military victory against a prestige animal (lion) and the defeat of an Egyptian giant in 1 Chr 11:22–23:41 22 Benaiah son of Jehoiada was a man of valor and a worker of great deeds from Qabzeel. He struck down two (sons) of Ariel of Moab, he went down (‫ )ירד‬into a pit and struck down a lion on a snowy day, 23 and he struck down an Egyptian man, a giant man (‫איש‬ ‫)מדה‬, five cubits tall (i.e., 2.3 meters, or 7.5 feet). In the hand of the Egyptian was a weaver’s beam; he went down (‫ )ירד‬with a staff, and snatched the spear from the hand of the Egyptian and killed him with his own spear.

37 These

categories are helpfully emphasized by Gregory Mobley, The Empty Men: The Heroic Tradition of Ancient Israel (New York: Doubleday, 2005); idem, “The Wild Man in the Bible and the Ancient Near East,” JBL 116 (1997): 217–33. See also Jacob L. Wright, “Making a Name for Oneself: Martial Valor, Heroic Death, and Procreation in the Hebrew Bible,” JSOT 26 (2011): 131–61, on the question of “name making” and exotic threats. 38  Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, 19–20. 39 See the stimulating discussion, with bibliography, on the anthropology of the giant in Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 58–138. 40  Baruch Halpern, David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 114–21, has collected many references to royal animal breeding and hunting. On the Assyrian lion hunt, see Michael B. Dick, “The Neo-Assyrian Royal Lion Hunt and Yahweh’s Answer to Job,” JBL 125 (2006): 243–70; Othmar Keel, Jahwes Entgegnung an Ijob. Eine Deutung von Ijob 38–41 vor dem Hintergrund der zeitgenössischen Bildkunst (FRLANT 121; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 61–66, 76–81, and many of the plates in Richard David Barnett, Sculptures from the North Palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (668–627 B. C.) (London: British Museum Publications, 1976). 41 See Christophe Lemardelé, “Asiatic Lions versus Warriors: Archaic Motifs in Biblical Texts,” SemClass 3 (2010): 223–25; Doak, Last of the Rephaim, 114–15; and commentary in Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles (London: SCM, 1993), 247–48; Ralph W. Klein, 1 Chronicles (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 305–6.

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25

The focus on the Egyptian’s height and the reference to the “weaver’s beam” (compare with the giant’s “spear like a weaver’s beam” in 1 Sam 17:7; 2 Sam 21:19; 1 Chr 20:5) mark this adversary as a giant, and his Egyptian status further makes him an iconic enemy of Israel. The thematic parallel between the killing of the lion and the giant is even marked verbally by the use of ‫“( ירד‬descend, go down”) to describe the approach to both lion in the pit and the giant, even though it is somewhat awkward for the narrator to say that Benaiah “went down” to the giant. In the parallel passage of David’s mighty men in 2 Sam 23:20–23, the adversary is only an Egyptian “of notable appearance” (‫)מראה‬. This passage in 1 Chr 11:22–23 is actually one of two instances where the Chronicler transforms a description of a “man” (‫ )איש‬from a non-giant to a giant – in the account of battle against a six-fingered man in 2 Sam 21:20, the six-fingered man is an ‫איש‬ ‫“( מדין‬man of strife, a mean or contentious individual”; the result is the same if we read ‫)איש מדון‬, whereas in the parallel passage of 2 Chr 20:6 he is a “giant man” (‫)איש מדה‬. It is quite possible that the Chronicler did not make a copying error here or work from a Vorlage different from the Samuel text, but rather in both cases intentionally sought to ensure both the six-fingered man and the Egyptian were read as giants, further magnifying the valor of the Israelite hero in his struggle against an enhanced enemy. 4. The giant as unruly or overgrown vegetation Joshua 17:14–18 contains a suggestive reference that draws the confrontation with the giant into a floral narrative of clearing out unruly vegetation in the land for Israelite habitation. Responding to a complaint about lack of inherited space from the sons of Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh), Joshua recommends that they go to “forest and cut out (√ ‫ )ברא‬for yourselves there (a spot) in the land of the Perizzites and the Rephaim – if the hill country of Ephraim is (too) narrow for you … although it is forested (i.e., the hill country), you will clear it (√ ‫)ברא‬, and even its furthest borders will be yours, for you will dispossess the Canaanites – even though they have chariots of iron, even though they are strong” (vv. 15, 18). The area in question here had apparently already been cleared of inhabitants in Num 21:35, as Moses had defeated Og of Bashan, “the last of the Rephaim” (Deut 3:11; cf. Josh 12:4; 13:12). Whatever the case, this forest (‫ )יער‬represents the margin of habitable society; it is land uncultivated for crops and for settled, peaceful society (Isa 29:17; 32:15) – to be sure, the forest is a place of banditry (1 Sam 22:1–5) and natural threat (2 Sam 18:8; Isa 56:9; Hos 2:12).42 Notably, in Josh 11:21 the eradication of the Anaqim is described with the verb ‫“( כרת‬cut 42  See Brian R. Doak, “‘Some Worthless and Reckless Fellows’: Landlessness and Parasocial Leadership in Judges,” JHS 11 (2011): 1–29 (24–26); Michael B. Rowton, “The Topological

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down, cut off”), a term used for many kinds of violence but specifically describing acts of plant cutting in Deut 19:5, Isa 44:14, and 1 Kgs 5:20 (Eng. v. 6), among other examples. Clearing out forests and cutting down trees are related to cutting down giants, as both forest and giant represent that which is unruly and overgrown as opposed to what needs to be cultivated for law and human flourishing.43 Dominance over nature includes overcoming wild forestland as well as the creatures who live there; recall the fateful journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in Tablet V of the Gilgamesh Epic, where the quest to harvest tall cedar trees coincides with the fight against the monstrous cedar tree forest guardian, Humbaba.44 The overgrown enemies in the land of Canaan during the wilderness and conquests periods reflect the overgrown plants there as well; just before the panicked account of the Anaqim in Num 13:33, verse 23 describes abnormally huge grape clusters, requiring two adult carriers, and Deut 8:7–9 similarly characterizes the promised land as an eruption of natural phenomena (water, plant life, and minerals).45 This connection between overgrown creatures and tall/​wild plants finds significant expression in the Egyptian “Craft of the Scribe” text (Papyrus Anastasi I), where the land of Canaan is characterized as overgrown with junipers and alluna [Semitic ʾln, oak] and cedars (that) have reached the sky, where lions are more numerous than leopards and bears, and surrounded with Shasu on every side … The face of the pass is dangerous with Shasu, hidden under the bushes. Some of them are four or five cubits, nose to foot, with wild faces. Their thoughts are not pretty, they do not listen to cajoling, and you are alone …46

Plant height metaphors abound in the Hebrew Bible as representatives of all that is opposed to God.47 Isaiah 2 uses multiple images of trees – cedars of Lebanon and oaks of Bashan – that grow so tall as to rival God’s own height, represented by Mount Zion. Only Zion can boast in its “beautiful elevation” (Ps 48:3 [Eng. v. 2]), while other mountains look on in envy (Ps 68:16–17 [Eng. vv. 15–16]). In Ezekiel 17 and 19, tall trees and vine stems that grow out of control must Factor in the ʿapiru Problem,” AsSt 16 (1965), 375–87 (376), as well as Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, 25, on the relationship of the giant to that which is “uncultivated.” 43 This motif also appears in classical Greek literature, as the term hybris can describe unruly plant life, as well as gluttonous animals or creatures out of control in some other way; see Ann Michelini, “Hybris and Plants,” HSCP 82 (1978): 35–44; Gregory Nagy, “Theognis and Megara: A Poet’s Vision of his City,” in Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis, ed. Thomas J. Figueria and Gregory Nagy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1985), 22–81. 44  George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, 1:144–47, for comments on Humbaba and pp. 1:602–15 for an edition of the text from Tablet V. 45  Brian R. Doak, Consider Leviathan: Narratives of Nature and the Self in Job (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 80–82, 140–41. 46 James P. Allen (trans.), “The Craft of the Scribe,” in Archival Documents from the Biblical World. Vol. 3 of The Context of Scripture, ed. William W. Hallo (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 9–14 (especially p. 12 [18.7] and p. 13 [23.7]). 47 See Doak, Consider Leviathan, 140–41; idem, Last of the Rephaim, 120–23, 144.

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be brought down and tossed to the ground in YHWH’s fury. The connection in these passages between rival political programs and the plot of foreign kings against Israel follows a spatial pattern similar to that of the “arrogant ascent to heaven” plotline, where the upward ambition of Babylonian monarchs leads to a great fall (e.g., Isa 14:12–20; Ezekiel 28; Dan 4:10–12; compare with Gen 11:1–9). Ezekiel portrays the Assyrian empire as a giant tree in Ezek 31:3–14, unequaled in height yet overly proud with its tall status, and Isaiah satirizes the boasts of the Assyrian king Sennacherib in Isa 37:24, as he claimed to have ascended the highest mountains and cut down the tallest trees. Lofty trees will fall down low, forests will be abolished, cedars of Lebanon will be ruined, and oaks of Bashan cut down – all by YHWH, and no one else (Isa 10:33–34; Zech 11:2). 5. The giant as the defeated past Already within the Hebrew Bible, we find that Israel is particularly self-conscious about its status as “unique” within the historical and social context of the Iron Age.48 As such, the Bible’s descriptions of early Israel in particular forge an identity against every kind of national or regional past, and define Israel primarily in terms of the Abrahamic covenant and the concomitant ancestral lineage. True, Israel does come to occupy the boundaries of territory at some point (at least in the biblical memory of the United Monarchy), but the claim to that land is not presented as primordial occupation, or through genealogical appeal to an autochthonous population in the land. Certainly the Israelites could have claimed ancestry from those they casted as the native population (of Canaanites, Jebusites, Perizzites, and so on), but it is not even the case that all biblical authors saw these groups as stable occupants. In Deut 2:9–23, for example, the author gives us a historical précis of dispossession: the Moabites drove out the Emim, Esau’s descendants drove out the Horites, the Ammonites drove out the Rephaim (“Zamzummim”), and the Caphtorim (roughly equivalent to the Philistines) drove out the Avvim (see also Amos 9:7). Israel does what others have done. One may compare Israel’s imagination of the passing of the “age of giants” in the conquest  – notwithstanding David’s later encounter with Goliath and David’s “mighty men” in conflict with other giants  – with the archaic Greek rumination on the end of the “heroic age” insofar as both literatures imagine the collapse of the great Late Bronze Age civilizations as a climactic battle. For Homer and congeners, this is the Trojan War, perhaps symbolic of a series of military engagements in the thirteenth–eleventh centuries BCE but not reflec48  Peter Machinist, “The Question of Distinctiveness in Ancient Israel,” in Essential Papers on Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. Frederick E. Greenspahn (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 420–42.

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tive of the complex series of demographic shifts that changed mainland Greece during the period.49 Even though there are Greek traditions that describe the end of this Heroic Age with divine judgment upon the heroes, such as early interpretive traditions for the Iliad,50 classical Greek elites would still claim lineage through these heroes; notwithstanding the interpretation of Zeus’ boulē (“plan”) at the opening of the Iliad as a plan to rid the polluted earth of overly-large heroes, the faults of Achilles and others do not match the scathing moral judgments the Bible casts upon the pre-Israelite population of the land. The Greek Gigantomachy and Titanomachy  – independent stories but conflated already in the fifth century BCE51  – clearly embody the “new good versus bad old” dynamic in the mythic past, even as the Greek obsession with visual depictions of the gigantomachy in sixth century temple art and architecture (most prominently at the Siphnian treasury building at Delphi) must represent a deliberate attempt to politicize the gigantomachy for a contemporary context.52 From the West Semitic world, the Ugaritic Rapiuma, who for Ugaritic elites represented continuity and identification with the past, whereas the biblical Rephaim only indicate dis-identification.53 In their role as marking the pre-Israelite past, giants act as a historiographic technique, marking the degradation and monstrosity of the former world. Giants stand not only at geographical boundaries but also at political and historical boundaries. There remain difficult questions about when any of the individual giant traditions were written, as well as questions about the nature of the conflation of various titles for giants living in the land such as Nephilim, Anaqim, Rephaim, Gibborim, Emim, Zamzummim, and so on. All such groups are of 49  See Ian Morris, “The Collapse and Regeneration of Complex Societies in Greece, 1500– 500 BC,” in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. G. M. Schwartz and J. J. Nichols (Tuscon: The University of Arizona, 2006), 72–84; Margalit Finkelberg, Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 167–68. 50 See Schol. [D] Il. 1.5 in Martin L. West, Greek Epic Fragments (LCL 497; Cambridge: Harvard, 2003), and discussion in Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999), 219–20; B. A. Heiden, Homer’s Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Margalit Finkelberg, “The End of the Heroic Age in Homer, Hesiod and the Cycle,” OP 3 (2004): 11–24 (12–15); Doak, Last of the Rephaim, 123–28. 51  Malcolm Davies, The Epic Cycle (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), 14. 52 On the Gigantomachy iconography and the debated meaning of the images for sixth century BCE audiences, see the following: Mary B. Moore, “The Central Group in the Gigantomachy of the Old Athena Temple on the Acropolis,” AJA 99 (1995): 633–39; idem, “Lydos and the Gigantomachy,” AJA 83 (1979): 79–99; Richard T. Neer, “Framing the Gift: The Politics of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi,” ClAnt 20 (2001): 273–336; Livingston V. Watrous, “The Sculptural Program of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi,” AJA 86 (1982): 159–72; Robin Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122–24. 53  Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69, uses this language of “cultural identification” and “disidentification” in this same way; see also idem, Poetic Heroes, 12, 76, 320.

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great size, and all oppose Israel in some way. Rather than imagining this conflation as a late, synthetic process,54 it is better to consider the rumination on giants as a kind of ancient antiquarianism, perhaps generally comparable to the type found in Mesopotamian and Greece in the eighth–sixth centuries BCE,55 which for the author of Deuteronomy at least includes philological footnotes and a type of primitive ethnography of regional occupation (Deut 2:9–23) as well as a “museum” notice proving the existence of giant artifacts (3:11).

III. A Transition to the Early Jewish Giant Having reviewed the biblical giant texts, how might we characterize the transition to the appearance of the giant in third–first century BCE? What historical, social, and religious developments prior to this context – but after the composition of the biblical materials themselves – can account for the appearance of giant traditions in 1 Enoch (chs. 1–36, 85–90, 106–7), at Qumran in various forms (Book of Giants and other fragments), and in other texts from this early Jewish interpretive matrix (e.g., Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, Jubilees)? Obviously part of this question is predicated upon the dating of the biblical materials in question, yet whatever the gap we must find a way to account for the strikingly uniform assumption in these texts that the Bible could be read in such a way as to support a detailed account of giants, angels, and demons (most prominently from Gen 6:1–4, but also elsewhere).56 Though a robust account of this development cannot be given here, some remarks are in order. First, on a most basic – but nonetheless important – level, the early Jewish giant traditions participate in the rise of midrashic and exegetical tendencies that would come to characterize the entire “rewritten Bible” genre and texts with apocalyptic elements. In a programmatic essay on the topic, Loren Stuckenbruck has rightly argued that the preoccupation with a standard demonic/gigantic interpretation of Gen 6:1–4 among early Jewish interpreters was not only a rou54 See Stuckenbruck, “The Origins of Evil,” 87–118, esp. 92, for comments on the problem of conflation. 55  For the ancient Near East, see Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “Antiquarianism and the Concern for the Past in the Neo-Babylonian Period,” BCSMS 28 (1994): 37–42; Irene Winter, “Babylonian Archaeologists of The(ir) Mesopotamian Past,” in eadem, On Art in the Ancient Near East, 2 vols. (CHANE 34; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 2:461–80; Piotr Michalowksi, “The Doors of the Past,” in Festschrift for Hayim and Miriam Tadmor, ed. Amnon Ben-Tor, Israel Ephal, and Peter Machinist (ErIsr 27; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2003), 136–52; E. Klengel-Brandt, “Gab es ein Museum in der Hauptburg Nebukadnezars II. in Babylon?” FB 28 (1990): 41–46. For a parallel development in Egypt (mid-eighth to late-sixth centuries BCE), see Peter Der Manuelian, Living in the Past: Studies in Archaism of the Egyptian Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (London: Kegan Paul International, 1994). 56  For the most comprehensive and focused review of this question, see Stuckenbruck, “The Origins of Evil.”

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tine social response based on oppression in the Hellenistic period – more than that, these particular interpretations saw important theological stakes at risk and sought to address them with their interpretations.57 For example, a careful delineation between giants as completely destroyed beings or as continually existing spirits could help explain ongoing spiritual problems of possession or wickedness in various situations, and a dissociation of giants from early biblical heroes (such as Enoch, Noah, and Abraham) could help show that the divine guidance these heroes received had nothing to do with the corrupt arts of magic or “questionable areas of learning” attributed to the teaching of wicked angelic figures.58 Moreover, the giants in these texts – especially at Qumran – seem to encode a broadly applicable political theology, as some of these interpretive communities apparently awaited a climactic moment when they would fight in a spiritual-physical battle against the Roman empire on par with an “end times” confrontation with giants-as-demons. Stories of giants were certainly entertaining enough in their own right without these multiple symbolic valences, but one can hardly ignore the political or spiritual currency giants must have held for the groups who curated these traditions. The issue of how, why, and when giants become prominent in the early Jewish literature is enormously complex and involves guesses based on poorly understood fragments, though new efforts to analyze these materials – especially in the Qumran Book of Giants stream – promises to reveal a diverse yet coherent picture of meditation on the giant in early Judaism. Giants are mysterious and important enough in the Hebrew Bible to provoke speculation, and ancient interpreters were no doubt faced with the same anthropological and theological problems as medieval exegetes regarding the giant’s place in the created world, the divine salvific scheme, and the newly complex world of angels and demons in which giants were already intertwined. Because giants are so strange, so notable, they draw attention to themselves and thus highlight any problems of contradiction or chronology they could evoke. The most obvious of these problems involved the question of how the giants could have survived the flood – recall the comment above about how the descendants of Nephilim could have appeared in Num 13:33 – and the answers ranged from esoteric discussions of giants as spirits (such as in the watchers tradition) all the way to having the giant Og, who had already existed prior to the flood, ride Noah’s ark, survive the cataclysm, fight with Abram in Genesis 14, and then encounter the Israelites in the wilderness as recorded in Numbers 21 (see Tg. Ps.-J. Gen 14:13). The Septuagint, notable for introducing Greek mythological nomenclature such as γίγας and τιτάν into the biblical storyline, demonstrates how sleights of

 Stuckenbruck, ibid., 89. “The ‘Angels’ and ‘Giants’ of Genesis 6:1–4,” 362–63, 373–77.

57

58 Stuckenbruck,

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translation could also achieve interpretive solutions.59 In a particularly subtle example, the Greek translators transliterated the Hebrew ‫ רפאים‬as Ραφαϊν or Ραφαϊμ in many passages (Gen 15:20; Deut 2:11, 20, 3:11, 13; Josh 15:8; 2 Sam 23:13), while using γίγας (Gen 14:5; Josh 12:4, 13:12; 1 Chr 11:15) or τιτάν in others (2 Sam 5:18, 22). In Josh 12:4 and 13:12, Og is explicitly identified as one of the ‫ רפאים‬in Hebrew, yet here there was no problem calling the ‫“ רפאים‬giants” (γίγαντες) since Og was not actually described as the very last of the Rephaim (pace some modern translations, such as the NRSV, for Josh 13:12). However, at Deut 3:11, the Septuagint ran into a potential problem, since here and only here Og is clearly specified as the last of his generation in Hebrew: “Now only (‫ )רק‬Og, king of Bashan, was left over from the remnant of the Rephaim …” Here the translator declined to call Og’s people γίγαντες, since he was aware that many giants remained to be killed later in the narrative (by David and his men in Samuel and Chronicles). Even within the Hebrew Bible problems like this seem to be a concern. Joshua 11:22b provides an “escape” clause for the Anaqim – who should have been wiped out completely by Joshua as clearly described in Josh 11:21–22a – that allows them to live along the Philistine coast, and Gen 6:4 has the ‫ וגם אחרי כן‬clause, providing some gesture toward logical coherence given the fact that Nephilim and other giants are mentioned later in the Torah and elsewhere. The motifs of military might and overt political power emphasized in, say, the Deuteronomistic History or even the Torah recede into the background during the post-exilic period. The gibbōr is no longer to be trusted, and the “giant” accordingly exists in other forms – for example, as a possessing spirit or threatening ghost. Warnings against reliance on the power needed to defeat a giant in the style of Moses, Caleb, Joshua, or David come in many texts (e.g., Zech 4:6; Pss 33:16; 52:3; Prov 21:22; Ecc 9:11; cf. 3 Macc 2:4 and Bar 3:26–28). Proverbs 16:32 puts the matter directly: “Better is one who is slow to anger than a gibbōr, and one who has control of his temper than one who captures a city.” A midrash for Isa 3:2 identifies the ‫ גברים‬and ‫ איש מלחמה‬as “masters of the tradition” and “the scholar skilled in conducting himself ‘in the war of Torah,’” respectively.60 The “spiritualizing” of the giants in 1 Enoch 15 (with echoes in the Qumran texts) disembodies the wicked opposition just as concepts of kingship, valor, and war lived on outside of the way these formal institutions were imagined to have existed in the Davidic era. The Enochic insistence on the shade-like existence of the giants had indeed already found expression in Ezekiel 32, where the “fallen” gibbōrîm of the ancient world reside in Sheol, defeated and powerless just like 59 See Doak, Last of the Rephaim, 100. Note also the article by Michael Tuval in the present volume. 60  As cited in Richard G. Marks, “Dangerous Hero: Rabbinic Attitudes Toward Legendary Warriors,” HUCA 54 (1983): 181–94 (191).

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the Egyptian Pharaoh whom Ezekiel says will join their ranks.61 Thus, the spirit giants of Enoch stand in continuity with Ezekiel’s presentation centuries earlier.62

IV. Conclusion One could think of the career of the “biblical” giant as something of a one-thousand year arc, from David’s victory over Goliath through the surge of interpretive efforts at Qumran and elsewhere at the beginning of the common era. Giants have had a life in Jewish and Christian traditions beyond this arc, and the stereotyped notion of a thousand-year period from David through Qumran and the intertestamental literature is only a historical gimmick. Yet, given the giant themes in the Hebrew Bible reviewed here, it is appropriate to think of the early Jewish giant as truly a “biblical” giant. While Stuckenbruck has reason to say that we cannot simply assume that post-biblical texts were only “adapting a tradition inherent to the biblical tradition,” we must still insist that the Hebrew Bible provides a far richer consideration of the figure of the giant than most have acknowledged.63 The giant is nothing if not primordial, and nothing if not resilient – we may expect that their spirits will haunt us for another thousand years.

 Doak, “Ezekiel’s Topography.”  Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, 38–40. 63 Stuckenbruck, “The Origins of Evil,” 88. 61 62

Greek Titans and Biblical Giants1 Samantha Newington University of Aberdeen

The Titans of Greek mythology are often compared and contrasted with the giants, fallen angels or Nephilim within biblical and Second Temple writings. For example, Jan Bremmer, in his ground breaking article “Remember the Titans!,” firmly links Jewish apocalyptic literature and stories about the fallen angels with the Greek Titans.2 Despite Bremmer’s extensive discussion regarding what and whom the Titans represent, biblical scholars have neglected the role and function of the related yet distinct “giants” in the non-Jewish Greek corpus.3 Some explanation is therefore needed to explain why Titan mythology, rather than Greek myths about giants, is more often placed in conversation with the traditions of Gen 6:1–4 and the Book of Watchers of 1 Enoch (especially chapters 6–16), neither of which directly refers to the Titans, except for a single mention in 1 En. 9:9.4 Furthermore, broader consideration is merited regarding how variant strands of Titan myths may inform our understanding of, say, the Book of Watchers and Genesis 6 as well as of their reception in biblical and Second Temple Jewish tradition. This paper thus offers a preliminary sketch of a subject area which has so readily evoked comparison between the Septuagint Giants, Greek Titans, and the Nephilim/n. I shall inquire into why such a comparison has been made by,

 This paper develops ideas from my dissertation, “Hesiod’s Theogony” (Durham University, 2006). 2 Jan N. Bremmer, “Remember the Titans!,” in Fall of the Angels, ed. Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (TBN 6; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 35–61 (55). Cf. Brook Pearson, “Resurrection and the Judgment of the Titans: ἡ γῆ τῶν ἀσεβῶν in LXX Isaiah 26:19,” in Resurrection, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs (JSNTSup 186; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 33–51. 3  Archie Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6.1–4 in Early Jewish Literature (WUNT II.198; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), the longest sustained study of early interpretation of Genesis 6 to date, only draws comparisons on pp. 73–74 and 79–80. 4  Cf. LXX Gen. 6:4 and 1 En. 7:2Pan. This occurrence of “Titans” in 1 En. 9:9 may have to do with transmission and audience reception. For example, it is probable that Greek mythology was a compass point for those translating the narrative from Aramaic into Greek. It seems likely that the ancient translators saw the Titans of Greek mythology as synonymous with the giants of 1 Enoch. 1

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in particular, biblical scholars and then ascertain to what extent the Titans of the classical tradition can serve as a point of departure for biblical exegesis. This paper argues that the divergent strands of Titan accounts in Greek myth­ ology are relevant to our understanding of giants in Genesis and the Book of Watchers. The relevance of the Titan tradition for the Book of Watchers becomes apparent when considering the cosmological significance of both the Titan and giants. The Titan tradition may also, as I explore, shape major religious themes in the West, such as original sin and spiritual purification. This paper observes that Hesiod’s Theogony has so often been the start and end point of comparison, but provides firm encouragement to look beyond Hesiod as – in fact – Orphic accounts can readily inform our theological understanding of the biblical and Second Temple Jewish narratives. It is striking that the giants (γίγαντες) of ancient Greek mythology have rarely if ever been considered a more immediate point for comparison and we may ask why the Titans instead have been a point of scholarly focus.5 To this, Radcliffe Edmonds may offer some solution since he, by citing Vian, notes that stories about the giants and Titans have often been conflated.6 However, this latter claim applies more to the later rather than the archaic material where giants and Titans receive separate and distinct consideration. The giants in Greek mythology are well attested in the epic tradition from the eighth century BCE associated with Homer and Hesiod. For Homer (Ody. 10.120), the giants are referred to in the context of the Laestrygonians as beings with supernatural powers beyond humankind but not quite on par with those of immortals. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the giants are mentioned in two crucial passages that firmly distinguish them from the titans: (i) as part of the muses’ invocation (50) and (ii) a brief account of the genesis of the giants (185). Although the giants of the proem (1–115) are awkwardly placed and their function is difficult to interpret, the text refers to them as a means of “delight” to both Zeus and the muses (51). This positive detail within the proem states that the physical attributes of the giants are considered worth singing about; however, there is no elaboration, nor is there anything regarding the content of such a song offered. More fundamentally, further details regarding the giants are not supplied until much later in the Theogony (at l. 185), where they are presented as a by-product of the Titans’ violent activities against Ouranos (cf. 176–87). The giants then are seen as distinct from the Titans: the former is the progeny of violence and the latter generated from Gaia and Ouranos. As rightly noted by West, “the Giants have no ancestry or descendants”; they simply emerge from the blood droplets 5 A

point referred to later in this paper.  Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 364 n. 187, and 366; Francis Vian, La Guerre des géants. Le Mythe avant l’époque hellénistique (EeC 11; Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1952). 6

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of Ouranos’ severed phallus.7 Given the emphasis of the Jewish and biblical traditions on the giants’ birth, the connection with the Theogony on this point is tenuous if not irrelevant. It is perhaps for this reason that scholarly attention has instead focused on the Titans. But who are the Titans in Greek mythology and why are they relevant to our study? Attempts to answer this question can lead to contradictory results, especially when later traditions are compared with that preserved in Hesiod. For instance, Prometheus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (fifth century BCE) identifies himself as both a god (l. 92) and Titan conspirator (ll. 205–9); whereas in Hesiod he is seen more as a progeny of first generation Titans (Iapetos and Clymene) and concerned with humankind rather than cosmological conflict (Theog. 507–616). Moreover, according to Nonnus of the fifth century CE, Titans mutilate Zagreus (Dionysiaca 6), while Olympiodorus a century later informs us that humankind was created from the ashes of Titans, whom Zeus had scorched for their actions against Dionysus (In Plat. Phaed. 1.3–6). These accounts by Nonnus and Olympiodorus deviate, however, from other earlier versions of the Titans (especially Hesiod). These later accounts may be put down to a decisive theological and philosophical perspective centered around notions of punishment and salvation, as discussed below; whereas (also examined below) earlier accounts that relate to the Titans, in particular Hesiod, have more to do with the formation of world order rather than salvation and resurrection.8 In other words, there are two strands to the ancient Greek Titan tradition: i) concerned with cosmological conflict and the other, ii) with the genesis of humankind and etiology of original sin. It is in this latter strand that scholars, such as Barnebé, have conflated giant and Titan terminology.9 So, who are the Titans according to Hesiod, and is there a basis for comparing them with the giants of Genesis 6 or the Book of Watchers? The first attestation of “Titan” in his Theogony appears at lines 207–10, in which they are referred to collectively as children rather than as individually named characters. Martin West identifies the offspring of the Titans as those children who are already referred to in lines 133–38: Okeanos, Koios, Kreios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Rheia, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Kronos. In his commentary, West suggests that those characters designated as Titans are not genealogically 7 Martin

L. West, Hesiod: Theogony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 [orig. pub., 1966]), 173. 8  Pearson, “Resurrection and the Judgment of the Titans,” 33–51, stresses resurrection in his discussion of the Titans. 9  Edmonds, Redefining Ancient Orphism, 296, 366, discusses how scholars such as Bernabé identify the giants in the Orphic Argonautica passage as Titans and therefore translate the term giant as Titan accordingly. See also Alberto Bernabé, “Autour du mythe orphique sur Dionysos et les Titans. Quelques notes critiques,” in Des Géants à Dionysos: Mélanges de mythologie et de poésie grecques offerts à Francis Vian, ed. Domenico Accorinti and Pierre Chuvin (Hellenica 10; Alessandria: Edizioni dell’ Orso, 2003), 25–39.

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integrated, because the Hundred Handers and the Cyclopes are distinguished from the Titans.10 West argues that “the list of children that follows as far as (line) 138, six male and six female … forms the group to which Uranos gives the name Titan in line 207, the Cyclopes and the Hundred Handers (139–53) cannot be included (among the Titans), since they help Zeus against the Titans in the Titanomachy.” The children of lines 132–38 are singled out as the most terrible of all Gaia’s offspring and the reason for this is that they inevitably stand against the succession of Zeus.11 The incongruences that West finds in the literature can be explained. Although we may accept West’s claim that the Titans can be set apart from the other offspring of Gaia and Ouranos, it would be misleading to agree with him that the characterization of the Titans is entirely dissimilar from the descriptions applied to the other progeny (i.e., the three One Hundred Handers). Nonetheless, the Theogony defines the Titans as “former gods,” who are later presumably replaced by the Olympians (424; 486); as noted by West, these Titans are “no longer active in the world but dwell in Tartarus.”12 What, precisely, the term “Titan” refers to is unclear.13 It could be argued that the castration of Ouranos in Hesiod (Theog. 154–210) is what triggered the Titans’ violent activities, which in turn led to the conflict involving them as a collective body. Accordingly, in the narrative the deceit of the Titan Kronos (459–596) and the offspring of Ouranos becomes the immediate cause for the (so-called) Titanomachy (617–731), which in turn is followed by a graphic description of Tartaros (732–820). It is the initial children who participated both in the primary violence and in the Titanomachy who are hurled into Tartaros. The descent into the subterranean void is not so much moral punishment as it is a measure taken to prevent future upheavals by further offspring and to ensure the singular rule of Zeus. The Titans in Hesiod’s Theogony play a particular role within the cosmological weave of the text (rather than emerging from the notion of a punishment of evil). Thus a basis for comparison between these Titans and Jewish apocalyptic and biblical literature (Gen 6:1–4) may initially seem elusive. That said, the point of comparison between Hesiod’s Titans, on the one hand, and the giants of the biblical and Jewish narratives, on the other, could be thematic rather than ideological. Motifs shared by the narratives of the Book of Watchers, Genesis, and Theogony include the following: the formation of the world (Theog. 123–24; Gen  West, Hesiod, 200, 206. expression δεινότατος παίδων (138) characterizes the children in 132–38 as the terrible offspring of Ouranos and Gaia, with Kronos being chief among them. Without doubt the Titans represent the genesis of evil, but this is based on cosmological necessity (159–60) and in response to the evil deeds of Ouranos and his suppression of cosmic evolution. 12  West, Hesiod, 200. 13  Cf. Hesiod, Theog. 136–37; OF 114.7–8; Pindar, fr. 33d3. Other references made to Titans include Prometheus and Atlas. Cf. Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus (56). 10

11 The

Greek Titans and Biblical Giants

37

1:1–2:4a); violence on a global scale and the fall of its perpetrators, amounting to either defeat, or destruction or subterranean imprisonment.14 Without a doubt violence unifies the Greek and Jewish texts with regard to giants, Nephilim, and the Titans. The term “giants” in the Septuagint is a translation of the Hebrew Nephilim, which means literally “fallen ones”; Hendel points out that “fallen one” could refer to battle and mighty warriors, citing 2 Sam 1:19 and Ezek 32:27 as points of reference.15 The Nephilim are those begot by the giants in Watchers (1 En. 7:2Syn), while in the Qumran Book of Giants the term signifies the giants themselves. Similarly, Hesiod’s Titans are warriors from a “former age” who are now displaced by the world order ultimately under the rule of a single deity.16 Despite these points of contact, one of the key motifs that varies in all these accounts is the role of humankind: for Hesiod, humans are not central to the narrative and the events narrated are concerned with a pre-human era; whereas for Jewish apocalyptic literature and biblical narratives humans arguably occupy a more central place.17 While Hesiod’s Titans may offer insight into cosmological activities of divine antagonists, and contribute towards our understanding of the giants in, say, the narratives of 1 Enoch and Genesis, it is possibly the Titan of the Orphic tradition that offers a better starting point for theological and ideological comparison. Brook Pearson appeals to this tradition’s significance for Second Temple Judaism without, however, offering significant elaboration.18 Furthermore, the fate of the “fallen ones” and giants in the Book of Watchers certainly provides a significant point of comparison with the Titans of the Orphic tradition. For example, like the giants of 1 Enoch, the Titans of the Orphic narratives act against the omnipotent deity. Radcliffe Edmonds has more recently revisited the Orphic corpus and attempted to read the Orphic fragments for their theological significance.19 Similarly, Alan Bernstein offers how the ancient Greek texts have been interpreted

 The Nephilim are defeated in Gen 7:23; the Titans are imprisoned in Hesiod, Theog. 814; the giants are destroyed in 1 En. 10:9–10. The transgressive deeds (including sexual indiscretions) are detailed in Hesiod, Theog. 125 and 1 En. 7:2 (cf. the Book of Giants at 4Q531 1). For destructive deeds, note Theog. 207–10 and 1 En. 7:3–6. A further parallel is divine agency: the archangels in 1 En. 10:1–11:2 and Cyclopes and Hundred Handers in Theog. 644–725 all carry out divine will. Concerning reward, salvation and punishment, cf. Theog. 880–85; 1 En. 13:4; and Gen 6:7. 15  Ronald Hendel, “The Nephilim were on the Earth: Genesis 6:1–4 and its Ancient Near East Context,” in Auffarth and Stuckenbruck, The Fall of Angels, 11–34 (21–22). 16  See George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. Vanderkam, 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 1, for the cultural significance of 1 Enoch. 17 For example, 1 En. 6:1 begins with the multiplication of humanity on the earth and ends in 10:16–11:2 with their ultimate salvation. 18  Pearson, “Resurrection and the Judgment of the Titans.” 19 Edmonds, Redefining Ancient Orphism. 14

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within a Christianized context.20 For example, he assumes that the religion of the ancient Greeks provided a crucial ideological basis for future religious practices in both Judaism and Christianity. Although Bernstein accepts that ancient religious thinkers did not “anticipate” how their thought would impact later religious developments, he does claim that neither “the Evangelists, those earliest biographers of Jesus, nor his later defenders, including Augustine (d. 430), lived in a cultural vacuum. They knew the Jewish scriptures, Greek philosophy and mythology.”21 In line with this, Bernstein regards the notion of Tartarus in Hesiod’s Theogony as a precursor to the “formation of hell” in Christian thought.22 By further extension, Bernstein’s thesis suggests that former religious systems are the basis of future ones; therefore, Orphism could be seen as an antecedent to Christianity. Bernstein’s argument works, provided there is a clear notion of Tartarus in Hesiod that provides an ancient equivalent to the hell of Christian tradition, hell as a place of punishment for those who act against God. Yet it is not apparent that the ancient Greeks even had a systematized form of belief, as Greek religious thought was so variable according to time, place, and social setting there is certainly no reference to any system in Hesiod’s Theogony. But, as already suggested above, differences emerge when comparing Orphic Titans with those detailed in the Theogony. It is those differences between the Orphic texts – we may think of the Derveni Papyrus, ancient commentators and fragments – that illuminate points of comparison.23 Pearson attributes a theological angle to later Titan accounts and, by extension, we can readily correlate Orphic narratives with those of the biblical tradition. In particular, the themes of sin, punishment, and resurrection are prominent in both the Book of Watchers and the Orphic way of life. The primary function of Orphic theogonies, hymns, exegesis, and poems was to provide guidelines for the religious practitioner; such a purpose does not apply to the Theogony. Unlike the Theogony, initiation rituals in Orphic religion are considered paradigmatic for human existence; 1 Enoch likewise has an instructive quality.24 Orphism stresses the importance of initiates purifying 20 Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (London: University College London Press, 1993). 21  Ibid., 2. 22  Ibid., 33–39. See 2 Peter 2. 23 According to the Orphic tradition Gaia produces the Titans in secret (OF 57, 114), she asks the Titans to castrate Ouranos, and only Okeanos refuses to perform the deed (OF 154; cf. Theog. 164–84)  – yet all the children are hurled into Tartaros by Ouranos (OF 57, 121, 126) – whereas in the Theogony Titans are hurled by Zeus (715–40). The Titans of the Orphic tradition are destroyed by Zeus’ thunderbolt in the context of violence against Dionysus (OF 220, 224). For more on the Derveni Papyrus, see André Laks and Glenn W. Most, eds., Studies on the Derveni Papyrus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 24  Cf. Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.3.2; 1 En. 8:1–3; Jub. 7:22–25. See S. G. F. Brandon, The Judgment of the Dead: The Idea of Life After Death in the Major Religions (New York: Scribner, 1967), 94.

Greek Titans and Biblical Giants

39

their soul from “original sin.” In particular, Orphic Fragment 220 refers to the dismemberment of Dionysus based on Hera’s instructions (cf. Callimachus, fr. 643), to the punishment of the Titans, and to the generation of humankind. Similarly, Orphic Fragment 210 mentions the dismemberment of Dionysus and the punishment of the Titans; moreover, Plato (Laws 701c) and Xenocrates (fr. 20), who are no doubt influenced by the Orphic tradition’s presentation of the Titans, detail these events as well. It is the acts of dismemberment, punishment, and re-generation that form the ritual basis of Orphic religion.25 Therefore, if humankind is created from the remnants of the Titans, then their previous crimes must be recognized and some form of ritual purification must be undertaken (Pindar, fr. 133). The process of physical and spiritual purification reflected in the Orphic tradition has implications for eschatology and soteriology. The context and concept of Orphic original sin has a remarkable parallel within Christianity. Noting that many have been tempted to draw such a correspondence, William Guthrie acknowledges that much modern scholarship has interpreted ancient religions from within the framework of Christianized expectations: “we are brought up in the atmosphere of Christianity, and whether we like it or not, Christian notions of behavior have sunk into the very marrow of our thought and expression.”26 Although it is possible to identify similarities between Orphic theogonies and rituals with Christian religions, one should resist imposing a Christian interpretive framework on the Orphic material. The principal reason here for mentioning the Christianized approach towards Orphic religion is the effect it has had on interpreting Hesiod, and how interpretation of the Titans as “fallen angels” in the Orphic theogonies could be inappropriately imposed on the Titans of the Theogony. Such Orphic mythologies derive from the savagery of the Titans against Dionysus, and the consequence of the violence against the Titans forms the biological and metaphysical aspects of existence.27 Although the Theogony does not provide an account that can be easily placed in service of religious ritual per se, it does offer comparison with other “religious” texts (such as the Orphic), especially in terms of cosmology and theogony.28 In turn, it is the Orphic theogonies that, in fact, have far more in common with the Enochic 25  For studies on Orpheus and Orphism, see Edmonds, Redefining Ancient Orphism; William K. C.  Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Martin L. West, The Orphic Hymns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 26 Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, 200. 27  Walter Burkert discusses not only the ritual connection between the violence of the Titans and the genesis of humankind, but also of divergent Titan myths referring to violence against Dionysus. See his Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 73. Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks 2.15. 28  Cf. Martin Nilsson, “Early Orphism and Kindred Movements,” HTR 28 (1935): 181–230 (225).

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narratives than Hesiod, and it is here where scholars of Judeo-Christian literature, when exploring traditions about giants, are better suited to look for points of comparison, while leaving the immediate significance of Hesiod’s Theogony as ground already covered.

“Συναγωγὴ γιγάντων” (Prov 21:16) The Giants in the Jewish Literature in Greek Michael Tuval Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

In this short study I will present an overview of traditions about giants that are found in ancient Jewish writings which were either originally composed in Greek, or – at some early point in their history – were translated into Greek, and subsequently preserved in this language.1 First, I will discuss the Septuagint passages in which the word γίγας appears, as well as their Hebrew Vorlage, and the possible implications of the translators’ choice. Second, I will discuss several other Jewish writings from the Greco-Roman period in which giants are mentioned. At the same time, I will examine these materials to see whether they reflect the Jewish myths about giants that go back to Gen 6:1–4 and 1 Enoch, whether they assimilate Greek myths about giants and Titans, and whether they present some combination of these Enochic and Greek traditions. Finally, I will consider the various evaluations of the role of giants in human history as witnessed by these writings.2 The corpus that will be dealt with includes the Septuagint (or, better, Old Greek), the Wisdom of Solomon, 3 Maccabees, Baruch, 3 Baruch, Ben Sira, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Pseudo-Eupolemus, Books 1–3 of the Sibylline Oracles, Philo of Alexandria, and Flavius Josephus.3 I will not discuss the extant Greek fragments of 1 Enoch and Jubilees; however, one should always bear in mind that these works would have been readily available to the Greek-speaking Jews, both in the Diaspora and in the land of Israel. Looking up γίγας in the concordance produced by Albert-Marie Denis, one immediately re1 This

article was written while I was a Minerva-Stiftung scholarship holder at the Department of Protestant theology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where I had the privilege and honor of being hosted by Prof. Dr. Loren T. Stuckenbruck, who – together with Prof. Matthew Goff – invited me to participate in the “Tales of Giants” conference as well as to contribute this paper to the present volume. There is no study, as far as I am aware, that presents a discussion of all the Greek Jewish materials on the giants in a convenient form. 2 For a general overview of the giants in ancient literature, see W. Speyer, “Gigant,” RAC 10:1247–76. 3  Texts from ancient Jewish versions of the Old Testament and Judith which also mention giants are dealt with in the footnotes.

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alizes that most occurrences of the word in the Jewish pseudepigrapha preserved in Greek appear in the extant parts of 1 Enoch.4

I. The Giants in the LXX The natural place to begin the discussion of the giants in Greek Jewish literature is, perhaps, the Old Greek version of the Old Testament, in which – in the Greek translation of the books which are now included in the Hebrew Bible – the word γίγας occurs thirty-four times. Most often it renders ‫​גִ ּבֹור‬5 and ‫ ְר ָפ ִאים‬.6 ִ ‫ נְ ִפ‬of Gen 6:4, which is the locus classicus for the Jewish giIt also translates ‫ילים‬ ants tradition along with the second part of the same verse (where γίγαντες renִ ִ‫)ג‬.7 Most probably, it also translates ‫ נְ ִפ ִילים‬in Num 13:33 and, if so, ders ‫ּבֹורים‬ ִ ‫ נְ ִפ‬being translated in Greek as then altogether we have two instances of ‫ילים‬ “giants.”8 The Greek word also translates ‫ ֲענָ ק‬in Deut 1:28, and, according to Hatch and Redpath, ‫ ָה ָר ָפה‬in 2 Kgdms 21:22 – however, this is a mistake, since a look at the Hebrew and Greek texts shows that the Greek translators rightly understood the Hebrew word to be a proper name, and transcribed it as Ραφα, both in 21:22, and in 21:20. Thus there is no corresponding Hebrew for the Greek “descen4  Albert-Marie Denis, Concordance grecque des pseudépigraphes d’Ancien Testament. Concordance, corpus des texts, indices (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université catholique de Louvain, 1987), 232. 1 Enoch contains fourteen occurrences out of twenty-four listed by Denis; Jubilees has one at 8:3. Γίγας appears in the Greek fragments of 1 Enoch as follows: in Codex Panopolitanus 7:2, 4; 15:3, 8, 11 (bis); in Syncellus 8:3; 9:9; 10:9; 15:8, 11; 16:1. The Greek text is conveniently available in Matthew Black, Apocalypsis Henochi Graece (PVTG 3; Leiden: Brill, 1970). Although the editors of the Qumran fragments routinely restore the Aramaic as ‫גבר‬/‫גברין‬/‫גבריא‬, unfortunately, the word has not been preserved in any of the fragments either parallel to the Greek which contains γίγας, or in other passages from 1 Enoch, that mention giants. See Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “Revision of Aramaic-Greek and Greek-Aramaic Glossaries in The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 by J. T. Milik,” JJS 41 (1990): 13–48. The Aramaic is preserved in the Qumran fragments of the Book of Giants, but this composition and its relation to 1 Enoch are beyond the scope of the present article. See Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary (TSAJ 63; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 245. 5  Seventeen times. Brook W. R. Pearson lists sixteen occurrences, since he misses that in Ezek 32:27 there are two instances, and not just one. See his “Resurrection and the Judgment of the Titans: ἡ γῆ τῶν ἀσεβῶν in LXX Isaiah 26:19,” in Resurrection, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs (JSNTSup 186; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 33–51 (36 n. 6). 6  Nine times – or eleven, if ‫ ָה ָר ָפא‬in 1 Chr 20:6, 8 was understood by the author(s) as the singular of ‫ ְר ָפ ִאים‬, which is very likely in light of verse 4 in the same chapter. On how 1 Chronicles understood ‫ ָה ָר ָפה‬in 2 Samuel, see below. 7  For another discussion of γίγας in the LXX, see Pearson, “Resurrection and the Judgment of the Titans,” 35–37. 8 It is not clear, however, which Hebrew word is translated as γίγαντες; see below.

“Συναγωγὴ γιγάντων” (Prov 21:16)

43

dants of giants” in this case.9 There are three other instances in which there is no corresponding Hebrew word to the Greek γίγας.10 Three other LXX terms are perhaps relevant to the present discussion of the giants tradition in the Old Greek, especially as it relates to the pagan Greek myths of giants and Titans.11 Τιτάν occurs twice as an alternative to γίγας as a rendition of the Hebrew ‫ ְר ָפ ִאים‬,12 and οἱ γηγενεῖς (“the earth-born,” “born of Gaia”) translates the same Hebrew word once.13 Also perhaps relevant is τάρταρος, which appears along with ᾅδης in Prov 30:16 where the Hebrew has only one word, ‫ ְׁשאֹול‬.14 The first place where the giants appear in the LXX is, quite expectedly, Gen 6:1–4. The Hebrew text says that after the sons of God had felt attracted to the ִ ‫ נְ ִפ‬in the land – daughters of men and took them as they chose, there were ‫ילים‬ ִ ִ‫ג‬. Here, the which are then more specifically identified as the renowned ‫ּבֹורים‬ ִ ‫ נְ ִפ‬and ‫ּבֹורים‬ ִ ִ‫ג‬. UnforLXX translators used γίγαντες in order to render both ‫ילים‬ tunately, both the Hebrew and the Greek passages are notoriously difficult to interpret, and, as has been pointed out by previous scholars, it is not clear what exact relationship exists between the giants and the flood, which is described in the verses that follow.15   9 2 Kgdms 21:22: οἱ τέσσαρες οὗτοι ἐτέχθησαν ἀπόγονοι τῶν γιγάντων ἐν Γεθ τῷ Ραφα οἶκος. ַ ‫ ֶא‬. The corresponding Hebrew reads ‫ת־א ְר ַּב ַעת ֵא ֶּלה יֻ ְּלדּו ְל ָה ָר ָפה ְּבגַ ת‬ 10  1 Chr 14:13; 20:8; 2 Kgdms 21:11. In the case of the first verse the difference may be explained by the fact that the translator understood ‫ ֵע ֶמק‬to mean ‫ ֵע ֶמק ְר ָפ ִאים‬, as would be logical on the basis of 1 Chr 14:9. The second case is more interesting. In 1 Chr 20:4 ἀπὸ τῶν υἱῶν τῶν γιγάντων translates ‫ ִמ ִיל ֵידי ָה ְר ָפ ִאים‬. In verse 6 καὶ οὗτος ἦν ἀπόγονος γιγάντων translates ‫הּוא‬-‫וְ גַ ם‬ ‫נֹולד ְל ָה ָר ָפא‬ ַ , while in verse 8 the translation is οὗτοι ἐγένοντο Ραφα ἐν Γεθ· πάντες ἦσαν τέσσαρες γίγαντες, corresponding to ‫נּוּלדּו ְל ָה ָר ָפא ְּבגַ ת‬ ְ ‫ ֵאל‬. Perhaps the translators had a different Vorlage, but it looks more like a gloss. On 2 Kgdms 21:11, see below. 11 On this subject, see Jan Bremmer, “Remember the Titans!” in The Fall of the Angels, ed. Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (TBN 6; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 35–61. 12  2 Kgdms 5:18, 22: τὴν κοιλάδα τῶν τιτάνων and ἐν τῇ κοιλάδι τῶν τιτάνων for ‫ ֵע ֶמק ְר ָפ ִאים‬. It should also be noticed that in the Greek of 1 En. 9:9Pan the word “Titans” is used interchangeably with “giants:” καὶ αἱ γυναῖκες ἐγέννησαν τιτᾶνας, ὑφ’ ὧν ὅλη ἡ γῆ ἐπλήσθη αἵματος καὶ ἀδικίας. Giants and Titans also appear in poetic parallelism in Jud 16:6: οὐ γὰρ ὑπέπεσεν ὁ δυνατὸς αὐτῶν

ὑπὸ νεανίσκων, οὐδὲ υἱοὶ τιτάνων ἐπάταξαν αὐτόν, οὐδὲ ὑψηλοὶ γίγαντες ἐπέθεντο αὐτῷ, ἀλλὰ Ιουδιθ θυγάτηρ Μεραρι ἐν κάλλει προσώπου αὐτῆς παρέλυσεν αὐτόν. See Carey A. Moore, Judith (AB 40;

Garden City: Doubleday, 1985), 248; Deborah Levine Gera, Judith (CEJL; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 460. 13 Prov 2:18: ἔθετο γὰρ παρὰ τῷ θανάτῳ τὸν οἶκον αὐτῆς καὶ παρὰ τῷ ᾅδῃ μετὰ τῶν γηγενῶν ְ ‫ )וְ ֶא‬τοὺς ἄξονας αὐτῆς. See also Matthew Goff, “Subterranean Giants and Septuagint (‫ל־ר ָפ ִאים‬ Proverbs: The ‘Earth-born’ of LXX Prov 2,” in With Wisdom as a Robe: Qumran and Other Jewish Studies in Honour of Ida Fröhlich, ed. Károly Dobos and Miklós Kőszeghy (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2009), 146–56. 14  ᾅδης καὶ ἔρως γυναικὸς καὶ τάρταρος, as opposed to ‫ ְׁשאֹול וְ ע ֶֹצר ָר ַחם‬. References to Tartarus also appear in Job 40:20 and 41:24. In both texts it means “a deep place,” in the second case translating ‫ ְתהֹום‬. 15  See the thorough discussion in Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The Origins of Evil in Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition: The Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4 in the Second and Third Centuries

44

Michael Tuval

The next appearance that the giants make in the LXX is in Gen 10:8–9, where Nimrod, who is called ‫ גִ ּבֹור‬in Hebrew, is thrice said to be a giant (cf. 1 Chr 1:10). Nimrod rules over the land of Shinar, where the next chapter of Genesis locates the building of the tower of Babel.16 Once more γίγαντες appear in Gen 14:5, which relates that “Chodollogomor and the kings who were with him came and cut down the giants who were in Astaroth Karnain,”17 in which “the giants” is a translation of ‫ ְר ָפ ִאים‬. In the rest of the LXX Pentateuch the giants show up twice: first, in the report brought by the spies who had gone to reconnoiter the ִ ‫ֶאת ַהּנְ ִפ‬ promised land in Num 13:33, where “giants” corresponds to ‫ילים ְּבנֵ י ֲענָ ק‬ ‫ ִמן ַהּנְ ִפ ִלים‬, and in its retelling by Moses in Deut 1:28, where the Hebrew has ‫ְּבנֵ י‬ ‫ ֲענָ ִקים‬, which the Greek translators render as “sons of giants.” The last two passages on the giants in the Hexateuch are Josh 12:4 and 13:12, in which Og the king of Bashan, who was smitten by Moses, is said to have been ‫ ִמּיֶ ֶתר ָה ְר ָפ ִאים‬, which the Greek rendered as ἐκ/ἀπὸ τῶν γιγάντων. It has been pointed out by Loren T. Stuckenbruck that the passage on Nimrod and other references to the post-diluvian giants in the LXX Hexateuch raise several interesting possibilities, one of which is the implication that although the flood is said to have destroyed all flesh except those who were saved on the ark (Gen 7:21–23), the pre-diluvian giants are apparently not all annihilated.18 Their relationship to the flood is not clarified, and the fact that – according to these LXX texts – at least some of them managed to survive, leads to the inevitable deduction that these survivors descended from the posterity of Noah, and therefore raises the intriguing possibility that Noah himself was a giant. Later in the LXX, the word γίγαντες appears three times as part of the toponym κοιλάς τῶν γιγάντων, ‫ ֵע ֶמק ְר ָפ ִאים‬, in 1 Chronicles.19 Curiously, in 2 Kingdoms this is twice translated as κοιλάς τῶν τιτάνων. Also, there is an unusual mention of the giants in 2 Kgdms 21:11 (which has no analogue in the Hebrew), in the story of the execution of the two sons and five grandsons of king Saul by the Gibeonites. Saul’s children and grandchildren are said to have been hanged, and later, taken down by “Dan son of Ioa from the descendants of the giants.”20 In both 2 Kingdoms and 1 Chronicles the giants appear in the stories of the wars of David and his men against the allophyles (Philistines) once and three times, respectively. In 1 Chr 20:4–8, in a single passage of five verses they twice translate ‫ ָה ָר ָפא‬and once ‫ ְר ָפ ִאים‬. This enigmatic Rapha was probably already taken by B. C. E.,” in idem, The Myth of Rebellious Angels (WUNT II.335; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 1–35. 16 Robert Doran, “Pseudo-Eupolemus,” in OTP 2:874. 17  All translations of LXX and the Apocrypha follow Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, eds., A New English Translation of the Septuagint (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 18  Stuckenbruck, “The Origins of Evil,” 4–7. 19  1 Chr 11:15; 14:9, 13 (in the last case there is no corresponding Hebrew). 20 2 Kgdms 21:11: καὶ κατέλαβεν αὐτοὺς Δαν υἱὸς Ιωα ἐκ τῶν ἀπογόνων τῶν γιγάντων.

“Συναγωγὴ γιγάντων” (Prov 21:16)

45

the authors of the Hebrew Chronicles to have been the eponymous ancestor of Rephaim, and subsequently became “a giant” in Greek. Perhaps the most humorous instance of translating Rephaim as “giants” appears in Prov 21:16. While the Hebrew says that “a man who wanders from the way of understanding will rest in the company of Rephaim (‫) ִּב ְק ַהל ְר ָפ ִאים‬,” the Greek promises that he “will rest in the gathering of giants (ἐν συναγωγῇ γιγάντων).” Giants appear once in Isaiah as a translation of Rephaim who inhabit Hades (14:9), but the other four occurrences in this book translate ‫גִ ּבֹור‬, which here appears in the regular sense of “a mighty one,” as do the two instances in Psalms.21 Another instance is the enigmatically short Job 26:5, where the Hebrew ‫ ְר ָפ ִאים‬was translated as γίγαντες. The last book of the OG translation of the Hebrew Bible which mentions giants is Ezekiel. They appear here six times, in two passages, and always transִ ִ‫ ג‬with the exception of Ezek 32:19(21), where οἱ γίγαντες translates ‫ֵא ֵלי‬ late ‫ּבֹורים‬ ‫ּבֹורים‬ ִ ִ‫ג‬. The less interesting of these two passages is Ezek 39:18–20, where God invites the birds of prey to feast on the flesh of the giants, who along with the rulers of the earth, horses and riders, and every warrior, will be slain in the course of the war of Gog and Magog. More interesting is the long passage in Ezek 32:11–27, which forms part of a prophecy against Egypt, where the giants are mentioned four times – in three of them as the inhabitants of the underworld who had died a violent death. This is especially interesting since Ezekiel 32 has been said to provide “perhaps the most explicit tour through the land of the dead available in the Hebrew Bible.”22 Although a clear-cut verdict is perhaps impossible, it looks likely that the author of the Hebrew text was already somehow familiar with the story of the giants later presented in 1 Enoch, or with some version of the Greek myth of the Tiִ ִ‫ג‬ tans. The first possibility might be strengthened by the appearance of ‫ּבֹורים‬ ‫נ ְֹפ ִלים‬, “fallen mighty ones,” which with a different vocalization would give us ‫ּבֹורים נְ ִפ ִלים‬ ִ ִ‫ג‬, which then would provide an unmistakable reference to the Jewish giants myth. However, already the Greek translator read it as in the later MT, and reproduced it as τῶν γιγάντων τῶν πεπτωκότων ἀπὸ αἰῶνος.23 Let us summarize this part of the discussion. The Greek translator of Genesis seems to have been aware of some version of the Jewish giants myth attested in 1 Enoch and related sources – as is perhaps witnessed by his choice to translate ‫ נְ ִפ ִילים‬with γίγαντες. Another intriguing feature of the LXX Hexateuch is that 21 Isa 3:2; 13:3; 49:24, 25; Ps 18(19):5; 32(33):16. However, it may well be that an ancient reader of the LXX could have interpreted the “giants” who are coming to fulfill God’s wrath as more than just incredibly large men (γίγαντες ἔρχονται πληρῶσαι τὸν θυµόν µου χαίροντες ἅµα καὶ ὑβρίζοντες; Isa 13:3). 22  Brian R. Doak, “Ezekiel’s Topography of the (Un‑)Heroic Dead in Ezekiel 32:17–32,” JBL 132 (2013): 607–24 (607). 23 Cf. Aquila on the Nephilim of Gen 6:5(4): οἱ ἐπιπίπτοντες.

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its translators believed that at least some of the giants did not perish in the flood, and it is even possible that they considered Noah to be a giant. The attitude of the LXX translators towards the giants, in contrast to that of the authors of 1 Enoch, was ambivalent, and not always necessarily negative. The giants or, to be more precise, their descendants, are also mentioned in 2 Kingdoms and 1 Chronicles, in the stories of the reign of David and of his wars with the allophyles. These references, perhaps, should also be seen in the same context as the passages in the Hexateuch. Another interesting piece, which may attest the familiarity of its author with the giants myth, is Ezek 32:12–27. However, if this were the case, then it would be already at the Hebrew stage, and would have nothing to do with the translation of the passage into Greek. Although the Greek myths about giants and Titans do not seem to have extensively influenced the Greek translators, it is very likely that they were aware of them, as is witnessed by the alternation of giants with Titans, and the mention of “the earthborn” and Tartarus.24

II. The Wisdom of Solomon, 3 Maccabees, Baruch, 3 Baruch, Ben Sira, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs There are several brief but nevertheless very important references to the giants story in the Wisdom of Solomon, 3 Maccabees, the Greek of Ben Sira, Baruch, 3 Baruch, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The author of the Wisdom of Solomon refers to the annihilation of the giants in the flood in 14:6: “For even in the beginning, when arrogant giants (ὑπερηφάνων γιγάντων) were perishing, the hope of the world fled for refuge on a raft and, piloted by your hand, left to the world the seed of a new generation.” This passage seems to imply that the author of the Wisdom of Solomon was familiar with more than just the story in Genesis. Although this reference is very short, and it is not possible to be sure whether the author believed that all giants were destroyed by the flood, it seems likely that that is what he meant. A similar reference is found in 3 Macc 2:4 in the prayer of the high priest Simon, who says: “You destroyed those who in the past worked iniquity, among whom were also giants, who trusted in their might and courage, bringing down upon them water immeasurable.”25 Although the 24  Apart from the OG, γίγας is also attested eleven times in the fragments of other ancient Greek versions of the OT. See Aq Jer 50(27):9 (‫ ;)גִ ּבֹור‬Sym Is 26:19 (‫ ;) ְר ָפ ִאים‬Th Gen 6:5(4) ִ ‫ ;)נְ ִפ‬2 Kgdms 5:18 (‫) ְר ָפ ִאים‬, 22 (‫ ;) ְר ָפ ִאים‬Job 26:5 (‫ ;) ְר ָפ ִאים‬Prov 9:18 (‫ ;) ְר ָפ ִאים‬Isa 13:3 (‫;)גִ ּבֹור‬ (‫ילים‬ Al Deut 3:11 (‫) ְר ָפ ִאים‬, 13 (‫ ;) ְר ָפ ִאים‬Quint Ps 32(33):16 (‫)גִ ּבֹור‬. See Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum Quae Supersunt, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875), and the critical apparatus in the relevant volumes of the Göttingen and Cambridge LXX series. 25  σὺ τοὺς ἔµπροσθεν ἀδικίαν ποιήσαντας, ἐν οἷς καὶ γίγαντες ἦσαν ῥώµῃ καὶ θράσει πεποιθότες,

διέφθειρας ἐπαγαγὼν αὐτοῖς ἀµέτρητον ὕδωρ.

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47

passage is rather laconic, as in the case with Wis 14:6, it may hint that the author was aware of more than the biblical account. The giants are also mentioned in Baruch, which was probably originally written in Hebrew but survives in a Greek translation.26 The author also refers to the destruction of the giants, although he does not specify exactly how they perished: Ah Israel, how great is the house of God, and how extensive is the place of its estate! It is great and has no end; it is high and immeasurable. The giants were born there, those renowned, those of old (οἱ γίγαντες οἱ ὀνοµαστοὶ οἱ ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς), seeing that they were large, experts in war. Not these did God choose, nor did he give them the way of knowledge, and they perished because they had no insight; they perished through their recklessness (3:24–28).

Although there is no mention of the flood, and the author of the book does not place this short passage in any historical context, the story clearly refers to Gen 6:1–4, which states: ἐκεῖνοι ἦσαν οἱ γίγαντες οἱ ἀπ’ αἰῶνος, οἱ ἄνθρωποι οἱ ὀνομαστοί.27 If the author of Baruch did not clarify by what means the death of the giants occurred, the author of 3 Baruch could not have been more explicit, speaking of the time “[w]hen God caused the flood on earth, and destroyed all flesh and 409,000 giants” (4:10).28 As was suggested by Gideon Bohak, and subsequently accepted by Alexander Kulik in his recent commentary, the number of giant casualties preserved in the Greek version of this document must owe its origin to a gematria of the Greek κατακλυσμός transcribed in Hebrew letters, which totals 409.29 The giants appear twice in the Greek version of Ben Sira. One reference is in 47:4, where David is said to kill the giant Goliath, which does not give us much. More interesting is 16:7, where the Greek text says that God “did not propitiate for the ancient giants (περὶ τῶν ἀρχαίων γιγάντων), those who revolted in their strength.” Fortunately, the Hebrew text of this verse has been preserved in two Genizah manuscripts, and while they differ in the second part of the verse, both give the original Hebrew for “giants” as ‫נסיכי קדם‬, that is, “princes of old.” Here one is tempted to agree with Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, who comment on this verse that “[t]he allusion to Gen 6:1–4 seen by the Gr[eek] … is certainly present; but the choice (mss. A, B) of nĕsîkê qedem, princes of old, by Ben Sira, instead of the familiar nĕpîlîm, is conscious avoidance of the mytho26 See

Daniel J. Harrington, “Baruch, First Book of,” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. John J. Collins and Daniel Harlow (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 425–26. 27  Carey A. Moore, Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions (AB 44; Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), 300: “This is an allusion to the antediluvian semidivine beings of Gen 6:4 (the Nephilim) rather than to their ‘descendants,’ i.e. to such Palestinian tribes as the Anakim … or the Rephaim …” 28 Translation follows the Greek recension in Alexander Kulik, 3 Baruch (CEJL; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 187. 29  Gideon Bohak, “Greek-Hebrew Gematrias in 3 Baruch and in Revelation,” JSP 7 (1990): 119–21; Kulik, 3 Baruch, 212.

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logical overtones to the Genesis narrative so familiar from the Enoch literature and (later) Jubilees.”30 Although some doubts have been expressed recently concerning whether the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs should be considered a Jewish rather than a Christian composition,31 there is no question, in any case, that its author(s) utilized much Second Temple Jewish material. Γίγας is attested three times in the Testaments, twice in the Testament of Judah, where this patriarch recounts the heroic battles waged by him and his father Jacob against the giant Canaanite kings, Achor and Belisath.32 The second giants tradition, in T. Reub. 5:5–7, is much more interesting: Accordingly, my children, flee from sexual promiscuity, and order your wives and your daughters not to adorn their heads and their appearances so as to deceive men’s sound minds. For every woman who schemes in these ways is destined for eternal punishment. For it was thus that they charmed the watchers, who were before the flood. As they continued looking at the women, they were filled with desire for them and perpetrated the act in their minds. Then they were transformed into human males, and while the women were cohabiting with their husbands they appeared to them. Since the women’s minds were filled with lust for these apparitions, they gave birth to giants (γίγαντας).33

According to this interpretation, the watchers did not really have sex with the daughters of men as in Gen 6:1–4 and 1 Enoch, although the reference is unmistakably to the same story. Also interesting is the author’s claim that it was actually the women who seduced the watchers. This is, however, in line with the misogynist position of the author(s) of the Testaments. In any case, it is clear that the author(s) were familiar with the watchers story of 1 Enoch, even if they drastically altered it to suit their own biases.34 To summarize this part of the discussion, it should be said that the survey of the giants traditions in the Wisdom of Solomon, 3 Maccabees, Baruch, and 3 Baruch, Greek Ben Sira, and the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, has shown that the authors of these compositions were all acquainted with the Jewish giants myth tradition, most probably as expressed in 1 Enoch and related documents. Some of the authors simply referred to it without comment, which demonstrates 30  Patrick W. Skehan and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira (AB 39; New York: Doubleday, 1987), 270. Consult also Matthew Goff, “Ben Sira and the ‘Giants’: A Note on Sir 16:7,” JBL 129 (2010): 645–54. 31  See, e.g., Robert A. Kugler, “Testaments,” in Collins and Harlow, The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, 1295–97 (1296). 32 On this passage and the attempts to identify these kings, see Harm W. Hollander and Marinus de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Commentary (SVTP 8; Leiden: Brill, 1985), 191. 33 Translation follows Howard C. Kee, “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” in OTP 1:784. 34  A reference to the watchers (but not to the giants) is also found in T. Naph. 3:5, which is somewhat reminiscent of Jude 7: “Likewise the watchers departed from nature’s order; the Lord pronounced a curse on them at the flood.”

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that the story, at least in broad terms, was well known and did not require further elaboration. Others, such as the author of 3 Baruch, added new information, for example, the number of giants who perished in the flood. Ben Sira, writing in Hebrew in Jerusalem in the early second century BCE, was most probably familiar with the Enochic tales of the sons of God and the giants, but disliked their mythological character, not unlike the much later rabbinic sages.35 However, his grandson, who translated the book into Greek, seems not to have shared his grandfather’s distaste of mythology, and reintroduced the giants into the story. As far as the author of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs is concerned, we saw that he was very familiar with the story of the watchers and the birth of the giants, but manipulated it in order to express his own misogynist stance.

III. Pseudo-Eupolemus Arguably the most fascinating traditions about the giants in all of Jewish literature written and/or preserved in Greek appear in the two short fragments designated by scholars as “Pseudo-Eupolemus” or “Anonymous.”36 The fragments are preserved in Book 9 of Eusebius’ Preparatio Evangelica, and were taken by the latter from the work of a first century BCE author, Alexander Polyhistor’s “On the Jews.” Both fragments deal mainly with Abraham. Eusebius ascribes only the first passage to Eupolemus, while he says that the second is anonymous. Beginning with Jacob Freudenthal in the late nineteenth century,37 scholars have tended to separate the two fragments under discussion from the other five fragments ascribed to Eupolemus, on the basis of differences in content and style. First, these two fragments are much more syncretistic than the other Eupolemus fragments, integrating figures of Babylonian and Greek mythology into biblical history and identifying some of them with biblical characters. Secondly, the first fragment identifies Mt. Gerizim as the “mountain of the Most High,” which – to say the least – would be a strange thing to come from the hand of a Jerusalem priest, which Eupolemus is usually believed to have been, and consequently, is considered by most scholars to have been authored by a Samaritan. The last frag See, e.g., Gen. Rab. 26.5–7; Sifre Num. 86; Sifre Zut. 194.

35

36 See the Greek text along with an English translation, introduction, and commentary in Carl

R. Holladay, Historians. Vol. 1 of Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983), 157–87. For a short discussion of the fragments and their author, see Robert Doran, “Pseudo-Eupolemus,” in OTP 2:873–82; idem, “Pseudo-Eupolemus,” in Collins and Harlow, The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, 612–13. Also see Ben Zion Wacholder, Eupolemus: A Study of Judaeo-Greek Literature (HUCM 3; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, 1974). 37  Jacob Freudenthal, Hellenistische Studien, 1–2. Alexander Polyhistor und die von ihm erhaltenen Reste judäischer und samaritanischer Geschichtswerke (Breslau: H. Skutsch, 1875), 82–91.

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ment, although anonymous according to Eusebius, was grouped together with the previous one by scholars on the basis of the similarity of contents. However, not all specialists think that the author of the first fragment was a Samaritan, and definitely not everybody believes that the two fragments were written by the same person.38 In both fragments giants are mentioned. I will begin with the first – here is the text relevant to the discussion at hand: Eupolemus in his work “Concerning the Jews of Assyria” says that the city of Babylon was first founded by those who were saved from the flood. He also says that they were giants and built the well-known tower. When it fell as the result of the action of God, the giants were scattered throughout the whole earth. In the tenth generation, he reports, in Camarine, a city of Babylon, which some call the city Ur (and is interpreted “a city of the Chaldeans”), in the thirteenth generation Abraham was born. He excelled all men in nobility of birth and wisdom (Praep ev. 9.17.2–3).39

Then the author goes on to tell of the travels of Abraham, his adventures, and his cultural mission. At the end of the fragment, he says that Abraham taught astrology to the Egyptian priests, claiming that it had been discovered first by Enoch. Then follows another curious passage: For the Babylonians say that first there was Belus (who was Kronos), and that from him was born Belus and Canaan. This Belus fathered Canaan, the father of the Phoenicians. To him was born a son, Cush, whom the Greeks called Asbolus, the father of the Ethiopians, the brother of Mizraim, the father of the Egyptians. The Greeks say that Atlas discovered astrology. (Atlas and Enoch are the same.) To Enoch was born a son, Methuselah, who learned all things through the help of the angels of God, and thus we gained our knowledge (Praep. ev. 9.17.9).

To sum it all up, the author claims that some of the giants were saved from the flood, and then founded Babylon and built the famous tower, after which they were scattered by God. Abraham is not said explicitly to be related to the giants, but such a connection is at least implicit in this source. In the second part, quoted above, in a most curious mixture of Greek, Babylonian, and Jewish mythology, Enoch is identified with a second-generation Titan, Atlas, and is said to have fathered Methuselah, who had been taught by angels, and became the source of all human knowledge. Before I discuss the implications of this source, I would like to quote and discuss the second, anonymous fragment, since it is most likely to share the same tradition, and it is even possible that it goes back to the same source: In some anonymous writings we found that Abraham traced his family to the giants. While these giants were living in Babylonia, they were destroyed by the gods because of their 38 See the listing of various scholarly opinions in Gregory E. Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography (NovTSup 64; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 187. 39 Quotations of Pseudo-Eupolemus are taken from Holladay, Historians.

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wickedness. One of them, Belus, escaped death and came to dwell in Babylon. There he built a tower and lived in it. It was named Belus, after Belus who built it. After Abraham had been instructed in the science of astrology, he first came into Phoenicia and there taught the Phoenicians astrology. Then he went to Egypt (Praep. ev. 9.18.2).

In this passage, Abraham is explicitly said to be a descendant of the giants. The author says that the giants lived in Babylon, and were destroyed by gods because of their wickedness. One of them escaped and built a tower. Abraham, as in the first fragment, went to Phoenicia (by which the author means Canaan, as in the previous fragment), taught the natives astrology, and later went to Egypt. The chronology of the anonymous fragment is different from the previous one, but it is likely that they both derive their information if not from the same tradition, then from a very similar one. Although some of the traditions found in these two fragments could be possibly derived from an interpretation of the LXX texts which were discussed above – such as the idea that some of the giants escaped the flood and built the tower of Babel, and that (by implication) humanity in general descended from the giants, the combination of all these and its mixture with Babylonian and Greek mythology is nothing short of extraordinary. Although the giants here are said to have been scattered by God (in the first source), or even destroyed by the gods on the account of their wickedness (in the second source), there is not much criticism of the giants in either fragment. Enoch is a Titan, Abraham’s ancestors were giants, and virtually all humanity is implied to have descended from the giants. Thus, the fragments of Pseudo-Eupolemus are strikingly different from virtually all Jewish literature discussed above, in their positive stance on the giants.

IV. The Sibylline Oracles The surviving Sibylline Oracles are notorious for their complicated compositional and redactional history, and contain pagan, Jewish, and Christian materials.40 Since all of them are pseudepigraphical in the truest sense of the term, posing as prophecies of sibyls, it is not surprising to find in them a large amount of pagan mythology, or at least a mixture of both Jewish and pagan traditions. Let us begin with Books 1 and 2 of the Sibylline Oracles, which are not separated in the manuscript tradition, and whose core was possibly composed by Jews in Phrygia between 30 and 70 CE.41 In Sib. Or. 1.87–103 the myth of the  Among those discussed here, Sib. Or. 1.324–400 is evidently Christian, and fiercely anti-Jewish. 41  According to Sib. Or. 1.261–64, Mt. Ararat, where Noah’s ark landed at the end of the deluge, is located in Phrygia. The Phrygian origin of books 1 and 2 of the Sibylline Oracles was already suggested by Johannes Geffcken, Komposition und Entstehungszeit der Oracula Sibyl40

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watchers is creatively retold, in which, curiously, watchers seem to be identified with the giants since they are said to be “mighty, of great form” (l. 100).42 In the periodization of history that is common in the Sibylline Oracles, the watchers are placed in the second generation of humanity, and are said to be fashioned by God “from the most righteous men who were left” (l. 88);43 in other words, they are humans. Although in the end the watchers are said to go “under the dread house of Tartarus guarded by unbreakable bonds, to make retribution, to Gehenna of terrible, raging, undying fire” (ll. 101–23),44 they are described in exceptionally good terms: the very name of the watchers is said to be bestowed on them “because they had a sleepless mind in their hearts and an insatiable personality” (ll. 99–100). They “practiced skills of all kinds, discovering inventions by their deeds” (ll. 91–92), and thus invented agriculture, carpentry, sailing, astronomy, divination, medicine, and magic. The author is strictly positive about their activities. Thus, here we witness another exceptional adaptation of the watchers/giants myth – although it is clear that the author of book 1 of the Sibylline Oracles was familiar with the story, he rewrote it to suit his purposes: the watchers and the giants are identified, there is no mention of the violence of the latter, the watchers are said to have descended from the most righteous men, and are credited with “noble pursuits,” “shrewd wisdom,” and all kinds of useful inventions. It is interesting, that although the flood occupies a very prominent place in Sib. Or. 1.125–282, the watchers are neither connected with it, nor related to it chronologically; perhaps this is intentional. It should also be noted that there is hardly any trace of particularly Greek mythology in this passage.45 However, when we reach the seventh generation, we discover that it was assigned by the author to the Titans. They have a proud heart and “rushing toward destruction will plot to fight in opposition against the starry heaven” (ll. 312–14). The author says that “the rushing of the mighty ocean of raging waters will be among them,” implying that they also planned to inundate the earth, but “the great Sabaoth in anger will shut them out, preventing them, because he promised not to make a flood again against evil-spirited men” (ll. 316–18). In Book 2 of the Sibylline Oracles the giants and the Titans are mentioned together in the passage describing the resurrection and the last judgment:

lina (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1902), 50. Most recently, see Olaf Wassmuth, Sibyllinische Orakel 1–2: Studien und Kommentar (AJEC 76; Leiden: Brill, 2011), 210–15, on the Phrygian provenance of Sib. Or. 1.125–282. 42 Cf. John J. Collins, “Sibylline Oracles,” in OTP 1:337 n. i: “Here in SibOr 1 the Giants are simply identified with Watchers.” 43  Translations of the Sibylline Oracles follow Collins in OTP. 44 This is, of course, similar to the description of the watchers’ fate in the Book of Watchers. 45  The giants are mentioned explicitly in Sib. Or. 1.123, where the men of the fifth generation, who were destroyed by the flood, are said to be “insolent, much more than those giants.” This reference, however, is probably to the giants of the Greek myths.

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Bodies of humans, made solid in heavenly manner, breathing and set in motion, will be raised on a single day. Then Uriel, the great angel, will break the gigantic bolts, of unyielding and unbreakable steel, of the gates of Hades, not forged of metal; he will throw them wide open and will lead all the mournful forms to judgment, especially those of ancient phantoms, Titans and the giants and such as the flood destroyed (ll. 225–32).

Here we find again an unmistakable reference to the Jewish giants myth, which is mixed with Greek mythology. At the same time, the overall eschatology of the passage is unmistakably Jewish. The last passage from the Sibylline Oracles I would like to mention is 3.97–161, which describes the erection and the fall of the tower of Babel, an euhemeristic account of the war of the Titans against Kronos and his sons, and a list of world empires. As John Collins has noticed, “[t]he account of Titans is paralleled in Hesiod, Theogony 412 ff., but differs in details and is interpreted euhemeristically to refer to human beings.”46

V. Philo of Alexandria Philo of Alexandria devoted a whole treatise to the interpretation of Gen 6:1–4, namely his On the Giants.47 His interpretation is, as usual, allegorical. He begins by quoting Gen 6:1, which he then interprets in a misogynistic manner, which also comes as no surprise to anybody familiar with his writings: “[T]he spiritual offspring of the unjust is never in any case male: the offspring of men whose thoughts are unmanly, nerveless and emasculate by nature are female” (4).48 Next he proceeds to quote LXX Gen 6:2, and explains that what philosophers call “demons,” that is, souls that fly in the air, Moses calls “angels.” Philo is well aware of the fact that the story smacks of rather primitive mythology, and thus he immediately hastens to comment “And let no one suppose that what is here said is a myth” (7), illustrating the well-known principle “the lady doth protest too much.” In Giants 6–18 the great philosopher expands his claim that the “angels” of the Bible are actually the same as “souls,” and stand here for the wicked souls that chase after the “daughters of men,” that is, bodily and worldly pleasures. In Giants 19–57, which take up most of the book, Philo first discusses the spirit of God, and then interprets the prohibition of incest in Lev 18:6 as if  Collins in OTP 1:364 n. p. his shorter treatment in Questions in Genesis. On the Giants is discussed in David Winston and John M. Dillon, Two Treatises of Philo of Alexandria (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983). See also Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “To What Extent Did Philo’s Treatment of Enoch and the Giants Presuppose Knowledge of Enochic and Other Sources Preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls?” in idem, The Myth of Rebellious Angels, 131–41. 48  Translations of Philo follow F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, Philo. Volume II (LCL; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929). 46

47 Compare

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it meant that true men are not to seek pleasures, honors, and wealth. Finally, in Giants 58–67 he gets to the giants: “Now the giants were on the earth in those days” (Gen 6:4). Some may think that the Lawgiver is alluding to the myths of the poets about the giants, but indeed myth-making is a thing most alien to him, and his mind is set on following in the steps of truth and nothing but truth. And therefore also he has banished from his own commonwealth painting and sculpture, with all their high repute and charm of artistry, because their crafts belie the nature of truth and work deception and illusions through the eyes to souls that are ready to be seduced. So, then, it is no myth at all of giants that he sets before us; rather he wishes to show you that some men are earth-born, some heaven-born, and some God-born. The earth-born are those who take the pleasures of the body for their quarry, who make it their practice to indulge in them and enjoy them and provide the means by which each of them may be promoted. The heaven-born are the votaries of the arts and of knowledge, the lovers of learning. For the heavenly element in us is the mind, as the heavenly beings are each of them a mind. And it is the mind which pursues the learning of the schools and the other arts one and all, which sharpens and whets itself, aye and trains and drills itself solid in the contemplation of what is intelligible by mind. But the men of God are priests and prophets who have refused to accept membership in the commonwealth of the world and to become citizens therein, but have risen wholly above the sphere of sense perception and have been translated into the world of the intelligible and dwell there registered as freemen of the commonwealth of ideas, which are imperishable and incorporeal (58–61).

Philo adduces Abraham as a “man of heaven,” and a “man of God” (62–64), and Nimrod, who, as we have seen, is called a “giant” in the LXX, is described as a “son of the earth” (65–67). Nimrod began the desertion from the “path of reason and transmuted it into the lifeless and inert nature of the flesh” (65). According to Philo, the very name of Nimrod means “desertion” (66). As has already been said above, such interpretations should not surprise anybody who is familiar with the rest of the Philonic corpus. It would be strange to expect Philo to follow explicitly the Enochic tradition about the giants, even if he knew it well. Actually, there is no reason to think that he was not familiar with it, since it was known in the Diaspora, as we have seen from the documents discussed above – not a few of which were either composed or at least circulated in Greek in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. The fact that he protested several times that Gen 6:1–4 had no relationship to mythology seems to hint, on the one hand, both at the fact that he was aware of the Jewish giants myth and that he recognized its similarity to the Greek myths of giants and Titans, and, on the other hand, that he strongly disliked both the Jewish myth and its compromising similarity to Greek pagan mythology.

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55

VI. Flavius Josephus Josephus, the great first century CE Jewish historian, mentions giants nine times in his Antiquities.49 In one case, at 18.103, γίγας appears as a nickname of a certain Eleazar, who received it on the account of his bodily size. The rest of the occurrences mainly follow the LXX. Once it appears as the rendition of the Valley of Rephaim,50 and three times in the stories of David’s wars with the Philistines.51 More interesting are the remaining four. In Ant. 1.72–73 Josephus refers to Gen 6:1–4, saying: And these men [i.e., the antediluvians] for seven generations continued to believe that God was lord of the universe and to look upon all things with reference to virtue. Then in the course of time they changed from their ancestral habits for the worse, neither offering to God the customary honors nor taking into account justice toward humanity; but, through the things that they did, exhibiting double the zeal for vice that they had formerly shown for virtue, they thereby incurred the enmity of God for themselves. For many angels of God, consorting with women, fathered children who were insolent and despisers of every good thing because of the confidence that they had in their power. For, according to tradition, they are said to have committed outrages comparable to those said by the Greeks to have been done by giants.52

Josephus definitely shared Philo’s distaste of mythology, and, similarly to Philo in Opif. 1.1–2, clearly states at the beginning of Antiquities that, in contrast to “[o]ther legislators [who followed] myths, [and] have, with their tales ascribed to the gods, imputed to them the shame of human errors and have given a considerable pretext to the wicked,” Moses followed a totally different path (1.22–23). Nevertheless, according to his retelling of Gen 6:1–4 Josephus recognized that the biblical story was similar to the myths of the Greeks. It is also clear from his reference to “tradition” about the outrages committed by the giants that he knew more than Gen 6:1–4, which at least hints that he was familiar with the Enochic expanded version of the events. Following the LXX in its interpretation of Gen 14:5, Josephus says that Chedorlaomer and the kings under his command subjugated the descendants of the giants (Ant. 1.174). The two remaining occurrences, 3.305 and 5.125, deal with the giants who lived in Hebron. In the first instance, Josephus discusses the spies who went to reconnoiter the land of Israel, and subsequently returned with the report of their encounter with the descendants of the giants. In the second case,

 Ant. 1.73, 174; 3.305; 5.125; 7.71, 299, 301, 304; 18.103. 7.71. 51  Ant. 7.299, 301, 304. 52  Translation follows Louis H. Feldman, Judean Antiquities 1–4. Vol. 3 of Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 49

50 Ant.

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Josephus retells the biblical story of Caleb’s conquest of Hebron and his expulsion of the sons of Anak from there, whom he presents as giants:53 From there they moved their camp to Hebron; taking this by storm, they killed everyone. There yet survived the race of giants. In the size of their bodies and appearance they were unlike other people; they were astonishing to see and terrible to hear of. Even now their bones, which are unlike those that have come to our knowledge, are displayed.54

As Christopher T. Begg notes in his commentary on Antiquities 5–7, Josephus’ “appended mention of the giants’ bones still being available for viewing serves to confirm the reliability of the biblical references to these fantastic beings.”55

VII. Summary and Conclusions In our examination of the LXX several interesting things have emerged, among them the possibility introduced by the translators of the Torah into Greek that the giants were not all annihilated by the flood, since Nimrod, who was a descendant of those saved on the ark, is called a giant. The fact that he descended from Noah implies that the translators of the LXX could have believed that Noah himself was a giant. As we have seen, these possibilities were later exploited and developed by some of the Second Temple Jewish authors writing in Greek. The coupling of the giants with Titans, and the references to Tartarus as a place of post-mortem punishment, strengthened the affinity between the Jewish tales of the giants and the Greek myths. These affinities were also recognized by postLXX Jewish authors. In general, it could be maintained that all of the authors/translators of the literature surveyed above  – which is a rather sizable corpus  – were aware of more than the LXX references to the giants. It is clear that most of these authors were familiar with some sort of the story which appears in 1 Enoch (and which is either succinctly repeated or referred to in related literature), such as Jubilees and other texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Not all of them were happy with it – such as, for example, Philo, who allegorized the Septuagintal reference to the giants (interpreting Gen 6:1–4 in the framework of his ubiquitous misogynist agenda), and the Hebrew Ben Sira, who turned the Nephilim into the more neutral “princes of old.” However, the latter’s grandson, who translated his book into Greek, got things right, and re-entered the giants into the text. The rational Josephus, who was aware of the mythological flavor of the giants material – not unlike some modern creationists – felt compelled to refer his readers to the “ar53 Josh

15:14; Judg 1:20. This is in line with LXX Num 13:33.  Translation follows Christopher T. Begg, Judean Antiquities 5–7. Vol. 4 of Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 30. 55 Ibid., 30 n. 334. 54

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57

chaeological” evidence in his retelling of biblical narratives. Josephus confessed that the story of Gen 6:1–4 was similar to the Greek myths; other Jewish authors, such as the authors of Books 2 and 3 of the Sibylline Oracles, simply adopted the Greek stories of giants and Titans into their retelling of history. Most interesting, however, appear to be the passages from Pseudo-Eupolemus and Book 1 of the Sibylline Oracles, since they are so unlike anything else we find in other Jewish literature of the period, as far as their presentation of the giants is concerned. According to the first, not only was Enoch a Titan and Abraham traced his ancestry to the giants who survived the flood, but virtually all humanity descended from the giants – which is not a thing for the Jews to be ashamed of. In the second text the watchers, who are identified with the giants, are humans, and are described in glowing terms. Finally, they go to Tartarus and Gehenna, but not for some misdeed on their part. So, by way of conclusion it should be said that although most of the Jewish literature in Greek demonstrates that its authors were familiar with the giants myth as it appears in the Enochic writings, and referred to the giants negatively, one cannot speak of any Jewish-Greek consensus on the subject. Beginning with the LXX, which introduced the option that the giants survived the flood – and, therefore, that they must have been among the passengers who boarded Noah’s ark – other Second Temple writers developed this possibility, and even exonerated them from all guilt.

Part Two

Tales of Giants in their Ancient Jewish Context The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Watchers, and Daniel

The Humbling of the Arrogant and the “Wild Man” and “Tree Stump” Traditions in the Book of Giants and Daniel 4 Joseph L. Angel Yeshiva University

I. Introduction There is no question that the Qumran Book of Giants, with its focus on the violence perpetrated by the progeny of the watchers and the elevated role of the patriarch Enoch in the revelation of divine judgment, belongs to the early Enochic tradition. There is, in fact, increasing agreement among scholars that the work depends upon the Book of Watchers as a main source.1 One can point to significant thematic and ideological links between Giants and other early Enochic writings, such as the Book of Dreams and the Apocalypse of Weeks.2 Moreover, if J. T. Milik’s suggestion that 4Q203 and 4Q204 belong to the same manuscript is correct, then Giants was copied together with parts of the Watchers, Dreams, and the Epistle as early as the late first century BCE.3 At the same time, intriguing points of contact between the Book of Giants and a diverse array of ancient sources, including, for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Pseudo-Eupolemus, 1  See, e.g., Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 298–99; Émile Puech, Qumran Grotte 4.XXII: Textes araméens, première partie: 4Q529–549 (DJD 31; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 13; Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary (TSAJ 63; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 24–25; Devorah Dimant, “Themes and Genres in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran,” in Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, 30 June–2 July 2008, ed. Kathel Berthelot and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (STDJ 94; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 15–45 (25); Matthew J. Goff, “When Giants Dreamed about the Flood: The Book of Giants and its Relationship to the Book of Watchers,” in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the Scriptures, ed. Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (BETL 270; Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 61–88. 2 See, e.g., Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, 91–92. 3  See Milik, The Books of Enoch, 178–79, 310. His contention remains unverifiable. At the very least 4Q203 and 4Q204 appear to have been copied by the same scribe. Consult Jonas Greenfield and Michael E. Stone, “The Enochic Pentateuch and the Date of the Similitudes,” HTR 70 (1977): 51–65 (54); Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “203. 4QEnochGiantsa ar,” in Qumran Cave 4.XXVI: Cryptic Texts and Miscellanea, Part 1, ed. S. J. Pfann et al. (DJD 36; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 8–41 (8–10).

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encourage us to broaden the scope and consider this composition within its wider literary and historical settings. In the present inquiry I focus on the place of Giants in relation to another body of roughly contemporary Aramaic Jewish tradition also quite popular at Qumran, namely the Danielic writings. That there should be affinities between Giants and Danielic literature is not surprising. It is clear from the so-called pseudo-Daniel texts from Qumran (4Q243–245), which contain an intriguing mixture of Danielic and Enochic elements, that these two bodies of tradition were not always understood in isolation from one another.4 As Loren Stuckenbruck puts it, there existed “a cross-fertilization between intellectual traditions associated with both Daniel and Enoch, [which] would have been in a state of flux, not only after but perhaps also before and during the Maccabean crisis.”5 As far as I am aware, almost all previous scholarship devoted to the relationship between the Book of Giants and Daniel has been limited to analysis of the strikingly parallel visions of the divine courtroom found in 4Q530 2 ii 15–20 and Dan 7:9–10.6 As I will attempt to show, the parallels are far more extensive than previously appreciated. The primary aims of this essay are, first, to bring to light a neglected constellation of shared themes, forms, and language in the Book of Giants and Danielic tradition, in particular, the fourth chapter of the book of Daniel; and, second, to explore some possible explanations and implications of the observed points of contact. As we shall see, while direct literary dependence in either direction cannot be proven, the shared features indicate dependence on a common pool of traditions, raising interesting questions about the social location

4  See George J. Brooke et al., Qumran Cave 4.XVII: Parabiblical Texts, Part 3 (DJD 22; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 95–164. 4Q243–245 are edited by John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint. 5  Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “Daniel and Early Enoch Traditions in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 2 vols., ed. John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint (VTSup 83; FIOTL 2; Leiden: Brill, 2001), 2:368–86 (376) (now available in updated form in idem, The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts [WUNT I.335; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014], 103–19). See also Collins and Flint, DJD 22, 134–36. 6  See, e.g., Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The Throne-Theophany of the Book of Giants: Some New Light on the Background of Daniel 7,” in The Scrolls and the Scriptures: Qumran Fifty Years After, 2 vols., ed. Stanley E. Porter and Craig A. Evans (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 2:211–20; idem, “Daniel and Early Enoch Traditions,” 378–84; Ryan Stokes, “The Throne Visions of Daniel 7, 1 Enoch 14, and the Qumran Book of Giants (4Q530): An Analysis of Their Literary Relationship,” DSD 15 (2008): 340–58; Jonathan R. Trotter, “The Tradition of the Throne Vision in the Second Temple Period: Daniel 7:9–10, 1 Enoch 14:18–23, and the Book of Giants (4Q530),” RevQ 25/99 (2012): 451–66; Joseph L. Angel, “The Divine Courtroom Scenes of Daniel 7 and the Qumran Book of Giants: A Textual and Contextual Comparison,” in The Divine Courtroom in Comparative Perspective, ed. Shalom E. Holtz and Ari Mermelstein (BIS 132; Leiden: Brill, 2015), 25–48. See also the essay of Amanda Davis Bledsoe in the present volume.

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and proximity of the scribal circles responsible for these works and indicating a closer relationship between the texts than previously recognized.

II. Parallels in Daniel 4 and the Book of Giants Before turning to the parallels, a review of the contents of Daniel 4 and a few observations about its literary history are in order. Different variations of this story appear in the Masoretic Text and the Old Greek.7 Presently it will suffice to offer a brief summary according to the more compact Masoretic version. Nebuchadnezzar, the great king of Babylon, reports in the first-person that he has had a frightening dream. The dream is about a mighty tree that reaches up to the heavens and provides shelter and food for all the creatures of the world. Suddenly a watcher descends from heaven and commands that the tree be chopped down, leaving only the stump in the ground. The subject of the dream (either the stump or the king – the language is ambiguous) is put in chains, fed grass, and given the mind of a beast for a period of seven years in order to illustrate that sovereignty belongs to God alone. Of all the sages summoned to interpret this rather transparent dream, only Daniel, who possesses unique access to divine knowledge, proves capable. Daniel recognizes in the dream a decree of divine judgment against Nebuchadnezzar, and begs the king to avert his punishment through acts of kindness. Twelve months later, the king cannot help himself. After an expression of royal hubris he is banished to the wilderness, where he is transformed into a wild beast. After seven years, the humbled king proclaims the glory of the one true God. He is then rehabilitated and his royal powers are restored. It is widely recognized that this story has a complex literary history incorporating a number of earlier traditions. Most prominently, it has become clear from sources like the Harran inscription and 4QPrayer of Nabonidus that the versions of Daniel 4 represent creative adaptations of materials originally associated with Nabonidus, the last Neo-Babylonian king.8 Moreover, many scholars have recognized in the combination of the king’s dream of the great tree and the story of his transformation into a wild beast a melding together of two originally separate traditional motifs with roots in ancient Mesopotamia.9 I shall return to these motifs below. Presently we may turn to the parallels from the Book of Giants. 7  A useful comparison of the versions and discussion of secondary literature is provided by Matthias Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar: The Ancient Near Eastern Origins and Early History of Interpretation of Daniel 4 (JSJSup 61; Leiden: Brill, 1999), 9–49. 8  This is the case whether one maintains that 4QNabonidus represents an intermediate stage between the Harran inscription and Daniel 4 or that 4QNabonidus and Daniel 4 make independent use of the Harran inscription. See further the secondary literature cited in n. 26. 9  See, e.g., Ernst Haag, Die Errettung Daniels aus der Löwengrube. Untersuchungen zum Ursprung der biblischen Danieltradition (SBS 110; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1983), 23;

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The first passage of interest is the relatively well-preserved account of the dream-visions of Hahyah and Ohyah narrated in 4Q530 2 ii.10 Report of Dreams and Reaction 3 … Thereupon two of them had dreams (‫ )באדין חלמו תריהון חלמין‬4 and the sleep of their eyes fled from them (‫)ונדת שנת עיניהון מנהון‬, and they arose … [and they o]pened their eyes 5 … [and then] told their dreams in the assembly of [their] c[omrades] the monsters. Hahyah’s Dream (parallel: 6Q8 3 + 2 [italics]) 6 [… In] my dream I was watching this very night (‫ )[ב]חלמי הוית חזא בליליא דן‬7 [and there was a large garden planted with all sorts of trees] and [i]t had gardeners and they were watering 8 [every tree in the garden all the days (?) ] large [sho]ots came out of their stump (‫)[ושר]שין רברבין נפקו מן עקרה[ו]ן‬9 [and from one tree came three shoots. I watch]ed until tongues of fire from 10 [heaven came down. I watched until the di]rt [was covered] with all the water, and the fire burned all 11 [the trees of this orchard all around and it did not burn the tree and its shoots on] the earth, whil[e it was 12 devastated with tongues of fire and water of the delug]e. This is the end of the dream. Giants Perplexed, Interpreter Wanted 13 [Then Hahyah asked them about the meaning of the dream and] the giants were [not] able to tell him 14 [the d]ream (]‫ ]…[ )[ולא ]השכחו גבריא לחויא לה [ח]למ[א‬this [dr]eam you should give [to Eno]ch the interpreting scribe, and he will interpret for us 15 the dream (‫)[לחנו]ך לספר פרשא ויפשור לנא חלמא‬. Thereupon his fellow Ohyah declared and said to the giants, Ohyah’s Dream 16 I too had a dream this night (‫)אף אנה חזית בחלמי בליליא דן‬, O giants, and, behold, the Ruler of Heaven came down to earth 17 and the seats were arranged and the Great Holy One sat do[wn, one hundred hun]dreds served him, one thousand thousands 18 [prostrated themselves; al]l [of them] in front of him, were standing and behold [boo]ks were opened and a judgment was pronounced and the judgment of 19 [the Great One was w]ritten [in a book] and a signature was signed for … is over all who live and (all) flesh … 20  … And such is the end of the dream. Mahaway Sent to Enoch [… Thereupon] all the giants [and monsters] grew afraid 21 and called Mahaway. He came to the assembly [of the monsters] and the giants and they sent him to Enoch 22 [and they delib]erated and said to him: “Go [to him” … ] … 23 … And he said to him, “He will tell [y]ou the interpretation of the dreams (‫”… )יחוא[ ל]כה פ[ש]ר חלמיא‬ Enoch Interprets (4Q530 7 ii) and Enoch saw him and hailed him, and Mahaway said to him, “What … 10 [in order that we may k]now from you their interpretati[o]n (‫)[ … די נ]נדע מנך פשרה[ו]ן‬.” [Then Enoch

6

Larry M. Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King: Ancient Jewish Court Legends (HDR 26; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 101–13. 10  For the reconstructed column, which actually consists of several fragments (2 ii + 6 + 7 i + 8–11 + 12[?]), see DJD 31, Pl. II. In using the text from 6Q8 3 + 2 to help restore the text of ll. 7–11, I follow Puech, DJD 31, 28. Note, however, the objections of Stuckenbruck in DJD 36, 80. See also his article in this volume. Unless otherwise noted, translations of Giants have been adapted from Edward Cook, “Book of Giants,” in DSSR 3:472–511.

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explained to Mahaway the dreams] 11 [and he said to him, “With regard to the gar]deners that [came do[wn from heaven, (‫[ )[גנ]נין די מן שמין נ[חתו‬these are the watchers who have come down … ]”

The pericope begins by noting that the two gargantuan brothers are disturbed by what they have seen. Lines 3–4 report that they have had dreams and that the contents of those dreams were disturbing enough to cause “the sleep of their eyes to flee from them.” In lines 6–12 Hahyah tells his dream of the destruction of an orchard by fire and water before the assembly of the giants. This is followed by Ohyah’s account of his dream of the descent of the divine courtroom to earth and its pronouncement of judgment (ll. 15–20). While the ominous implications of the two dreams are fairly transparent from the reader’s perspective, the giants are frightened and perplexed as to their meaning. They send the giant Mahaway to Enoch to seek the interpretation (ll. 20–23). Mahaway meets with the patriarch, who begins to interpret the dreams. The body of Enoch’s interpretation is not preserved, but it likely clarified the inescapability of the giants’ impending punishment. While the role of Enoch looms large here, in some respects this passage is more reminiscent of Danielic than Enochic tradition. Most notably, the notion that the giants were informed of their own doom through dream-visions appears nowhere else in early Enochic literature. It does, however, closely resemble the motif of the humbling of arrogant kings through the revelation of their inferiority to God, which is attested not only in Daniel 4, but also in Daniel 2 and 5.11 A closer comparison of the Giants passage with Daniel 4 indeed reveals a number of striking correspondences. In each text, a powerful figure renowned for violence, arrogance, and inflicting suffering on human beings has a dream-vision (Dan 4:2; cf. 2:1; 5:5). The dream-vision creates anxiety and a resulting physiological response in the seer (4:2; cf. 2:1; 5:5–6). The dream-vision perplexes the seer even though its meaning is somewhat obvious from the reader’s perspective (4:3–4; cf. 2:3; 5:7). The dream-vision is presented in the first-person before a group that is unable to grasp its meaning (4:4; cf. 5:8). The interpretation of the dream-vision is sought from the hero of the Jews who has the characteristics of a scribe and access to divine knowledge (e.g., 4:6; cf. 2:47; 5:12). The interpretation of the dream-vision foretells the imminent punishment and humbling of the seer, which entails his removal from a position of power by God (4:21–22; cf. 2:44–45; 5:26–28). Note, however, that according to the present form of Daniel 4, the king’s power is restored, whereas in Giants, the punishment appears to be irreversible. In this sense, the dream-visions of the giant brothers are perhaps more comparable to Belshazzar’s vision of the writing on the wall in Daniel 5. In terms of form, parts of the dream-vision are repeated in the course of interpre11  The motif occurs elsewhere in Second Temple period literature as well. See, e.g., 2 Macc 3; 9:5–27; 1 Macc 6:1–17. Cf. Isaiah 14.

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tation (4Q530 7 ii 11 and Dan 4:16–23; cf. 2:37–45; 5:26–28). Finally, there are some striking instances of shared vocabulary. Note, for example, ‫שרשוהי‬ (6Q8 2 1; Dan 4:12, 20, 23), ‫( עקרה[ו]ן‬4Q530 2 ii 8) and ‫( עקר‬Dan 4:12, 20, 23). Both texts also frequently use Aramaic roots associated with dream-visions and their interpretation, including ‫חלם‬, ‫חזי‬, ‫פשר‬, and ‫חוי‬. In the light of this impressive list of shared elements, it is intriguing to note that variations of two central images in Daniel 4, namely those of the chopped down tree and the wild man among the beasts, also appear in the Book of Giants. The former motif appears in the dream-vision of Hahyah presented above (4Q530 2 ii 6–12). Of course the context is quite different and many specific details differ. Most notably, in Daniel there is one magnificent tree whereas in Giants there are many trees. However, several thematic and linguistic parallels may be observed. In both passages, there is a dream of a tree or trees representing the arrogant figure or figures. The tree or trees are destroyed by divine initiative, and only “shoots/roots” (‫ )שרשוהי‬from a “stump” (‫ )עקר‬are allowed to survive. In each text, the shoots/roots of the stump signify future life in recognition of the supreme power of God (that is, the converted Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel, and perhaps Noah and his sons in The Book of Giants).12 In Daniel, the punishment is decreed by “the watchers” (v. 14). It is presumably they who follow the direct order to “chop down the tree!” (v. 13) shouted by the watcher who descends from heaven in verse 10. While in the Giants passage it is not clear by whose agency the trees are destroyed, the answer could perhaps be surmised from the parallel dream of the giant called Hiyya (= Hahyah) in the “Midrash of Shemḥazai and Azael,” according to which “angels came with axes in their hands and cut down the trees.”13 The second motif from Daniel 4, namely that of the wild man, appears in a separate passage found in 4Q531 22 3–12. 12 This interpretation of the giants tradition is explicit only in the later “Midrash of Shemḥazai and Azael.” Based upon the attribution of narration to Rabbi Joseph bar Hiyya, Milik, The Books of Enoch, 339, dates the work to the fourth century CE. Annette Yoshiko Reed suggests that it is a much later compendium of traditions dating to the early medieval period (Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 258–59). 13  See John C. Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions (HUCM 14; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992), 95. This reading is according to Milik’s “M” manuscript (Henoch Albeck, Midrash Bereshit Rabbati ex libro R. Mosis Haddarshan collectus e codice Pragensi [Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1940], 29, 14–31, 8 [fol. 10–11]). In the Oxford Bodleian manuscript version (Milik’s “B” manuscript), the trees are destroyed by a single angel. For the texts, see Milik, The Books of Enoch, 325. For a recent attempt to delineate the literary relationship between the Book of Giants and the Midrash, see Ken M. Penner, “Did the Midrash of Shemihazai and Azael Use the Book of Giants?” in Sacra Scriptura: How “Non-Canonical” Texts Functioned in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. James H. Charlesworth, Lee M. McDonald and Blake A. Jurgens (London: T&T Clark, 2014), 15–45.

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[ I am] mighty, and by the mighty strength of my arm and my own great strength (‫ובתקוף‬ ‫ )חיל דרעי ובחסן גבורתי‬4 [and I went up against a]ll flesh, and I made war against them (‫ ;)ועבדת עמהון קרב‬but I did not 5 [prevail, and I am not] able to stand firm against them, 3

for my opponents 6 [are angels who] reside in [heav]en, and they dwell in the holy places (‫)ובקדשיא אנון שרין‬. vacat And they were not 7 [defeated, for they] are stronger than I (‫)תקיפין מני‬. 8 [  ]rh of the wild beast has come, and the wild man they call [  ] (‫[ ]רה די חיות‬ ] [ ‫ )ברא אתה ואיש ברא קרין‬9 […] and then Ohyah said to him vacat “I have been forced to have a dream 10 [and] the sleep of my eyes [vanished], to let me see a vision. Now I know that because of 11 [the vision I will not] sleep, and I will not hasten for … 12 [ … O Gi]lgamesh, tell your [d]ream … (… ‫”)[… ג]לגמיש אמר [ח]למכה‬

The identity of the speaker in this mysterious text is unclear. Noting the arrogant attitude attributed to the giants in roughly contemporary literature (e.g., 3 Macc 2:4, Wis 14:6, and Josephus, Ant. 1.73), John Reeves suggests that the speaker is a giant.14 Matthew Goff agrees and offers a sensible specification. Since Ohyah responds to the speaker in line 9, and Gilgamesh is the only other giant mentioned in the passage (in line 12), it is reasonable to claim that the latter figure speaks in lines 3–7.15 If he is correct, then here the giant Gilgamesh tells of his tremendous power, his conflict with both earthly and heavenly entities, and his defeat brought about by the superiority of the latter. The themes and some of the language here are reminiscent of the conflict in Daniel 7 involving the fourth beast. For my present purpose, however, I wish to focus on the continuation of this passage in lines 8–9 and its relationship to Daniel 4. Émile Puech reconstructs and translates as follows:16 ‫ [נקמתהון ] וכדן אמר לה אוהיה‬9 ‫ [ ארו קל גע]רה די חיות ברא אתה ואיש ברא קרין‬8 8 [Voici que] parvint [le cri du gémi]ssment des bêtes des champs et (que) les hommes de la campagne crièrent 9 [leur(s) vengeance(s).] Et ainsi lui dit Ohyah.

According to this reading, this passage refers to the shrieks of both beasts and humans, who have suffered violence at the hands of the giants and are seeking justice. This would fit nicely with the report in the Book of Watchers that describes the earth as bringing accusation against “the lawless ones” (1 En. 7:6; cf. 8:4; 9:2–3, 10). However, such a narrative detail would awkwardly interrupt the speech in lines 3–7 and Ohyah’s response to it in line 9. Further, one might ask why beasts and men are specified as being “wild/of the field,” a detail lacking in the Watchers passages. Moreover, the interpretation of the word ‫ איש‬as “un substantif collectif” is very uncertain and in this context a singular meaning seems more likely. Edward Cook offers a preferable translation:17  Reeves, Jewish Lore, 118. Matthew J. Goff, “Gilgamesh the Giant: The Qumran Book of Giants’ Appropriation of Gilgamesh Motifs,” DSD 16 (2009): 221–53 (242). 16  DJD 31, 74–75. 17 DSSR 3:495. 14

15 See

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[  ] of the wild beast has come, and the wild man they call [me] Ohyah said to him

8

9

[    ] and then

According to this reading, line 8 constitutes the continuation of the speech of Gilgamesh from lines 3–7. The singular “wild man” is thus best taken as referring to him.18 One advantage of this approach is that Ohyah’s response in line 9 appears directly after Gilgamesh is finished speaking, without any awkward intrusion. Now we are prepared to note several tantalizing links to the story of the king’s animalization recounted in Daniel 4. Both passages are reflective first person accounts of powerful figures beginning with arrogant words and followed by the realization of inferiority to divine power. If the speaker in Giants is indeed Gilgamesh, then both may be understood as Mesopotamian kings who have been humbled. If the first visible words in line 12 are to be translated “[O Gi]lga­mesh, tell your [d]ream,” then both figures have received dream-visions.19 Both passages refer to wild beasts in close relation to the protagonists, who are themselves characterized as beastly. The phrase “wild beasts” (‫)חיות ברא‬, which appears in 4Q531 22 8, also appears six times in Daniel 4, where it denotes the wild beasts with whom Nebuchadnezzar will dwell as he transforms into a beastly figure himself.20 Both protagonists are referred to as wild men. The phrase “wild man” (‫ )איש ברא‬in 4Q531 22 8 does not appear in Daniel 4. However, in verse 13 Nebuchadnezzar is characterized as a man gone wild: “Let his mind be altered from that of a man, and let him be given the mind of a beast” (‫לבבה‬ ‫)מן־אנושא [אנשא] ישנון ולבב חיוה יתיהב לה‬. There is recognition of an element of social separation engendered by the figure’s wildness (in Giants, “the wild man they call [me]” and in Dan 4:22, “You will be driven away from men”).21 Finally, the characterizations of Gilgamesh in Giants and Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel as wild men both appear to relate to the Epic of Gilgamesh. The portrayal of Gilgamesh roaming like a wild man after the death of Enkidu is a well-known image from the Mesopotamian epic.22 And, as Matthias Henze has pointed out, Daniel’s portrait of Nebuchadnezzar as a wild man is best understood as a polemical reversal of Enkidu’s metamorphosis portrayed in Gilgamesh.23

18 On

the “wild man” tradition in Mesopotamian texts (in relation to the book of Daniel), see Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 93–99. 19  So Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, 164. Puech’s reading (“[Then Gi]lgamesh said, ‘Your [d]ream is …’”) is also possible. See DJD 31, 75, 77–78. 20  Vv. 9, 18, 20, 22, 29. Cf. Dan 2:38. 21  Cf. Henryk Drawnel, “The Mesopotamian Background of the Enochic Giants and Evil Spirits,” DSD 21 (2014): 14–38 (21–22 n. 24). 22  Gregory Mobley, “The Wild Man in the Bible and the Ancient Near East,” JBL 116 (1997): 217–33 (221–22). 23 Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 90–99.

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III. Explanations and Implications Having presented the parallel features in Daniel 4 and the Book of Giants, I would like to explore some possible explanations and implications. First, we may address how these tantalizing points of contact are best understood. While I have focused on similarities, the fact remains that these compositions are vastly different. The common elements are employed in diverse ways and in much different contexts, and direct literary dependence in either direction cannot be demonstrated. This is true even in the case of the most striking parallel between Giants and Danielic tradition, the twin throne theophanies (4Q530 2 ii 15–20 and Dan 7:9–10).24 At the same time, it would be insufficient to describe the correspondences as entirely coincidental. It seems clear from the heavy concentration of shared themes, literary forms, and language that the scribal circles responsible for Giants and Daniel 4 made use of a shared pool of traditions and creatively adapted them in accordance with their own specific aims. It is worth noting that this conclusion is in harmony with a growing body of scholarship illuminating the extent to which the larger Aramaic corpus discovered at Qumran, which includes some thirty literary compositions, exhibits shared concerns and dependence on a common pool of language and tradition, suggesting that clusters of these texts originated in closely related scribal circles.25 However, in our case the evidence can perhaps lead us to a greater degree of specificity. In particular, the striking combination of the tree stump and wild man motifs in connection with revelatory dreams portending the humbling of arrogant figures of power in each text raises a question: are we dealing with two works that have independently

24 See

the secondary literature cited in n. 6.  See, e.g., the studies of Daniel A. Machiela and Andrew B. Perrin, “Tobit and the Genesis Apocryphon: Toward a Family Portrait,” JBL 133 (2014): 111–32; Andrew B. Perrin, “Dream-Visions in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls: Shared Compositional Patterns and Concerns” (Ph.D. diss., McMaster University, 2013), a revised form of which is now available as The Dynamics of Dream-Vision Revelation in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls (JAJSup 19; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015). Some notable recent treatments of the Qumran Aramaic corpus, reflecting a variety of approaches and perspectives, include Devorah Dimant, “The Qumran Aramaic Texts and the Qumran Community,” in Flores Florentino: Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish Studies in Honour of Florentino García Martínez, ed. Anthony Hilhorst et al. (JSJSup 122; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 197–205; Jonathan Ben-Dov, “Hebrew and Aramaic Writing in the Pseudepigrapha and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Ancient Near Eastern Background and the Quest for a Written Authority,” Tarbiz 78 (2008–09): 27–60 (Hebrew), vi (English summary); Florentino García Martínez, “Scribal Practices in the Aramaic Literary Texts from Qumran,” in Myths, Martyrs, and Modernity: Studies in the History of Religions in Honour of Jan N. Bremmer, ed. Jitse Dijkstra et al. (SHR 127; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 329–41; Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, “Aramaic Texts from Qumran and the Authoritativeness of Hebrew Scriptures: Preliminary Observations,” in Authoritative Scriptures in Ancient Judaism, ed. Mladen Popović (JSJSup 141; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 155–71. See also the articles in Berthelot and Stökl Ben Ezra, Aramaica Qumranica. 25

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combined a number of the same disparate motifs? Or, do these affinities reflect common dependence upon a nucleus of traditions that had already been gathered together by the time each work was composed? In order to approach this question it will be helpful to return to the literary history of Daniel 4 in more detail. Fortunately, generations of curious inquiry into the background of this composition and some fortuitous archaeological discoveries have afforded us a unique opportunity to peer behind the curtain into the process of the transmission of traditions leading to the forms of the tale currently available to us in the Masoretic and Old Greek versions of the Bible. As I noted above, it is widely recognized that proto-Daniel 4 as well as 4QPrayer of Nabonidus reflect dependence upon traditions originally associated with Nabonidus. In particular it is clear that these two Jewish texts, which give no indication of a direct literary relationship,26 are both closely related to the sixth century Harran inscription, in which Nabonidus speaks in the first person to a public audience, presents himself as a religious teacher, shares a dream vision, and recounts the story of his absence from Babylon for a period of ten years.27 A recent essay by Carol Newsom illuminates the process by which Jewish authors of the Second Temple period could have produced new narratives about the Babylonian king, namely Daniel 4 and 4QPrayer of Nabonidus, utilizing a sixth century inscription deriving from across cultural and linguistic lines.28 She is critical of previous attempts to explain the development of these narratives, which typically employ source and redaction critical methods, as “too mechanical in their understanding of the nature of literary production.”29 Instead,

26  In agreement with Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 68–73; Carol A. Newsom, “Why Nabonidus? Excavating Traditions from Qumran, the Hebrew Bible, and Neo-Babylonian Sources,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Transmission of Traditions and Production of Texts, ed. Sarianna Metso, Hindy Najman, and Eileen Schuller (STDJ 92; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 57–79 (69). An alternative view of the evidence, namely that there is a linear tradition-historical development of sorts from the Harran inscription to 4QPrayer of Nabonidus to Daniel 4, is maintained by a number of scholars. See, e.g., Peter W. Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Craig A. Evans and Peter W. Flint (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 41–60 (58); Florentino García Martínez, Qumran and Apocalyptic: Studies on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (STDJ 9; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 129–35; Esther Eshel, “Possible Sources of the Book of Daniel,” in Collins and Flint, The Book of Daniel, 2:387–89; Collins, DJD 22, 86. Note, however, that Collins observes that “The fragmentary state of [4QPrNab] does not permit us to claim a direct literary relationship. The stories may be different developments of a common tradition” (Daniel [Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993], 218). 27  See C. J. Gadd, “The Harran Inscriptions of Nabonidus,” AnSt 8 (1958): 35–92; and more recently, Hanspeter Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen samt den in ihrem Umfeld entstandenen Tendenzschriften (AOAT 256; Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2001), 486–99. 28  Newsom, “Why Nabonidus?” 57–80. 29 Ibid., 73.

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applying insights from cognitive literary theory, she proposes that a process of oral transmission and “conceptual integration” or “blending” stands behind their construction. For Newsom, the starting point was the public recitation of the Harran inscription. The contents of this long text most likely were not memorized verbatim. Instead, the “memory of it would be stored as a template, an outline with key points of content.”30 Over a period of several centuries Jewish tradents creatively reconfigured and blended parts of this template with an array of stock elements from the repertoire of traditional Jewish sources. So, in the case of the Prayer of Nabonidus, elements from the Harran inscription could have been blended with a source like Isaiah 38, the tale of King Hezekiah’s illness, healing, and thanksgiving prayer. In proto-Daniel 4 elements of the same template could have been blended with Jewish traditions such as the dream interpretation in Genesis 41 or the story of royal disobedience, chastisement, and reform in 2 Samuel 12.31 Whether or not one agrees with these specific suggestions, Newsom’s general explanation of the process behind the construction of these narratives is compelling; its greatest strength is the realistic picture it provides of the centuries-long process of transmission of tradition and creativity lying behind the production of Daniel 4 and the Prayer of Nabonidus. Moreover, it illustrates how these two quite similar Jewish Aramaic texts could come to be constructed independently of one another, avoiding the improbable assumption of a direct literary relationship between them. While Newsom does not concern herself with in-depth speculation regarding the complex web of component sources utilized to construct Daniel 4, scholars have already identified a number of traditions that were likely interwoven with the material from the Harran inscription. The most important of these for our present purposes are the images of the chopped down tree and the king as wild man, which, many source critics argue, originally circulated separately before being combined in Daniel 4.32 Each of these motifs can be traced back to Mesopotamian tradition and, within their Danielic context, may be understood to function as anti-Babylonian polemics. The portrayal of the king as an enormous tree in Daniel 4 appears to derive from the image of the cosmic tree, a well-known symbol of cosmic order in the ancient Near East.33 In Sumerian and Assyrian sources, the king is sometimes equated with the cosmic tree as a means of associating him with the maintenance

30 Ibid.,

74.  Ibid., 74–76. 32  Haag, Die Errettung Daniels, 23; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 101–13. See also Collins, Daniel, 219. 33  See, e.g., Geo Widengren, The King and the Tree of Life in Ancient Near Eastern Religion (UUÅ 1951.4; Uppsala: Lundequist, 1951); E. O. James, The Tree of Life: An Archaeological Study (SHR 11; Leiden: Brill, 1966). 31

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of divine order.34 In Nebuchadnezzar’s inscription at Wadi Brisa in northern Lebanon, to which I shall return below, Babylon may be compared to a great shelter-providing tree.35 Herodotus conveys the tradition of dreams associating the Persian kings Cyrus and Xerxes with enormous vegetation that grows to cover the earth (1.108; 7.19). In an apparent reversal of this widespread motif, the allegory of Ezekiel 31 represents the Assyrian empire as a magnificent cedar of Lebanon whose enormous height is equated with hubris.36 The chopping down of the tree represents the divinely ordained judgment against the empire. Significantly, it appears that Ezekiel 31 represents one of the key input traditions utilized by Daniel 4. As P. W. Coxon notes, “the appropriation of the major theme (great height, impressive appearance and universal dominance of the tree),” as well as “the borrowing of several of the details, as for instance the picture of the birds at home in the branches and the shelter provided for the animals underneath,” demonstrate the extent of the dependence of Daniel 4 on the Ezekiel passage.37 The other motif of interest in Daniel 4 also appears to be connected to Mesopotamian tradition. As Henze has shown, each of the elements in the story of the king’s transformation in the wilderness finds an “exact counterpart [within the Epic of Gilgamesh] in the description of Enkidu, the wild man, before his metamorphosis into a fully civilized human being.”38 He notes the following points of comparison:39

34 See, e.g., Widengren, The King and the Tree of Life, 42–48; Simo Parpola, “The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy,” JNES 52 (1993): 161–208; Miguel Civil, “Literary Text About Ur-Namma,” AuOr 14 (1996): 163–67; and the discussion of Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 73–83. 35  So Rudolf Meyer, Das Gebet des Nabonid: Eine in den Qumran-Handschriften wiederentdeckte Weisheitserzählung (SSAWL.PH 107.3; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1962), 44; Aage Bentzen, Daniel, 2nd ed. (HAT 19; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1952), 43; Mathias Delcor, Le Livre de Daniel (SB; Paris: Gabalda, 1971), 113. For the passage of the inscription in question (WBN VIII 27–37), see Rocío Da Riva, The Twin Inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar at Brisa (Wadi Esh-Sharbin, Lebanon): A Historical and Philological Study (AfOB 32; Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik der Universität Wien, 2012), 61. She translates as follows: “I united all mankind peacefully under its (Babylon’s) everlasting protection.” The possibility of tree imagery is perhaps more easily discerned in the translation of Stephen Langdon, “Under its everlasting shadow I have gathered all the peoples in peace.” See his Building Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Part I: Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar (Paris: Leroux, 1905), 171–72. Cf. 4Q552 2 ii 5, where after being asked its name a personified tree identifies itself as Babylon. 36 A thorough discussion to the tree imagery in Ezekiel 31 is provided by Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2 vols. (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979–83), 2:146–48. 37  Peter W. Coxon, “The Great Tree of Daniel 4,” in A Word in Season: Essays in Honour of William McKane, ed. James D. Martin and Philip R. Davies (JSOTSup 42; Sheffield: JSOT, 1986), 91–111 (102–3). 38  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 98. 39 The chart is reproduced from ibid., 98.

The Humbling of the Arrogant and the “Wild Man” and “Tree Stump” Traditions

Daniel 4:30

Epic of Gilgamesh

He was driven away from men,

There was a young man who came from the mountains […] He ever walks about on the mountains […] (I.150, 153)

he ate grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven

All the time he eats herbs with cattle, all the time he sets his feet at the watering-place. (I.154–55)

until his hair grew like eagle’s [feathers] And his nails like [the talons of] birds.

Shaggy with hair his whole body, he is furnished with tresses like a woman. His locks of hair grew luxuriant like Nisaba. He knows neither people nor country. He is dressed like Sumuqan. (I.105–9)

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According to his interpretation of these points of contact, which seems quite plausible, the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s animalization constitutes an ironic reversal of Enkidu’s transformation. The king of Babylon, supposedly the pinnacle of all civilization, is transformed into a wild beast by the hand of the true king, the God of Israel.40 What emerges from this brief sketch is that the major components of Daniel 4 can be explained as the result of the blending of elements from the Harran inscription with two motifs with Mesopotamian roots that have been adapted subversively by Jewish scribes into anti-Babylonian polemics. Unfortunately it cannot be known exactly how or when these motifs were combined, and it is questionable whether we can reconstruct the actual sources of which they were originally a part, as attempted by some scholars.41 However, it is worth pausing to consider one intriguing piece of evidence which may suggest that the combination of the tree stump and wild man motifs were associated with Nebuchadnezzar already in the sixth century BCE. I am referring to the twin inscriptions at Wadi Brisa. These two texts sit across from one another on the facing slopes of a river bed and are accompanied by partially preserved images of the king. While the relevance of the inscription for the study of Daniel 4 has been recognized by

40  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 99 n. 118, rightly observes that the play on elements known from the Epic of Gilgamesh in Daniel 4 does not necessitate a relationship of literary dependency. Rather “it would suffice to assume that that biblical author was aware of these traditions and shared them with the various accounts of the wild man throughout the ancient Near East.” 41 See, e.g., Haag, Die Errettung Daniels.

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Fig. 1: Drawing of the Relief Decorating WBO.42

some scholars,43 the reliefs have largely been ignored.44 The relief on the western side depicts Nebuchadnezzar battling a lion (see Figure 1). A similar image of the king is preserved at Wadi es-Saba, slightly to the north. The relief on the eastern side of Wadi Brisa shows him standing in front of a tall tree with no leaves, perhaps a dead cedar (see Figure 2).45 In the accompanying inscription, the Babylonian monarch speaks of the “strong cedars that I cut with my pure hands in the Lebanon.”46 Following a long line of Mesopotamian leaders, Nebuchadnezzar apparently coveted the timber of the forests of Lebanon for his building projects.47 He boasts of his ability to exploit the important resource: “Strong cedars, thick and tall, of splendid beauty, supreme their fitting appearance, huge yield of the Lebanon, I bundled them like reeds … and I put them in Babylon like Euphrates poplars.” The continuation of this passage explicitly refers to the purpose of the monument in strongly propagandistic terms: 42 This image and that of Figure 2 were provided courtesy of R. Da Riva. They are also available in Da Riva, The Twin Inscriptions, 152–53. 43  See, e.g., Collins, Daniel, 224. 44  A notable exception in Jonathon Ben-Dov, who discusses the relationship of the Brisa reliefs to Daniel 4 and other contemporary Jewish texts in an unpublished essay entitled “Iconography and Myth from Nebuchadnezzar to the Fallen Angels.” I thank him for sharing this paper with me. 45 See Rocío Da Riva, “A Lion in the Cedar Forest: International Politics and Pictorial Self-Representations of Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BC),” in Studies on War in the Ancient Near East: Collected Essays on Military History, ed. Jordi Vidal (AOAT 372; Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2010), 165–93 (180 n. 76); eadem, The Twin Inscriptions, 94. 46  Translations of the Brisa texts follow Da Riva, The Twin Inscriptions, 42–63. 47  See, e.g., Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1:93–94.

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Fig. 2: Drawing of the Relief Decorating WBN.

“I installed an eternal image of myself as king to protect (them) … I reunited the widespread people in the totality of all lands, and I wrote an inscription in the mountain passes and established (it) with my royal image for ever after.” As Rocío Da Riva observes, this monument, as well as several others established by Nebuchadnezzar in the same region, was strategically located in an open, exposed area along a vital travel route. The clear purpose was to communicate imperial dominance to the broad public, including potential enemies, subdued natives, and future generations. While very few of those people who viewed the inscription, both during the reign of the king and generations later, would have been able to read Akkadian, the general elements of the empire’s message would still have been conveyed by the images of the king and “the monumentality of the cuneiform.”48 Indeed it seems plausible that such monuments successfully fulfilled their purpose of conveying imperial ideology across cultural and linguistic boundaries. It is not difficult to imagine that Jews in the region also would have become aware of the message.49 48 Da

Riva, “A Lion in the Cedar Forest,” 169–71. The quotation appears on p. 171.  Perhaps an analogy can be made with the Harran inscription, the contents of which clearly became known to and were creatively adapted by Jews in the Aramaic language. As mentioned above, according to Newsom, knowledge of the Harran inscription crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries by means of a process of public recitation and oral transmission (“Why Nabonidus?” 67–76). To be sure, the Brisa inscriptions are in many ways different from the Harran stelae, and it is not clear how widely the contents circulated, although preservation of 49

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To be sure, the dead tree on the relief is a far cry from the flourishing cosmic tree of Daniel. Moreover, while the characteristically Assyrian image of the king wrestling the lion does evoke the wild man tradition, it is quite different from the passive bovine imagery of Daniel. Even so, it is tempting to suggest that Daniel 4 has adapted the imagery from Wadi Brisa. If this is the case, we can recognize a striking critical inversion of imperial propaganda. Whereas in the Brisa monument the king’s ability to level cedar trees is projected as evidence of the empire’s divinely ordained power, in Daniel the king is himself a chopped down tree, brought low by the true king, the God of Israel. Similarly, whereas the image of the king wrestling the lion at Brisa is meant to project the king’s super-human might and territorial dominance, in Daniel his association with wild beasts is turned into a passive and pitiful image, again a loss of control brought about by the one true king. If these suggestions are accurate, then key elements of Daniel 4 may be explained as a creative blending of traditions associated with Nabonidus and Nebuchadnezzar dating to the sixth century BCE. We may now return to the question of the meaning of the parallels in Daniel 4 and the Book of Giants. We cannot rule out the possibility that the fusion of the image of the humbling of the giants through dream-visions with the wild man and tree stump motifs in the Book of Giants simply indicates that the author of this work has utilized a number of the same motifs, which were readily available within contemporary scribal circles. After all, analogues for each of these individual themes can be found elsewhere in biblical and Second Temple tradition. However, to my knowledge, Daniel 4 and the Book of Giants are the only two compositions to combine all three of them. This fact, together with the shared linguistic and formal features already observed, makes it more likely that the two works reflect common dependence upon a nucleus of traditions that had already been gathered together. I would like to suggest that the most likely scenario is that the author of the Book of Giants has drawn from the collection of traditions associated with the Babylonian king lying behind our current forms of Daniel 4. The most convincing support for this explanation relates to the remarkable innovation of the Book of Giants that the giants themselves were informed of their doom through dream-visions. As I noted above, this striking notion is found nowhere else in early Enochic tradition and seems foreign to it. However, given our discussion to this point, it is most sensibly understood as an Enochic adaptation of the tradition of the humbling dream-vision of the king akin to the one now prepart of the same text with minor variants at Nahr el-Kalb, located along the most important coastal road of the ancient Near East (Via Maris), indicates wider circulation. Nonetheless, if we permit ourselves to imagine an analogous process of public recitation and oral transmission across cultural and linguistic lines, it seems plausible that Jews would have become aware of the imperial message of the monuments, which was meant to be impressed upon the consciousness of the subjects of Babylonian rule in the Levant.

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served in Daniel 4. The setting has shifted from the realm of history to that of primordial mythology. The dreamer is no longer a king but two giants,50 and the post of the Jewish dream interpreter is now filled by Enoch. We may also note that the suggestion that Giants draws from this particular nucleus of tradition is entirely possible from a chronological perspective. Assuming that the Book of Giants depends upon the Book of Watchers, the earliest date of its composition would be in the late third century BCE.51 While the final form of the book of Daniel dates to the second century, we have seen that the sources of Daniel 4, and perhaps even the blending of our three separate motifs of interest, stretch back to the sixth century. This interpretation of the evidence is enticing for another reason. There is a natural explanation for why a Jewish author of the Hellenistic period choosing to expand upon the Enochic Watchers tradition by shifting the spotlight onto the giants and their exploits would find it useful to blend elements from the collection of anti-imperial traditions lying behind our current forms of Daniel 4. Scholars have noted the great popularity of the gigantomachy during the Hellenistic period, and the fact that this myth was widely understood as a paradigm for the conflict between Greek and barbarian forces – the victorious Olympians representing the Greeks, who embodied the ideals of virtue and order, while the defeated giants stood for violent and uncouth outsiders.52 There are hints that some Jewish authors of the period playfully reversed this symbolism in order to impugn the Hellenistic empires – that is to say, they argued that it is the Greeks, and not the subdued natives, who are to be associated with the giants. Such an interpretation may be implied, for example, in certain traditions critical of Alexander and the Diadochi preserved in the Sibylline Oracles (e.g., 3.383, 390; 11.198).53 Still closer to our present concern is the example of the Book of Watch50  As Goff, “When Giants Dreamed about the Flood,” 75–76, observes, double dreams also appear in the roughly contemporary Enochic Book of Dreams. He also refers to the two dreams of Nebuchadnezzar recounted in Daniel 2 and 4 and notes that the doubling is perhaps to be explained in relation to Gen 41:32, which states: “As for Pharaoh having had the same dream twice, it means that the matter has been determined by God, and that God will soon carry it out.” 51 See n. 1. 52 See Susan A. Stephens, Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 63–64; Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 53, 68, 102. Note also David Castriota, Myth, Ethos, and Actuality: Official Art in Fifth Century Athens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 138–43, who argues that the gigantomachy depicted on the east metopes of the Parthenon would have been conceived by Greeks of the fifth century as a paradigm for the defeat of the hubristic “gigantic ambitions” of the Persian Empire: “The gigantomachy, more than any other theme, could bring home the message that the Olympians had always supported and inspired the Athenians in their righteous struggles against arrogant lawlessness and disorder” (p. 142). 53  So Anathea Portier-Young, “Symbolic Resistance in the Book of the Watchers,” in The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Angela Kim Harkins, Kelley Coblentz Bautch, and John C. Endres, S. J. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 39–49 (45 n. 23). This article is

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ers. A recent study by Anathea Portier-Young shows how this work inverts the common allegorical understanding of the gigantomachy, identifying the bloodthirsty giants with the Greeks.54 In many ways, Portier-Young’s argument aligns with that of George Nickelsburg, who famously suggested that the destruction and bloodshed wrought by the giants in the Book of Watchers are mythological representations of the devastation associated with the diadochic campaigns in Palestine at the end of the fourth century.55 If early Enochic tradition indeed conceives of the giants in such a way, then the appropriation of the anti-imperialistic material behind Daniel 4 in the Book of Giants would be particularly poignant. Indeed, from this perspective the notion that the giants were informed of their own doom through dream-visions is not simply an entertaining mythological detail, but also an expression of the author’s desire to portray symbolically the humbling of real imperial oppressors.56 The ominous dreams of the giants would not only pertain to the inevitable subjugation of demonic evil in the Urzeit, but also to the eradication of empire in the Endzeit. And Gilgamesh’s first person admission of inferiority to God’s supreme power, coupled with his identification as a wild man and association with wild beasts could easily have evoked the image of Nebuchadnezzar, a paradigm for imperial hubris in Second Temple period tradition.57 Such a typological understanding of traditions associated with the Babylonian king would not be unprecedented. Indeed, a diversity of Second Temple period works, including not only Daniel, but also texts such as Judith, excerpted and adapted from eadem, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 11–23. 54 Portier-Young, “Symbolic Resistance,” 43–46. 55  George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Apocalyptic and Myth in 1 Enoch 6–11,” JBL 96 (1977): 383–405. 56 Given the likely origins of the Book of Giants in the late third or second century BCE, the giants would have originally represented Ptolemaic and/or Seleucid powers. If this suggestion is correct, it still remains the case that the work continued to be copied and read by Jews for several generations (the latest Qumran manuscripts date to the Herodian period [see Puech, DJD 31, 12]), during which time the multivalent quality of its apocalyptic symbolism could have been understood as referring to any number of perceived historical conflicts. Moreover, it is important to note that this socio-political understanding need not have remained the only or even the primary understanding of the text for any given audience since the mythological symbolism easily would have allowed for the work to have been understood simultaneously on different levels, e.g., as theological etiology or simply as entertainment. Of course the canonical status of the Book of Giants among the Manichaeans centuries later proves that the multivalent symbolism of the composition could be appropriated fruitfully by non-Jews as well. For the suggestion that the Manichaean Book of Giants was conceived as “a political pamphlet in the guise of allegory and myth” modeling the doom of historical empires and their human agents, see Michel Tardieu, Manichaeism, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 47. 57 Matthias Henze, “Nebuchadnezzar,” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 992–93; Ronald H. Sack, Images of Nebuchadnezzar: The Emergence of a Legend (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2004).

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2 Maccabees, and 4QApocryphon of Jeremiah show that Jewish authors of the time were accustomed to the typological equation of Nebuchadnezzar with the hostile rulers of the Hellenistic age.58 To be sure, these suggestions require a fuller discussion, and I have attempted to develop some of them in a separate article.59 Presently, however, I would like to conclude by mentioning two further implications of this interpretation. First, if I am correct that the Book of Giants has utilized the nucleus of traditions behind Daniel 4 in such a manner, this would affirm the view of many scholars who have suspected that the use of Mesopotamian elements in the Book of Giants, and particularly the attribution of the names Gilgamesh and Ḥobabish to two of the giants, reflects an attitude of hostility toward Mesopotamian-Hellenistic culture or rule.60 On a broader level, it would also lend weight to recent attempts by scholars such as Horsley and Portier-Young to read early Enochic tradition as a whole as literature of resistance which seeks to undermine imperial discourse by means of the revelation of a hidden reality in which the God of Israel reigns supreme.61 Finally, a word of caution. While the giants are portrayed collectively as perpetrating deceitful and murderous acts,62 such details are too general in nature to be related with certainty to events associated with particular conflicts known to have occurred during the period in which the work was composed. Moreover, while any of the intense military struggles between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids for control of Palestine in the Syrian Wars of 219–217, 202–200, 170–168, or the Seleucid-Jewish conflict of 167–164 could provide a suitable background, it 58 On this phenomenon in Daniel, see George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 83, 369 n. 57; Norman W. Porteous, Daniel: A Commentary (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 71; H. H. Rowley, “The Unity of the Book of Daniel,” in The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays on the Old Testament (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), 249–80 (277); in 4QApocryphon of Jeremiah, see Devorah Dimant, Qumran Cave 4.XXI: Parabiblical Texts, Part 4: Pseudo-Prophetic Texts (DJD 30; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 210–11; in Judith, see Carey A. Moore, Judith (AB 40; Garden City: Doubleday, 1985), 52–56; and more recently Gabriele Boccaccini, “Tigranes the Great as ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ in the Book of Judith,” in A Pious Seductress: Studies in the Book of Judith, ed. Geza Xeravits (DCLS 14; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 55–69. The story of the humbling and death of Antiochus IV in 2 Macc 9:5–27 shows that Jewish authors could model the fall of a hated Seleucid monarch upon the tradition of the fall of the neo-Babylonian kingdom exemplified in both Daniel 4 and 4QPrayer of Nabonidus. See further Doron Mendels, “A Note on the Tradition of Antiochus IV’s Death,” IEJ 31 (1981): 53–56. 59  See Joseph L. Angel, “Reading the Book of Giants in Literary and Historical Context,” DSD 21 (2014): 313–46. 60 See, e.g., Drawnel, “The Mesopotamian Background,” 38 n. 93; Reeves, Jewish Lore, 126; David R. Jackson, “Demonising Gilgameš,” Gilgameš and the World of Assyria: Proceedings of the Conference held at Mandelbaum House, The University of Sydney, 21–23 July 2004, ed. Joseph Azize and Noel Weeks (ANES 21; Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 107–14. 61  See Richard A. Horsley, Revolt of the Scribes: Resistance and Apocalyptic Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010); Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire. 62 See, e.g., 1Q23 14; 4Q531 19; 4Q533 4.

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is not necessary to posit such a specific crisis as the motivation for composition. The realities of life under Hellenistic imperial occupation could have sufficed.63 Moreover, there are hints in the Book of Giants that signal a more nuanced and developed plot. The giants argue with one another and there are perhaps different factions among them.64 Thus, if I am correct that the Book of Giants models the humbling of Hellenistic figures of power, it seems that the composition now before us preserves only the remains of a complex allegory, whose original referents cannot be recovered.

 Daniel Smith-Christopher, “Daniel,” NIB 7:23–33.  See, e.g., 6Q8 1; 4Q530 2 ii 1–3. Note also the reconstruction of the plot by Goff, “Gilgamesh the Giant,” 238–46. 63 64

Throne Theophanies, Dream Visions, and Righteous(?) Seers Daniel, the Book of Giants, and 1 Enoch Reconsidered Amanda M. Davis Bledsoe Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

I. Introduction The Book of Daniel, the Enochic Book of Watchers, and the Aramaic Book of Giants each preserve a throne theophany, in which the seer observes the deity seated upon a throne and surrounded by a vast number of attendants.1 Although the tradition of a throne theophany is not unique to these three accounts – see, for example, Isaiah 6 or Ezekiel 1  – they share enough features of both form and content that analyses of these texts have focused almost exclusively on the question of their relationship. In several studies two or (less often) all three of these throne theophanies have been compared in an attempt to identify one as dependent on the other(s).2 Some, however, have proposed a more nuanced understanding of this relationship, namely that all three texts in their current 1  For Daniel 7, the text used is the MT. Only fragments of this chapter have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, but none containing the throne theophany of vv. 9–10. For the text of Watchers (specifically 1 Enoch 14), this essay in general follows George W. E. Nickelsburg (1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108 [Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001]). The relevant text of Aramaic Giants is contained in one composite manuscript (4Q530 2 ii). 2  From its first publication, the throne theophany of Aramaic Giants was already assumed to have relied on the book of Daniel for its shape and language; see Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). A major proponent of Enochic priority is Helge S. Kvanvig, “Henoch und der Menschensohn. Das Verhältnis von Hen 14 zu Dan 7,” ST 38 (1984): 101–33; idem, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and of the Son of Man (WMANT 61; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1988); idem, “Throne Visions and Monsters: The Encounter Between Danielic and Enochic Traditions,” ZAW 117 (2005): 249–72; idem, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading (JSJSup 149; Leiden: Brill, 2011). More recently, Ryan E. Stokes has argued for Danielic priority over 1 Enoch 14. See his “The Throne Visions of Daniel 7, 1 Enoch 14, and the Qumran Book of Giants (4Q530): An Analysis of Their Literary Relationship,” DSD 15 (2008): 340–58.

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form were shaped by an earlier tradition (either oral or written) which each has preserved intact to varying degrees.3 In this paper, I will explore some of the shared features of these three accounts, looking at their individual portrayals of the deity, the thrones, and the attendants. After evaluating the proposals for direct dependence, I maintain there is simply not enough evidence to establish the precise relationship between these texts. Moving beyond questions of dependence, relationship, and influence, I consider instead the function of the throne theophany within their respective larger contexts: in each case the theophany is part of a dream vision. I suggest these visions are actually of different types and with different purposes that we can most easily identify by looking at the role of the seer in each dream vision. I will especially focus on Aramaic Giants, which is noticeably different from the other two in that it is not a righteous Jewish seer who experiences the dream vision (and sees the throne theophany), but a culpable giant.

II. The Throne Theophanies of Daniel 7, 4Q530, and 1 Enoch 14 1. The Deity Probably the most important element of any type of theophany is the appearance of the divine. In the throne theophanies of Daniel 7, Giants, and Watchers the divine names and descriptions of the deity have sometimes been used as a basis for understanding how these texts may relate to one another. In the Enochic throne theophany (1 En. 14:18–23), the deity is identified as the ʿabiya sebḥat / ​ἡ δόξα ἡ μεγάλη (“Great Glory”; 14:20), a divine epithet that appears only three times in Second Temple Jewish literature: here in Watchers, once in the Epistle of Enoch (102:3), and in the Testament of Levi (3:4). In the larger context, however, other names are also given for the deity, notably qeddus wa-ʿabiy (“Great and Holy One”; 14:1) and ʿabiy (“Great One”; 14:2).4 The relevant fragments of Aramaic Giants employ these same two titles in its own description of the deity – ‫“( קדישא רבא‬Great Holy One”) (4Q530 2 ii 17) and

3  See Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary (TSAJ 63; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 120–23; and more recently his “Early Enochic and Daniel Traditions in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in idem, The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts (WUNT I.335; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 103–19 (112–19); Jonathan R. Trotter, “The Tradition of the Throne Vision in the Second Temple Period: Daniel 7:9–10, 1 Enoch 14:18–23, and the Book of Giants (4Q530),” RevQ 25/99 (2012): 451–66; John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 300. 4 The generic title “Lord” is also used (1 En. 14:24).

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‫“( רבא‬Great One”; 4Q530 2 ii 2, 19 [rec.]).5 These two titles are not restricted to

Giants and Watchers, however, but also appear elsewhere in the Enochic corpus and in two other Qumran texts, namely Genesis Apocryphon and 4QWords of Michael.6 Thus, the broader distribution of these titles does not demand a relationship of dependence between these two texts, though it may be taken as further evidence for the closeness of these two textual traditions.7 In the Danielic thron e theophany (7:9–10) only a single title appears, ‫עתיק‬ ‫יומין‬, “Ancient of Days” (v. 9), though elsewhere in the chapter the deity is referred to as either “Ancient of Days” (vv. 13, 22) or ‫עליא‬, “Most High” (v. 25).8 While “Most High” occurs commonly throughout Daniel as well as elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible a nd numerous texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the title “Ancient of Days” is known in all of Second Temple Jewish literature only from this chapter of Daniel. Nevertheless, some commentators have claimed the deific titles of Daniel 7 and 1 Enoch 14 are related to one another. In his study of the relation of these throne visions, Helge Kvanvig reconstructs the Great Glory of 1 En. 14:20 as ‫ רבותא רבתא‬in Aramaic, which he translates as “the Great (old) Majesty.”9 Citing a segment of 11QtgJob where God’s greatness is paralleled with his multitude of days, Kvanvig suggests that the Danielic Ancient of Days could then be understood as a derivative of ‫רבותא רבתא‬, “considering that the time aspect of ‫ רב‬is stressed.”10 Provided that Kvanvig’s reconstruction is correct (though this is far from certain), the example from 11QtgJob in no way indicates the prevalence of this understanding of ‫רב‬, and it is still more difficult to imagine the suggested correspondence (and dependence!) between “the Great (old) Majesty” of 1 Enoch 14 and “the Ancient of Days” in Daniel 7.11  5  A third divine title ‫“( שלטן שמיא‬ruler of the heavens”) also appears in these fragments of Giants (4Q530 2 ii 16).  6 For “Great Holy One,” see 1 En. 1:3; 10:1; 14:1; 25:3; 84:1; 92:2; 97:6; 98:6; 1QapGen 2:14; 6:13, 15; 7:7; 12:17. For “Great One,” see 1 En. 14: 81:3(?); 103:1, 4; 104:1, 2; 1QapGen 2:4; 4Q529 i 6–12 (six times, once reconstructed).  7 For a discussion of the relation of Giants to the Enochic tradition, see Milik, The Books of Enoch; Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, 1–3, 24–28.  8  See also the related designations ‫קדישי עליונין‬, “the holy ones of the Most High” (Dan 7:18, 22, 25) and ‫ עם קדישי עליונין‬, “the people of the holy ones of the Most High” (v. 27). For discussion of the strangeness of the form ‫עליונין‬, see Collins, Daniel, 312–13.  9  Kvanvig, “Throne Visions and Monsters,” 254–55; idem, Roots of Apocalyptic, 561–63. Collins, however, characterizes this reconstruction as “extremely hypothetical” (Daniel, 301 n. 213). 10  Kvanvig, “Throne Visions and Monsters,” 254–55; idem, Roots of Apocalyptic, 562–63. 11Q10 28 3–4 reads ‫“( הא אלהא רב הוא ויומוהי סגיא [לא ננ]דע ומנין שנוהי די לא סוף‬Behold, God is great and his days are a multitude [(which) we do not k]now, or the number of his years, which are without end”). Cf. Job 15:10. 11  A much closer parallel for the Danielic title is probably to be found in the Ugaritic title for El as ab šnm, “Father of Years” of the Baal myths. There is some debate amongst scholars over how this second millennium BCE myth may have been transmitted and known to the author of Daniel 7. Without the need for establishing direct influence, in this instance it suffices to say that the Ugaritic myth attests the wider usage of divine titles related to time. See further

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Besides the naming of the deity in these accounts, the visions of both Watchers and Daniel also include a brief description of the deity’s physical appearance – an element lacking in Giants. In Daniel 7, the Ancient of Days’ clothing is said to be white like snow, and the hair of his head is compared to pure wool (v. 9).12 Though quite longer, the description of the deity in Watchers presents several points of comparison. It too speaks of the Great Glory’s clothing – it is “like the appearance of the sun and whiter than much snow” (1 En. 14:20)13 – and makes mention of the deity’s face, which neither angel nor human is able to look upon on account of its splendor and glory (v. 21).14 In a recent article, Ryan Stokes analyzes the depictions of the deity in these two accounts. He notes that (1) their descriptions follow the same order: the deity sits, his clothing is described, then his hair or face is discussed; and (2) their description of God’s clothing as white, specifically in comparison with snow, is not found in other texts of this period.15 Together he takes these two elements to indicate the probable dependence of one text on the other. Stokes then identifies the depiction of the “superbly anthropomorphic gray-haired old man” in Daniel as being rooted in ancient Canaanite traditions, and argues that this portrayal of the deity is necessarily older than that of Watchers, which describes the “glorious God, upon whom neither humans nor angels can cast their gaze.”16 He further reasons that the author of Watchers would have had greater reason “to alter Daniel’s vision according to the biblical tradition that one cannot see God” rather than the other way around and, thus, concludes that “the Enochic tradition reflects a development of that found in Dan 7.” While these elements do suggest some relationship between the texts, Stokes’ assessment of dependence is problematic. First, regarding the order of the material, it is not unusual that a description of the deity begins at the bottom and continues upward, and, in fact, we find this same movement in Isa 6:1–2: the Lord is seated, his robe fills the temple, and above him are flying seraphim. Second, while the description of God’s clothing as white like snow may not be known from other texts of this period, it is not so specific as to demand direct dependence. This is further emphasized in that the descriptions are not exact (white like snow vs. whiter than snow). Additionally, white clothing is commonly understood as a sign of purity, so it is not surprising that God should be Collins, Daniel, 286–94. Consult also other related titles in Gen 23:33; Deut 33:27; Isa 40:28; 1QapGen 21:2. 12 Or “lamb’s wool” (Collins, Daniel, 275). Snow and wool occur elsewhere in parallel (e.g., Ps 147:16; Isa 1:18). 13  Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 258 n. 20a. A variant reading in one of the Greek texts implies the deity’s clothing is even brighter than the sun. 14  See also Isa 6:4; cf. Exod 33:20. 15  Stokes, “The Throne Visions,” 347. 16 Ibid., 347–48.

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identified as wearing white.17 Finally, we must point out the inherent difficulties in relating texts based on assumed theological conceptions. These conceptions cannot be arranged according to some strict linear model, and there is no oneto-one correspondence between ideas and chronological dates. Rather different ideas could (co)exist at a single moment in time. By Stokes’ own admission the accounts of both Watchers and Daniel 7 were clearly influenced by the tradition of the prophet Ezekiel’s encounter with the deity in Ezekiel 1.18 The fact that the author of Daniel 7 consciously chose to portray the deity in a manner different from that of Ezekiel 1 (and which comes quite close to 1 Enoch 14) signifies that the Danielic idea of the deity was accepted even at a late period, and does not automatically make it older even if the tradition may be observed in generally more ancient writings (see further below).19 2. The Throne(s) After the deity, the second most important element of a throne theophany is the appearance of the divine throne(s). While the throne vision scenes seem quite similar in Watchers, Giants, and Daniel 7, we also find that there are discrepancies with regard to both the location and number of thrones the visionary sees. Enoch’s vision in the Book of Watchers opens with the seer’s ascension to heaven and his journey through the heavenly temple (1 En. 14:8–17). Within the innermost room, he sees “a lofty throne” upon which the deity is already seated. Enoch’s vision, therefore, explicitly takes place in heaven and contains a single throne. This contrasts sharply with what we find in Giants, where the giant Ohyah begins recounting his dream vision, “the ruler of the heavens descended to the earth, and thrones were erected, and the Great Holy One sat d[own]” (4Q530 2 ii 16b–17b).20 This vision clearly takes place on earth where an unspecified number of thrones are assembled before the deity takes his seat.21 The case in Daniel 7 is less clear. Although most commentators have understood this scene as occurring in heaven, I propose that in comparing this scene of Daniel with our other throne theophanies an earthly location becomes

17  In the Hebrew Bible, priests are typically understood as wearing white garments; e.g., Exodus 28; Leviticus 16. Cf. Eccl 9:8. 18 Stokes, “The Throne Visions,” 342. 19  There he is compared to a man and his appearance from the waist up is likened to metal and from the waist down is compared to fire (Ezek 1:26–28). The description of the deity in Watchers also speaks of the brightness of the deity. Cf. also Ps 104:1–4. 20  Trans. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, 120. 21  The thrones are ‫“( יחיטו‬erected”) (4Q530 2 ii 17a) and the deity ‫“( לארעא נחת‬descended to the earth”; l. 16).

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evident.22 Daniel’s vision begins with four beasts emerging from “the great sea” (Dan 7:2–3). After a description of the beasts, the text notes that plural thrones are ‫( רמיו‬v. 9), translated as either “cast down” or “set up.” What is clear, however, is that the thrones are not already present but must be set in place before the deity can be seated. This distinction presents a close parallel to what we find in both Giants and in another throne theophany in Animal Apocalypse, where the throne(s) must likewise be erected and are explicitly said to take place on earth.23 On the other hand, this sharply contrasts with 1 Enoch 14 as well as Ezekiel 1, both of which clearly take place in heaven and depict the throne as already in place with the deity seated.24 Beyond discussions over the location of the theophanies, the numerous thrones of Daniel 7 and Giants have also presented commentators with much difficulty.25 In Daniel, after the deity sits, it is also said that ‫“( דינא‬the court”) is seated (7:10, 26).26 In Giants, however, after the setting of the thrones and seating of the deity, the text notes that “[a]ll stood [be]fore him” (4Q530 2 ii 18a) – that is, only the Great Holy One sits, leaving the other thrones apparently unoccupied. Although it has but a single throne, Watchers also includes at this point the statement that the deity “needed no counselor, his every word was deed” (1 En. 14:22). Scholars have long recognized that the idea of the Danielic heavenly court probably has its background in ancient Canaanite traditions concerning the council of El.27 In his article, Stokes argues that this portrayal of the heavenly court in Daniel 7 is necessarily older than that of Watchers, where the deity is

22  James A. Montgomery (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1959], 296) views the scene as taking place in heaven, based on the coming of the Son of Man with the clouds of heaven in Dan 7:13. However, Collins (Daniel, 300) points out that the location is not certain and John Goldingay (Daniel [WBC 30; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996], 164–65) argues that the setting is actually the earth given that there is no indication of a change in location from earlier in the vision, i.e., “the great sea” (Dan 7:2–8). 23  The Animal Apocalypse (1 En. 90:20) explicitly takes place on earth – “in the pleasant land,” which is most often understood as Israel. See Patrick A. Tiller, A Commentary on the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch (SBLEJL 4; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 368. 24  Ezek 1:26; 1 En. 90:20. Both of these note that the seer saw a (single) throne. There exists, however, a major difference between the two accounts in that Ezekiel only looks into heaven (“the heavens were opened”), while Enoch is actually transported there. Cf. Isaiah 6, which abruptly begins with the prophet’s vision of the deity seated on a throne in the (heavenly) temple and includes no discussion of his vantage point. 25 See the discussion in Collins, Daniel, 300–1. 26  Different traditions have variously dealt with who was to sit on the multiple thrones. An explanation given in rabbinic tradition interprets this not as two powers in heaven but as two aspects of the same God (see further Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism [SJLA 25; Leiden: Brill, 1977], 36). 27  Cf. the above discussion of the “anthropomorphic” deity. See further Collins, Daniel, 286–94, 301, for a discussion of the Canaanite material as background for Daniel 7.

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“the sole arbiter of divine judgment.”28 He further suggests that the Enochic editor may have been uncomfortable with the divine council of the Danielic tradition and the assertion in Watchers that God needed no counselors could be read as a response to this.29 He likewise regards Giants as having secondarily adapted the narrative, viewing the plural thrones as a vestige of the no longer extant heavenly court.30 Stokes’ solution, however, is again problematic. First, the phrase in Watchers that is read as responding to the Danielic heavenly court – “he needed no counselor, his every word was deed” (1 En. 14:22) – is not certain. Although this is the translation given by Nickelsburg, it is not preserved in any manuscript but is rather a compilation of the various manuscripts.31 While the Greek text of 1 Enoch includes only the second phrase: “his every word was deed,” the Ethiopic text has only the first: “he needed no counselor.” Unfortunately, the Aramaic fragments do not preserve the text at this point.32 A second problem with Stokes’ analysis is his assumption that the heavenly court in Daniel would have been problematic for the Enochic editor. We have already discussed above the inherent problems involved when dating texts using theological conceptions. Like 1 Enoch, Ezekiel 1 also contains a single throne. Certainly Stokes would not suggest that the Danielic account preserves a more original version of the throne theophany than that of Ezekiel as well. We must, therefore, conclude that the author of Daniel found no theological difficulty with the view of the seated heavenly court, and purposefully opted to either retain or insert the numerous thrones. We can say nothing of how this relates to the Enochic account. In addition to these differences, the throne theophanies of Watchers and Daniel each include a description of the throne  – an element again lacking from Giants. In Daniel it is said that his throne (that is, the deity’s) is “flames of fire” (7:9), its wheels are “burning fire” (v. 9), and a river of fire issues out from before him/it (v. 10).33 There is no description given for the other thrones. The single throne in 1 Enoch 14 is described somewhat differently. It is “a lofty throne; and  Stokes, “The Throne Visions,” 349. See also discussion above regarding Stokes and the Canaanite influence on the description of the deity. 29 Ibid., 348–49. 30  Ibid., 354. 31  Nickelsburg (1 Enoch 1, 258 n. 22a) writes “the juxtaposition of both elements in 2 Enoch 33:4 indicates that at one time both were in a single text of 1 Enoch.” It is equally plausible, however, that 2 Enoch be seen as unifying the two traditions. Even if we do conclude with Nickelsburg that both phrases were part of 1 Enoch “at one time,” this does not necessarily indicate that it must have been so in Aramaic, but could have entered at a later point in the textual transmission. 32  We must again admit the possibility that even if the Ethiopic and the Greek texts are understood as responding to Daniel (or a similar tradition) it need not have been present in the Aramaic text of Watchers. 33  The Hebrew is ambiguous. Both forms are masculine singular, thus the river of fire could be understood as coming out from either the throne or the deity. 28

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its appearance was like ice; and its wheels were like the shining sun … and from beneath the throne issued streams of flaming fire …” (vv. 18–19). Both of these descriptions have clearly been influenced by Ezekiel’s vision, which also speaks of the throne’s fire and wheels.34 Our texts include an element absent from Ezekiel’s vision, though: the river(s) of fire. There is no need, however, to argue for direct dependence as this element is different in the two accounts – one river in Daniel 7 and multiple streams in 1 Enoch. We may also compare here another text that attests the wider usage of this element in the Second Temple period: in Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice “rivers of fire” are present in the area near the holy of holies of the heavenly temple (4Q405 15 2; 4Q405 16 2–3). 3. The Attendants The third major element of the throne theophanies of Giants, Watchers, and Daniel 7 is the presence of large numbers of attendants surrounding the enthroned deity. Although the presentation of a deity surrounded by their council or a host of attendants is a common element of biblical and Near Eastern theophanies, in our three accounts the numbers of these attendants are cast in a distinctive form such that they have been exclusively compared – a hundred hundreds and a thousand thousands in Giants (4Q530 2 ii 17c–18a),35 a thousand thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand in Daniel (7:10), and ten thousand times ten thousand in Watchers (1 En. 14:22).36 In his commentary on the Qumran Book of Giants, Loren Stuckenbruck suggests that Giants preserves a tradition earlier than that of Daniel since in the process of transmission numbers are more likely to be exaggerated than re-

34 There the throne is compared to lapis lazuli (Ezek 1:26) and the “living beings” have wheels “like sparkling beryl” (v. 16). Like Ezekiel 1, 1 Enoch 14 associates the wheels with the cherubim, although the text is corrupted at this point so it is difficult to say more. Fire is a common element associated with biblical and Near Eastern theophanies and the divine throne(‑room). See, e.g., Exod 3:2; Isa 66:15–16; Ps 18:9 (Eng. v. 8); 97:3; 1 En. 17:5; 71:2, 6; 4Q405 15 ii–16 2; 4Q405 20 ii–22 10. 35  There is some debate over how to fill the lacuna at the beginning of line 18 of 4Q530 2 ii. Some commentators have read ‫רבו רבון‬, “ten thousand ten thousands” in the space (e.g., Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 2 vols. [Leiden/Grand Rapids: Brill/Eerdmans, 1997–98], 2:1064; Kvanvig, “Throne Visions and Monsters,” 251). I follow, however, the reading of Stuckenbruck (The Book of Giants, 120–21), who identifies traces of a partial lamed in the lacuna, making the reading ‫ רבו רבון‬impossible, and instead reconstructs ‫( כל קדמוהי‬so also Émile Puech, Qumran Grotte 4.XXII: Textes arameens, première partie: 4Q529–549 [DJD 31; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001], 28–30, and Stokes, “The Throne Visions,” 352). 36  Contrast these with the numbers of attendants in Ezekiel 1 (four beings) and 1 Enoch 90 (seven “white men”), while no numbers are given in Isaiah 6.

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duced.37 Thus, we should expect that “hundreds” and “thousands” as we have in Giants was later transformed into “thousands” and “ten thousands” as we find in Daniel.38 Stuckenbruck is cautious, however, to show that this does not prove the direct dependence of Daniel on Giants, but only that the tradition is better preserved in Giants. The relationship of these two to Watchers is less clear since it also has the larger number (“ten thousand times ten thousand”) but lacks the parallelism.39 It is possible, however, that these specific numbers were part of a broader tradition associated with the heavenly entourage as evidenced in another independent theophanic tradition – in Ps 68:17, the chariots of God are “ten thousands” and “thousands.”40 Unlike the earlier embellishments regarding the appearance of the deity and the throne(s), it is perhaps striking that in not one of our three visions are we given any clear description of who these attendants are or what they looked like.41 They are rather described primarily by their number and their position of standing before the deity.42 There is probably some indication of their function in Daniel and in Giants, as they are said to “serve/minister” (√ ‫ )שמש‬before the deity, though they have only limited (if any) interaction with the seer.

III. The Relationship between the Visions of Daniel 7, 4Q530, and 1 Enoch 14 What does this examination suggest of the relationship between the three throne theophanies of Watchers, Giants, and Daniel 7? First, there are several elements 37  Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, 122–23. Kvanvig (“Throne Visions and Monsters,” 255) critiques this assertion since Stuckenbruck does not also conclude that Watchers is later than Giants, though Watchers too contains the higher numbers. 38  These verses are not preserved in the extant Dead Sea Daniel or 1 Enoch fragments and we must rely on much later manuscripts. We may thus speculate that the numbers of Daniel and of Watchers may have been inflated in subsequent copying of the text (i.e., by a later scribe/editor over the long transmission history of the texts), though we cannot know for certain and must work with the evidence at hand. 39 Nickelsburg notes that 1 En. 14:22 does include parallelism, albeit of a different sort, and suggests that the “wall of fire that ‘stood by’ him” could be the ten thousand times ten thousand (1 Enoch 1, 265). 40 Psalm 68:17: “The chariots of God are ten thousand and ten thousand, thousands repeating.” 41  This stands in sharp distinction from detailed descriptions of the seraphim of Isaiah 6 and the winged, wheeled beings of Ezekiel 1. In 1 Enoch 14, it has been proposed that the attendants may be related to the cherubim (v. 18) or to the “standing fire” (v. 22), but this is far from certain (Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 264–65). 42 The reference to their standing can be seen as a contrast with the court in Daniel 7, which is explicitly said to be seated. Similarly, in Watchers it seems that they should be juxtaposed with “the holy ones of the watchers” (1 En. 14:23), since the holy ones are said to approach him, while the ten thousand times ten thousand are perhaps not allowed to do so (v. 22).

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that suggest a close relationship between these texts. (1) In all three texts the numbers of attendants are given in similar form. (2) In Watchers and Giants we have the identification of the deity as the Great Holy One and the appearance of the figure of Enoch. (3) Both 1 Enoch 14 and Daniel 7 include the river(s) of fire and a description of the deity’s clothing as white like snow. (4) Giants and Daniel 7 share the plural thrones, books being opened, and the remark “here is the end of the dream.”43 While some of these similarities are striking, it is nearly impossible in any case to demonstrate convincingly which account is more “original.”44 In some instances where certain elements are preserved only in these two or three texts, it must be sufficient to say that they exhibit a close (though indefinable) relationship. When we broaden our scope to look at the visions as a whole, there is simply not enough evidence to demonstrate a single direction of borrowing or that one work could only have received certain ideas or vocabulary from another. Ultimately, the only conclusion we can reach is that all three of these texts drew from a common tradition(s) regarding the heavenly throne and then adapted it to fit within their individual context.

IV. Dream Visions and the Role of the Seer in Daniel 7, 4Q530, and 1 Enoch 14 While most former studies have largely focused on the question of influence, it is perhaps more fruitful to study the broader placement of these theophanies within their respective texts and to look at their overall purpose. In each of our three texts the throne theophany is part of a larger “dream vision.” In the ancient Near East, dream reports were structured in a very formalized way, with both content and organization being severely limited by scribal conventions.45 The dream report consisted of three parts, with (1) the actual content of the dream enclosed by a “frame,” that is, (2) an introduction and (3) conclusion that explicitly identified the narrative as having been part of a dream. In the introduction the setting for the dream is given and the dreamer is identified. Often, it is also stressed that the dream occurred at night or during 43  Due to limitations of space, the latter two similarities are not discussed in this paper. Dan 7:28: “here is the end of the account” (‫ ;)עד כה סופא די מלתא‬4Q530 2 ii 20: “Here is the end of the dream” (‫)עד כא סוף חלמא‬. 44  For example, Stokes’ discussion about the different portrayals of the deity in 1 Enoch 14 and Daniel 7. Probably the strongest evidence is Stuckenbruck’s assertion about the inflation of numbers. Even this, though, leaves some margin of doubt. 45  This is what A. Leo Oppenheim refers to as “censorship.” See his The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East. With a Translation of an Assyrian Dream-Book (TAPS 46.3; Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956), 186–87.

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sleep.46 In the conclusion, the end of the dream is described and a statement of the dreamer’s reaction may be included. Watchers, Daniel 7, and Giants all employ a structure that is similar to that of the ancient Near Eastern dream reports, although the order is not as rigidly followed.47 Each of these visions use a frame to indicate that the material belongs to a dream vision. They open with a description of the setting: the location of the dreamer (nearby the waters of Dan, 1 En. 13:7–8; in his bed, Dan 7:1) and the time the dream occurred (the first year of Belshazzar, Dan 7:1; ‫“( באדין‬then”; 4Q530 2 ii 3b).48 There is also special emphasis that the dream visions occurred during sleep or at night – “I fell asleep. And behold, dreams came upon me, and visions fell upon me” (1 En. 13:7–8); “Daniel saw a dream and the visions of his head upon his bed” (Dan 7:1); “Then the two of them dreamed dreams. And the sleep of their eyes fled from them” (4Q530 2 ii 3–4). Each of these visions, likewise, contains a concluding statement about the ending of the dream (Dan 7:28; 4Q530 2 ii 12–14, 20) or the waking of the dreamer (1 En. 13:9–10; 4Q530 2 ii 4[?]), along with the dreamer’s reaction to the dream (all are fearful: 1 En. 14:24–15:1; Dan 7:28; 4Q530 2 ii 20). While the frame of these dream visions may be similar and they all belong to the category of “revelatory dream,” the content of the dreams varies greatly and suggests that they are actually of a different type.49 This is further confirmed by the function of the throne theophany within each dream vision. The vision of Watchers can be identified as a “message dream.”50 In his sleep, Enoch ascends to heaven where he encounters the deity in all of his glory seated upon the divine throne (1 En. 13:7–8; 14:8–23). Enoch stands before the throne, where he hears a speech from God in which he is instructed to deliver a message to the watchers (14:24–16:4). The message he is given is self-explanatory; the 46  Cf. Num 12:6. While it may be emphasized by biblical scholars that the placement of the theophany within a dream is theologically motivated by the view that one cannot see God and live (Exod 33:20), it should also be noted that the appearance of a deity within dreams was commonplace in the ancient Near East. Thus, it may be better explained as a wider cultural phenomenon. 47 Daniel most closely follows the format outlined by Oppenheim in his The Interpretation of Dreams, while the order is somewhat altered in Giants by the double dreams. 1 Enoch is the most different: rather than a “frame,” the text gives a summary of the vision (13:7–9) that follows the expected structure, with the full contents of the vision given afterward (ch. 14). 48 No specific setting is available in the preserved text of Giants. If Stuckenbruck’s inferences are correct, it may be that Ohyah (and Hahyah?) separates himself from the other giants before he dreams (The Book of Giants, 106). The state of the text, however, prohibits us from saying more. 49  According to Oppenheim, “revelation dreams always contain a message and occur, as a rule, only under critical circumstances and then as a privilege to the leader of the social group” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 185). He identifies two types of revelatory dreams, “message” dreams and “symbolic” dreams. These are discussed in more detail below. 50  In the message dream, the deity directly communicates a message to the dreamer and these dreams are therefore self-explanatory. See Oppenheim, The Interpretation of Dreams, 200.

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watchers will all be bound and imprisoned, while their offspring, the giants, will be destroyed though their spirits will live on to wreak havoc until a future final judgment. Thus, Enoch needs no interpretation and upon his return to earth, he carries out his commission, repeating all he has seen and heard in the presence of the watchers (13:9–14:7). Within the message dream, the throne theophany serves the primary function of affirming Enoch’s role as messenger. First, the throne theophany affirms Enoch’s privileged position in that he is allowed to see the Great Glory upon the throne, though it is consistently emphasized that others are not.51 This stands especially in distinction from the watchers, who are no longer allowed to ascend to heaven and are no longer admitted before the Lord. Enoch, on the other hand, is active and moves throughout the heavenly building and is even sent as a messenger to the others – fulfilling actions normally reserved for the watchers and holy ones.52 Thus, Enoch’s authority is established as he is positioned over those to whom he is sent. Second, the text locates the scene within the divine courtroom, where the deeds of the watchers and their offspring are reported and the judge (the Lord) pronounces his sentence over them.53 Enoch acts as the “officially” appointed court messenger responsible for the delivery of the verdict to the offenders. He is confirmed in his role as messenger but also his message is established as authoritative and faithful since it is said to be the direct word of God. Thus, Enoch’s role as a messenger comes quite close to what we witness in the biblical prophets, especially Ezekiel 1–2.54 His message, however, differs from that of the prophets in two important ways. First, the message of judgment is not against the Jewish people, but rather against their oppressors. Second, Enoch’s vision is firmly grounded in the apocalyptic genre in that it serves as a message for both the guilty party at hand as well as for a future generation and eschatological final judgment (1 En. 1:2–3). In contrast to the vision of Watchers, that of Daniel 7 is, to use Oppenheimer’s categories, a “symbolic dream.”55 It consists of two primary parts: the vision 51 See

1 En. 14:5, 21. designation “holy ones of the Watchers” (1 En. 14:23 – or its equivalents, see Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 258–59 n. 23a) probably also serves as a direct contrast from the other watchers who have sent Enoch to petition on their behalf, and to emphasize that they have ceased to perform their intended responsibilities. 53  Nickelsburg (1 Enoch 1, 256) also identifies the influence of “current court protocol” on this part of the vision. 54 See discussion above for other elements drawn from Ezekiel. Cf. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic, 94: Enoch’s dream vision “is clearly colored by the throne vision of Ezekiel. This corresponds to Enoch’s role as a messenger, which can be described as a prophetic mission.” 55 A symbolic dream is enigmatic in that it “conceals with strange shapes and veils with ambiguity the true meaning of the information being offered, and requires and interpretation for understanding” (Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 3.10). See William Harris Stahl, Macrobius: Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia 52 The

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report (vv. 2b–14) and its interpretation (vv. 15–27).56 In the first part of the dream, Daniel watches as four beasts emerge from the great sea. They are increasingly violent and bring destruction down upon the earth.57 In this section, Daniel is entirely passive; he reacts with fear, but does nothing other than watch the events as they unfold. Veiled language and a cast of mixed-animal beasts conceal the true meaning of what he is witnessing. In the second part, however, Daniel takes a more active role in approaching one of the attendants (‫קאמיא‬, lit. “standing ones”) and asking him for the meaning of the vision. The attendant enters into dialogue with Daniel and interprets the dream for him. This interpretation is focused on the fourth beast and is itself given in rather veiled terms. Thus, Daniel awakes still terrified, although he does not seek further interpretation, but rather “kept the matter in [his] heart” (v. 28).58 The Danielic throne theophany appears within the first section of the dream report, inserted between the boastful words being spoken by the little horn of the fourth beast. Immediately after, the beast is slain and destroyed. In the second section where the dream is interpreted, the theophany is summed up in the phrase “the Ancient of Days came and judgment was passed …” (v. 22). Thus, within the Danielic context the primary role of the theophany is to serve as a court scene. The setting up of thrones and seating of the court lead to judgment over the fourth beast, which is rendered immediately. In this manner, the throne

University Press, 1990), 90. The message in symbolic dreams always pertains to the future and most often the assistance of a specialized dream-interpreter is required to uncover its meaning, although sometimes dreams can be self-explanatory – for example when the symbols serve as obvious substitutes for persons (e.g., Genesis 37). Oppenheim incorrectly states that symbolic dreams are experienced only by gentiles in the Old Testament, while God speaks to “his own people” in message dreams (The Interpretation of Dreams, 209–10). While this may be true for the Joseph narrative and the first six chapters of Daniel, it is clearly not the case in the visions of Daniel 7–12. Collins (Daniel, 284) also classifies Daniel 7 as a symbolic dream. Cf. Num 12:8. 56 The traditional frame of the dream is found in the introduction (7:1–2a) and conclusion (v. 28), which place the dream sequence within the larger narrative context. This is one way the vision of Daniel 7 differs from traditional dream reports, namely that Daniel seeks the interpretation within the vision rather than after waking. Perhaps this could be understood as a further condemnation of official dream interpreters, whose abilities have already been ridiculed earlier in the book (chs. 2 and 4) and the reader knows that true understanding comes only from the Jewish God, in this instance mediated through his appointed messenger (cf. Daniel 9). 57 In Daniel 7, the situation is somewhat similar to that of Watchers, but rather than the watchers and giants, destruction of the earth is being wrought by the four beasts (meaning four gentile kingdoms). They will all face judgment – the dominion of the first three beasts will be taken away, while the fourth beast will be destroyed and its body burned – compare here the imprisonment of the watchers but the destruction of the giants. 58  It is uncertain whether Daniel is frightened by a continued lack of understanding or whether he is frightened by his knowledge of the violent events which are yet to happen. That he does not seek further interpretation after waking could suggest that he does indeed understand, but it could also be construed as further antagonism toward earthly means of understanding (i.e., through human dream interpreters).

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theophany also symbolizes a swift change in circumstances brought about only through divine intervention. While the throne theophany functions differently within the dream report of Daniel 7 than in 1 Enoch, it is of no surprise to find that Daniel also plays a very different role from that of Enoch. He is not instructed to deliver a message to those facing judgment; he is in fact given no instructions at all.59 Thus, there is no attempt to warn the guilty party; instead we are simply told that Daniel wrote down his dream (Dan 7:1) and he kept the matter to himself (v. 28). This suggests, then, that the primary reason for Daniel’s vision is his own personal knowledge.60 Nevertheless, the act of writing down his vision (v. 1) also indicates that it should be preserved for a future generation – that is, the judgment does not pertain to Daniel’s own time, but to an eschatological judgment. The dream vision of the Book of Giants (4Q530 2 ii) is markedly different from those of our other texts in several respects. First, it differs in format. In Ohyah’s dream, the throne theophany is not only part of the dream as in 1 Enoch and Daniel, but rather it is the dream. It may also be connected, however, with another dream that immediately precedes it. The same night that Ohyah saw his vision, his brother Hahyah evidently also had a dream. In the ancient Near East, symbolic dreams sometimes occurred as repeated dreams in order to provide additional stress or to increase the clarity of the dream’s message. This could be the same dream occurring in multiple forms (for example, Genesis 37)61 or those which appear to multiple people, usually in the same night, either as identical or complementary dreams (Genesis 40).62 Thus, the two dreams in Giants are intimately connected and together constitute a distinct unit. The first dream, that of Hahyah, is clearly a symbolic dream. He saw the shoots of a plant, which represent the offspring of the watchers (i.e., the giants themselves), destroyed in water and fire.63 Presumably at the same time, his brother Ohyah experienced a dream of the divine throne, in which judgment was spoken, written and sealed. When taken together, therefore, the two dreams can be understood as mirrors 59 Cf. the Animal Apocalypse, where Enoch is likewise given no message to deliver, so it is apparently only for his personal knowledge. Enoch does, however, relate these events to his son Methuselah (1 En. 85:1–2 [on his deathbed?]), guaranteeing that they will be transmitted to a future generation. 60 That the message is primarily for Daniel’s self-understanding is made further implicit by the presence of an angelic interpreter, who is commanded to make him understand and then converses with Daniel and answers his questions. 61 According to Oppenheim, “these variations repeat the message of the deity by replacing one ‘symbol’ with another without disturbing the scene, the mood, and the trend of the action of the first dream” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 208). 62 Oppenheim, The Interpretation of Dreams, 209. These types of dreams are especially characteristic of the “late classical world,” although there they are more often message dreams than symbolic dreams (e.g., Acts 9:10–16). 63 Fire and water are both elements of purification. See, e.g., Num 31:21–24.

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of the same event, notably the coming destruction of the unfortunate giants.64 It is likely that this destruction should be understood as two-fold such as we find in Watchers, as evidenced by two means (fire and water) and also by the acts of speaking and writing (present and future). The second notable difference from our other two dream visions is that the dreams in Giants are in need of interpretation.65 While Enoch’s dream was self-explanatory (typical of message dreams) and in Daniel the visionary was accompanied by an interpreting angelic figure of whom he could ask questions, the giants are granted no such relief. After awakening, the two brothers recite their dreams before a group of giants, who all become frightened and desire to know the meaning of the dream-pair. For that they must seek out Enoch, “the scribe of interpretation” (4Q530 2 ii 14), to whom they send another giant, Mahaway, on their behalf (ll. 20–24). Although the precise interpretation of their dreams is lost in the lacunae, it is apparent that the giants’ destruction is signified. That the giants look for a Jewish sage to explain the meaning of their dreams is not so surprising. Indeed, when we look at other cases of non-Jews receiving symbolic dream-visions in the Hebrew Bible, they too lack understanding of their dreams and must seek out an interpreter upon waking.66 Perhaps the closest parallel to our text is Daniel 4, where King Nebuchadnezzar receives a frightening dream, which only Daniel is able to interpret.67 Like our text, the focus of the narrative is on the gentile dreamer, who often speaks in the first person, while the Jewish interpreter plays only a minor role.68 Perhaps another point of comparison can be found in that Daniel 4 tells not only of Nebuchadnezzar’s judgment but also of his subsequent rehabilitation and restoration – the Greek edition even has him convert. Perhaps, like Nebuchadnezzar, some of the giants are likewise granted an opportunity for repentance and rehabilitation.69 64  In Gen 41:32 the repeated dreams are said to indicate that the matter is fixed with God and will come about soon. 65 In his description of symbolic dreams, Oppenheim writes “the dream and its interpretation form an indivisible unit” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 206). 66  The cupbearer, baker, and pharaoh must seek assistance from Joseph (Genesis 40–41). Nebuchadnezzar relies on Daniel for the interpretation of his dreams (Daniel 2, 4). 67 For more detailed comparison of Daniel 4 and Aramaic Giants, see the article by Joseph Angel in this volume. 68  Stuckenbruck (The Book of Giants, 25–26) contests Milik’s identification of Giants as belonging to an “Enochic Pentateuch” on the basis that 1 Enoch is a pseudepigraphon of Enoch and Enoch plays a different and only minor role in Giants; he does not have his own dreams but acts as interpreter par excellence. Perhaps this comparison with Daniel 4 (cf. also ch. 3) offers us an additional perspective on the relation of Aramaic Giants to the Enochic corpus, since Daniel likewise has only a small part in the narrative, primarily as interpreter, though the narrative is included within the larger “Book of Daniel.” 69 See above discussion of the two-fold judgment. There is also evidence of the giants praying or repentance, though the context is fragmentary. See, 4Q203 4 6: “they prostrated and wept be[fore,” referring to Ohyah and Hahyah. Also prayers are contained in 4Q533 3; 4Q531 12; 4Q203 9–10; and 4Q203 8 commands someone (watchers?) to pray. Of course, even these

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Finally, the role of Hahyah and Ohyah within their dreams is quite different from that of Enoch or Daniel. There is no evidence of their being active in the dreams; they apparently do not speak, move, or ascend to heaven, but only observe. The brothers themselves are also remarkably different from our other two visionaries; most notably, they are not Jewish sages, but culpable giants! Their non-Jewish status becomes even more striking when we consider that Ohyah’s dream is a theophanic vision of the divine throne. How is it that a culpable giant would have been allowed the privilege of seeing the deity seated on his throne and surrounded by his heavenly entourage when even a righteous Jewish sage or prophet who sees the deity is terrified of his vision, or fear that he will face death because of it?70 There is perhaps some indication of the lower status of the giants in comparison to Daniel and Enoch in that there is no description given of the deity or of the heavenly thrones in Ohyah’s throne vision. While it is possible that these elements were added in Watchers and Daniel 7, it is equally plausible that these details have been purposefully omitted so as to prevent the descriptions coming from the lips of one so unworthy as the giant Ohyah.71

V. Conclusion In conclusion, rather than focusing on issues of dependency, relationship, and influence, this paper has demonstrated the simple heuristic value of reading similar texts together. By comparing the throne theophanies of Daniel, the Book of Giants, and 1 Enoch, we have added nuance to our understanding of how each text functions within its respective context which in turn allows for a better model for appreciating an ancient literary tradition than creating some rigid scheme of interdependence.

actions need not necessarily guarantee their salvation (cf. 2 Maccabees 9). See further the essay by Matthew Goff in this volume. 70  See esp. Isa 6:5: “Woe is me. I am ruined. For I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty”; 1 En. 14:21: “No angel could enter into this house and look at this face because of the splendor and glory, and no human could look at him.” Ezekiel likewise indicates a similar tradition in that he does not see the Lord directly, but rather “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord” (Ezek 1:28). 71  Stuckenbruck (The Book of Giants, 120–23) admits this possibility, yet considers it more likely that Giants simply preserves a more primitive version of the throne vision than does Daniel 7.

Giants and Demons Ida Fröhlich Pázmány Péter Catholic University

Qumran Aramaic manuscripts containing Enochic traditions are not identical with the collection known as 1 Enoch or Ethiopic Enoch.1 1 Enoch 37–71 was not preserved among Aramaic Enochic manuscripts, and they were probably not part of the Qumran tradition. On the other hand, fragments of an Astronomical Book, and those of a Book of Giants, not contained either in the Greek or in the Ethiopic tradition of 1 Enoch, were found among the Enochic manuscripts.2 The oldest Qumran manuscript of 1 Enoch (4QEna) containing parts of chs. 1–36 is dated to the end of the third century BCE.3 This Qumran fragment represents the earliest Aramaic manuscript tradition of the Book of Watchers. The booklet’s earliest chapters, 1 Enoch 6–11, contain the story of the fall of the heavenly watchers – a narrative generally understood as commenting on Gen 6:1–4.4 The 1 For an early edition of the Ethiopic text, see Robert H. Charles, The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch (AnOx; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906). A critical edition of the Ethiopic text which takes the Aramaic fragments into consideration, with translation and annotation, is Michael A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch: A New Edition in the Light of the Aramaic Dead Sea Fragments, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). For more recent research on the Ethiopic textual tradition, see Ted M. Erho and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “A Manuscript History of Ethiopic Enoch,” JSP 23 (2013): 87–133. 2  The Book of Giants is represented among the Qumran texts by 4Q203 (4QEnGiantsa), 4Q530 (4QEnGiantsb), 4Q531 (4QEnGiantsc), 4Q532 (4QEnGiantsd), and 4Q533 (4QEnGiantse). The fragments were edited first by Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). A further publication of the composition, including editions of 1Q23, 1Q24, 2Q26, 4Q206 2–3, and 6Q8 (all generally regarded as Giants manuscripts), with commentary is available in Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary (TSAJ 63; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). For the official publication of these fragments, with further additions and joins, see Stephen J. Pfann et al., Qumran Cave 4.XXVI: Cryptic Texts and Miscellanea, Part 1 (DJD 36; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 8–94 (with the Giants fragments edited by Stuckenbruck); Émile Puech, Qumrân Grotte 4.XXII: Textes araméens, première partie: 4Q529–549 (DJD 31; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 17–116. 3 Milik, The Books of Enoch, 140. Milik also supposes that the writer of the text followed Northern Syrian or Mesopotamian scribal customs; and this may also indicate the origin of Enochic tradition. The fragments also prove that 1 Enoch 1–5 already belonged to the so far known earliest Enoch tradition. 4  So also Archie T. Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6.1–4 in Early Jewish Literature (WUNT II.198; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). On the history of strategies of interpretation of this pericope, see pp. 51–95.

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basis of this view was the assessment of the J source in the narrative of Genesis, and the dating of Gen 6:1–4 itself. Earlier the J source was dated by the Wellhausen school to the ninth century BCE. After a period of re-examination (when even the existence of a J source was challenged) the source was re-dated.5 As for the book of 1 Enoch, known until the middle of the twentieth century primarily from Greek and Ethiopic translations, the collection was unanimously dated to the middle of the second century BCE.6 The finding of the Qumran Aramaic fragments of an Enochic collection has dramatically changed this model. Fragments containing calendrical and narrative material from the third century leads one to reconsider former theories and to date the earliest calendrical and narrative tradition to this century, and perhaps even (much) earlier.7 The Qumran Enochic manuscripts show a continuous use of these texts.8 As mentioned previously, among the earliest fragments from the end of the third century BCE are those of the Astronomical Book, the Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36), and a collection called the Book of Giants that comments upon the story of the watchers (1 Enoch 6–11).9 Reinterpreting, supplementing, reflecting 5 Jan Christian Gertz, Konrad Schmid, and Markus Witte, eds., Abschied vom Jahwisten: Die Komposition des Hexateuch in der jüngsten Diskussion (BZAW 315; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002). Joseph Blenkinsopp offers a new interpretation on the J source in Genesis 1–11 in this volume. See his “A Post-Exilic Lay Source in Genesis 1–11,” in ibid., 49–61. In his recent thematic commentary on Genesis 1–11 Blenkinsopp dates J later than the priestly source and argues that the Yahwistic redactor J put the narrative of Genesis 1–11 into shape and articulated its final theological message. See his Creation, Un-creation, Re-creation: A Discursive Commentary on Genesis 1–11 (London: T&T Clark, 2011). John Van Seters (The Yahwist: A Historian of Israelite Origins [Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013]) locates both sources in the exilic diaspora, with an inverse chronological order. 6  Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, 3 vols., rev. ed. Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, and Martin Goodman (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973–87), 3:256, suggests that Watchers, together with the Enochic astronomical tradition, “could even be traced to the third century BCE.” 7  As mentioned above, the story of the watchers is generally regarded as later than Genesis 1–11. George W. E. Nickelsburg takes the story to be a “rewritten biblical narrative.” See his 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 29–30. Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits, 2, considers Watchers to be a “third-century composite work” that comments on Gen 6:1–4; similarly Loren T. Stuckenbruck, 1 Enoch 91–108 (CEJL; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 87. Considering the possible relationship between the Enochic and Genesis sources, Blenkinsopp, Creation, Un-Creation, 123, concludes that “We can therefore no longer take for granted that the biblical version is the source and inspiration for the account of the descent of the watchers in 1 Enoch.” 8  4QEna (4Q201) is a copy of a much older archetype which Milik, The Books of Enoch, 141, dates to “the third century at the very least.” 4QEnastra (4Q208) was dated by Milik (ibid., 273) to the end of the third or early second century BCE. This opinion is confirmed by radiocarbon dating See Gregory Doudna, “Dating the Scrolls on the Basis of Radiocarbon Analysis,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls After Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, 2 vols., ed. Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 1:430–71. 9  Fragments of the Book of Giants were first edited in Milik, The Books of Enoch, 273–317. The order of the fragments is very problematic. See Florentio García Martínez, “The Book of Giants,” in idem, Qumran and Apocalyptic (STDJ 9; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 97–115, and the edition

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upon, and re-writing this earliest narrative tradition was essential to the growth of Enochic traditions.10 The story was commented upon first in the Book of Watchers itself, in the form of an explanation of the nature of the offspring of the watchers in 1 Enoch 15. The tiny fragments of the so-called Book of Giants contain a tradition about the sons of the fallen watchers, in the form of dream-visions, dialogues, and narratives.11 The narrative of 1 Enoch 6–11 itself as found in the Aramaic fragments is obviously not the first draft of the tradition. The kernel of the tradition is a narrative about Shemiḥazah and his companions (1 En. 6:1–7:6), which relates the story of a group of the sons of heaven (6:2), the two hundred watchers who glimpsed the daughters of men, desired them, and decided to descend to them.12 Their leader Shemiḥazah (‫ )שמיחזה‬considered the plan to be sinful, and he did not want to bear the responsibility for it alone (v. 3). Therefore the watchers, in order to fulfill their plan, made an oath to unite on Mount Hermon (v. 6). Then the watchers “… began [to go in to them, and to defile themselves with them and (they began) to teach them] sorcery and spell-binding [and the cutting of roots; and to show them plants …” (7:1). The women became pregnant from them and bore children, described as beings of gigantic (three thousand cubits high) stature (v. 3). The children of the watchers were “devouring (‫[ )הוו אכלין‬the labor of all the children of men and men were unable] to supply (‫[ )לאספקה‬them]” (v. 4). After this they began to devour men and “to sin against all birds and beasts of the earth], and reptiles [… and the fish of the sea, and to devour the flesh of one another, and they were] drinking blood. [Then the earth made an accusation against the wicked, concerning everything] which was done upon it” (vv. 5–6).13 These transgressions finally brought about the punishment of the flood (9:1–11:2). The story in the Enochic tradition serves as a justification for the catastrophic punishment of the flood. of the fragments in Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants. The document is at least contemporary with the Aramaic Astronomical Book and the Aramaic Levi Document. 10 Besides the reinterpretation of the watchers tradition in 1 Enoch 85–90 (the Animal Apocalypse), the tradition of the fallen watchers is a constant theme in Enochic tradition. Re-interpreted with cosmic and eschatological meaning, the theme of the watchers appears in 1 Enoch 12–36, 37–71, 2 Enoch, and 3 Enoch. On the watchers in Enochic tradition, see Ida Fröhlich, “The Figures of the Watchers in the Enochic Tradition (1–3 Enoch),” Hen 33 (2011): 6–26. 11  The story of the watchers as related in the Aramaic manuscripts is a composite text. This leads one to presuppose an earlier written tradition about the fall of the watchers (the Shemiḥazah narrative of 1 Enoch 6–7) behind the present text. Stuckenbruck, 1 Enoch 91–108, 158, supposes “a growing collection of different Enochic pieces that resembled one another due to composition and transmission within the same circles.” 12  The term “watchers” (‫ )עירין‬is from the root ‫ עור‬I (“to rouse oneself, awake”). Aside from Enochic texts, the word appears in Dan 4:10, 20 (‫ )עיר וקדיש‬and 4:14 (‫)עירין‬. Etymologically the root can be derived from Akkadian ȇru (“to be awake, vigilant”). See the entry for this word in CAD 4:326. 13  This translation and reconstruction of the Aramaic text follows Milik, The Books of Enoch, 166–67.

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An introduction about the order of the creation (chs. 1–5) was added later to the story. The narrative in 1 Enoch 6–11 itself includes secondary material, such as the teachings of Asael on weapons, dyes, and cosmetics given to humans (8:1).14 Further additions are the teachings of the watchers on the interpretation of omina (vv. 3–4), and the report on the punishment of Shemiḥazah and Asael (10:4–8, 11–16). Chapter 15, a text on the demonic nature of the giants (not attested in any Aramaic manuscript), is inserted into the section on Enoch’s heavenly voyages (1 Enoch 12–36). The Book of Giants is a collection of narratives based on the Shemiḥazah narrative, attested by manuscripts written from before the end of the third century BCE. On this basis one can suppose that the basic narrative tradition of the mixed marriages of the watchers and their consequences might have been shaped earlier, in the fourth or even the fifth century BCE.15 Unfortunately, the content of Watchers does not help to locate the story in a historical milieu.16 At the same time, literary motifs and names in the watchers’ tradition (including the Book of Giants) clearly reflect a distinct cultural background. Like the majority of the Aramaic texts found in Qumran, the Enochic collection indicates a conspicuous Mesopotamian influence.17 The Prayer  Earlier scholarship considered the section on Asael as part of an independent narrative. See Robert H. Charles, The Book of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), 13–14; Paul D. Hanson, “Rebellion in Heaven, Azazel, and Euhemeristic Heroes in 1 Enoch 6–11,” JBL 96 (1977): 195–233; George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Apocalyptic and Myth in 1 Enoch 6–11,” JBL 96 (1977): 383–405. Devorah Dimant supposes three versions of the story in the narrative. See her “‘The Fallen Angels’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic Books Related to Them” (Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University Jerusalem, 1974), 23–72 (Hebrew). See also Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 172. 15  Both Milik, the first editor of the Aramaic manuscripts, and Nickelsburg, a major commentator on 1 Enoch, think that the collection goes back to an early tradition. See Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits, 24–27. 16  Nickelsburg, “Apocalyptic and Myth,” 383–405, discerns the background of Watchers in the wars of the Hellenistic diadochoi and the Prometheus myth (Asael being a protos heuretes). A social model of the exilic times and priestly marriages constitutes the background for the composition according to David W. Suter, “Fallen Angel, Fallen Priest: The Problem of Family Purity in 1 Enoch 6–16,” HUCA 50 (1979): 115–35, and Riszard Rubinkiewicz, “The Book of Noah and Ezra’s Reform,” FO 25 (1988): 151–55. Joseph L. Angel (“Reading the Book of Giants in Literary and Historical Context,” DSD 21 [2014]: 313–46) also sees a historical context of Mesopotamian rulers behind Giants. 17  A Mesopotamian origin of the Essenes was supposed by Albright, Murphy O’Connor, and others. See André Lemaire, “Nabonide et Gilgamesh: L’araméen en Mésopotamie et à Qoumrân,” in Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, 30 June–2 July 2008, ed. Katell Berthelot and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (STDJ 94; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 125–44 (138). Ben Zion Wacholder observed that the Qumran Aramaic texts represent a special tradition, and gave a tentative typology of them. See his “The Ancient Judeo-Aramaic Literature 500–164 BCE: A Classification of Pre-Qumranic Texts,” in Archaeology and History in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The New York University Conference in Memory of Yigael Yadin, ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman (JSPSup 8; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 257–81. Lemaire’s article offers an excellent survey of earlier literature. For a general examination of the Mesopotamian background of 1 Enoch 6–11 and Genesis 1–11, see Helge 14

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of Nabonidus (4Q242) reflects knowledge of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire. The book of Tobit, Aramaic and Hebrew fragments of which were found among the Qumran scrolls, shows a familiarity with historical, literary – and also magical – traditions of the Eastern diaspora.18 The list can be continued with the fragments of physiognomies, a Mesopotamian genre par excellence, copies of which were found at Qumran.19 The most obvious example of the impact of Mesopotamian culture is reflected in the corpus of Aramaic astronomical texts from Qumran. The Enochic Astronomical Book is clearly based on the Mesopotamian astronomical/astrological tradition.20 Likewise, the revelations of the secrets of the cosmos given to Enoch during his heavenly voyage (1 Enoch 12–36) reflect a knowledge of Mesopotamian astronomical and cosmological lore.21 A similar awareness of Mesopotamian scholS. Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic. An Intertextual Reading (JSJSup 149; Leiden: Brill, 2011). 18 A fundamental article on the historical background of the Nabonidus legend is Rudolf Meyer, Das Gebet des Nabonid: Eine in den Qumran-Handschriften wiederentdeckte Weisheitserzählung (SSAWL.PH 107.3; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1962). See also Florentino García Martínez, “The Prayer of Nabonidus: A New Synthesis,” in Qumran and Apocalyptic, 116–36; Carol A. Newsom, “Why Nabonidus? Excavating Traditions from Qumran, the Hebrew Bible, and Neo-Babylonian Sources,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Transmission of Traditions and Production of Texts, ed. Sarianna Metso, Hindy Najman, and Eileen Schuller (STDJ 92; Leiden: Brill, 2010), 57–79; eadem, “Nabonidus in Jewish Memory,” in Remembering Biblical Figures in the Late Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods: Social Memory and Imagination, ed. Diana V. Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 270–82. The text 4Q550 uses Persian names and the story has similarities with Ahiqar. See Ida Fröhlich, “Stories from the Persian King’s Court: 4Q550 (4QprEstha-f ar),” ActAnt 38 (1998): 103–14; John J. Collins and Deborah A. Green, “The Tales from the Persian Court (4Q550a-e),” in Antikes Judentum und frühes Christentum: Festschrift für Harmut Stegemann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Bernd Kollmann, Wolfgang Reinbold, and Annette Steudel (BZNW 97; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 39–50; Michael G. Wechsler, “Two Para-Biblical Novellae from Qumran Cave 4: A Reevaluation of 4Q550,” DSD 7 (2000): 130–72; Sidnie White Crawford, “4QTales of the Persian court (4Q550a-e) and Its Relation to Biblical Royal Courtier Tales, especially Esther, Daniel and Joseph,” in The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judaean Desert Discoveries, ed. Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov (London/New Castle: British Library/Oak Knoll Press, 2002), 121–37. 19 On Qumran physiognomies, see Mladen Popović, Reading the Human Body: Physiognomics and Astrology in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Hellenistic-Early Roman Period Judaism (STDJ 67; Leiden: Brill, 2007). 20  James C. VanderKam suggests that the Astronomical Book should be interpreted in the context of early astronomical/astrological cuneiform works. See his Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Measuring Time (LDSS; London: Routledge, 1998). For the 364-day year in the cuneiform sources, see Matthias Albani, Astronomie und Schöpfungsglaube: Untersuchungen zum Astronomischen Henochbuch (WMANT 68; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1994), 197–99; Wayne Horowitz, “The 360 and 364 Day Year in Ancient Mesopotamia,” JANES 24 (1996): 35–44; idem, “The 364 Day Year in Mesopotamia, Again,” NABU 2 (1998): 49–51. 21 Pierre Grelot, “La géographie mythique d’Hénoch et ses sources orientales,” RB 65 (1958): 33–69. This article was written before the publication of the Aramaic fragments. Consult also Kelley Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19: “No One Has Seen What I Have Seen” (JSJSup 81; Leiden: Brill, 2003).

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arly and literary traditions is reflected in the tradition about the watchers. The items on the list of their teachings, the interpretation of various omina (8:3–4), are paralleled with those in the Enūma Anu Enlil, a Mesopotamian collection of omina associated with natural, heavenly, and earthly portents, and their interpretations.22 Furthermore, the names Gilgamesh and Ḥobabish (to be identified with Huwawa) in the Book of Giants show a familiarity with Mesopotamian tradition.23 It can be assumed that the calendrical tradition and the related tradition regarding the watchers – that is, the primary tradition that survives in the Aramaic manuscripts of the Astronomical Book, the Book of Watchers, and the Book of Giants – was shaped in the Eastern (Babylonian/Syrian) Jewish diaspora.24 The story of the revolt of Shemiḥazah and his companions is a paradigmatic narrative that transmits a philosophical-theological message – a myth about the origin of the evil.25 Sources and models of myths are by no means historical although they are shaped by the specific historical and sociological situations of their authors. Shaping the origin of evil is the first aim of any splinter group, sect, and separating community, such as minority or diaspora groups. Diaspora groups define themselves against their cultural background. Post-colonial studies have shown that identities of diaspora groups are shaped in terms of the ruling culture, adopting foreign elements, interpreting, fitting, and adapting them according to their own worldview and culture. The exilic Judaism that shaped the watchers tradition defined itself in the terms of Mesopotamian culture, adapting elements of their science and literature. However, the works born in the diaspora community bear a message that was very different from the Mesopotamian texts they utilized. The key elements of any literary work shaped in terms of a foreign culture are the purpose and mind of the author, and the intended message of the work. Elements of the foreign culture are reflected, adapted, and assimilated

22 Rykle Borger, “Die Beschwörungsserie Bīt Mēseri und die Himmelfahrt Henochs,” JNES 33 (1974): 183–96; idem, “The Incantation Series Bīt Mēseri and Enoch’s Ascension to Heaven,” in “I Studied Inscriptions From Before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1–11, ed. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura (SBTS 4; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 224–33. 23  For Gilgamesh, see 4Q530 2 ii 1; 4Q531 22 12; for Huwawa: 4Q203 3 3, 4Q530 2 ii 2. On the figure of Gilgamesh in the Enochic tradition, see Matthew Goff, “Gilgamesh the Giant: the Qumran Book of Giants’ Appropriation of Gilgamesh Motifs,” DSD 16 (2009): 221–53. For Gilgamesh reflecting a scholarly (and not a literary) tradition, see Ida Fröhlich, “Enmeduranki and Gilgamesh: Mesopotamian Figures in Aramaic Enoch Traditions,” in A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, 2 vols, ed. Eric F. Mason et al. (JSJSup 153; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 2:637–53. 24  Lemaire, “Nabonide et Gilgamesh,” 133. 25 First recognized by Mathias Delcor, “Le Mythe de la chute des anges et de l’origine des géants comme explication du mal dans le monde dans l’apocalyptique juive: Histoire des traditions,” RHR 95 (1976): 3–53. This article is also available in his Études bibliques et orientales de religions comparées (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 263–313.

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according to these objectives.26 The myth of the watchers answers the question unde malum? (“Where is evil from?”). The answer of the exilic Jewish author is that evil originates from impurity – understood as genealogical impurity, as well as physical and ethical impurity. Several facts understood as impurities (beginning with cosmic and genealogical impurity) led to the defilement of the land and the origin of the demons, thought in ancient cultures to be transmitters of physical/natural evil in the form of plagues and illnesses.27 The first of the sins of the watchers resulting in impurity is their transgression of the cosmic order and their mixing with earthly women.28 The teachings of the watchers  – magic and other activities associated with magic  – are further ethical impurities.29 The interpretation of heavenly and earthly omina – a practice regarded in Mesopotamian culture as a science – would be considered by a Mesopotamian Jewish author to be a forbidden magical practice.30 The sins resulting in the impurity of the giants, the sons of the watchers, are violence, bloodshed (cannibalism), sins against the animals, birds, and fishes, and drinking of blood (1 En. 7:4–5). Homicide is among the sins that make the land impure 26 Siam Bhayro (“Noah’s Library: Sources for 1 Enoch 6–11,” JSP 15 [2006]: 163–77) suggests that the model for the watchers was the tradition of the omen interpreter bāru-priests, while Amar Annus (“On the Origin of Watchers: A Comparative Study of the Antediluvian Wisdom in Mesopotamian and Jewish Traditions,” JSP 19 [2010]: 277–320) interprets the watchers as an inversion of the tradition about the apkallū. Ida Fröhlich (“Theology and Demonology in Qumran Texts,” Hen 32 [2010]: 101–29) sees the giants as demonic beings described in terms of Mesopotamian demonological texts. Henryk Drawnel (“The Mesopotamian Background of the Enochic Giants and Evil Spirits,” DSD 21 [2014]: 14–38) views the story of the watchers as “a manifesto directed against the main bearers of cuneiform scholarship and craftmanship that functioned within the walls of the Babylonian temple.” All these traditions, and others, are present in the story. Mesopotamian traditions were sometimes appropriated to have a positive meaning. See the analysis of the figure of Enoch in James C. VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (CBQMS 16; Washington, D. C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984). 27  The main list of ethical impurities – i.e., sins resulting in the defilement of the sinners and the land – is contained in the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26). Sins can be classified in four categories, namely sins related to sexual relations (zenūt), idolatry (i.e., foreign cults and cultic sins [often interpreted as zenūt], sins related to blood and bloodshed, and sins related to the dead. For the categories of physical and ethical impurities, see David P. Wright, “Unclean and Clean (OT),” in ABD 6:729–41 (738–39). For the theme of impurity in Watchers, see Fröhlich, “Theology and Demonology,” 101–29. 28  They became impure by this act (1 En. 7:1; cf. 4Q531 5 1). The Book of Giants explains their relationship as an example of zenūt (4Q203 [4QEnGiantsª] 8 9), one of the main categories of ethical impurities. 29  On magic as impurity, see Fröhlich, “Theology and Demonology.” 30 Most of the names of the watchers are related to astral and natural phenomena. The interpretation of omina provided by natural phenomena was a traditional science in Mesopotamia, its largest collection being the Enūma Anu Enlil, compiled in the first millennium. The natural elements in the watchers’ names coincide with those in the collection of omina. The Canaanite background of the names assumed by Michael Langlois (“Shemihazah et compagnie[s]: onomastique des anges déchus dans les manuscrits araméens du Livre d’Hénoch,” in Berthelot and Stökl Ben Ezra, Aramaica Qumranica, 145–80) is not supported by textual evidence.

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(Deut 21:9). Their consumption of blood is clearly a violation of the biblical prohibition concerning blood, stressed in Gen 9:3–4. These are the sins of the watchers and their offspring that made the earth impure. The resulting flood is not only a punishment of these sins but, at the same time, a purification of the earth (1 En. 10:1–3, 20–22).

I. Demonic Traits of the Watchers The teachings of the watchers – magic and witchcraft – are related by nature to the realm of the demonic. The watchers’ relation to the demonic world is reflected by another motif, the way their leaders are punished, that is, their binding. Asael is bound by the angel Raphael and cast into darkness, where the watchers are to stay until “the great day of judgment” (1 En. 10:4–7), while Shemiḥazah and his companions are bound by Michael “for seventy generations” after being forced to witness their children, the giants, perish (vv. 11–12). The giants are said to perish in the devastation of the flood (vv. 1–3, 20–22). Demonological texts regularly mention that a demon binds his victim. Disempowering a demon and making it harmless is likewise often through binding. The binding of demonic beings is a constant motif in the Mesopotamian creation myth Enuma Elish.31 The binding of demons is also a recurrent verbal and iconographic motif of the late antique Aramaic magic bowls.32

II. Demonic Traits of the Giants Several characteristics of the sons of the watchers the giants are also reminiscent of Mesopotamian demonological traditions. Important in this regard are the utukkus, a term generally used for demonic beings who were understood as originators of diseases and plagues – representatives of physical evil. The continuous presence of this idea is well documented in Mesopotamian tradition, with its heyday being the first millennium BCE. The series entitled Utukkū Lemnūtu is a manual of demonology based on archaic traditions with a rich account of demons and ghosts.33 31  Volkert Haas, Magie und Mythen in Babylonien: Von Dämonen, Hexen und Beschwörungs­ priestern (Gifkendorf: Merlin Verlag, 1986), 92, 170. 32  On the watchers in the magic bowls, see Siam Bhayro, “The Reception of Mesopotamian and Early Jewish Traditions in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls,” AS 11 (2013): 187–96. 33 The collection Utukkū Lemnūtu is a comprehensive survey of these demonic beings from the first millennium. For an edition of the text, see Markham J. Geller, Evil Demons: Canonical Utukkū Lemnūtu Incantations (SAACT 5; Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2007).

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Demons represent physical or natural evil in the world that appears in the form of various plagues and diseases, mental illnesses, famine, and natural disasters. Although spiritual non-human beings, they are not gods. They do not receive offerings, and they are usually mentioned only as members of a group, without an individual name. Since they have no cult and humans do not feed them with offerings, the demons try to get by force what they do not get by right: food and drink.34 In Mesopotamia they are referred to in various texts as the “spawn of Anu,” originating from the union of the sky god Anu and Earth (erṣetum).35 With regard to physical appearance, the utukku is “hostile in appearance,” “tall in stature,” and “his voice is great.” He is an indefinitely shaped, dim figure: “His shadow is dusky, it is darkened; there is no light in his body.” The demons dwell in hidden places. They are poisonous by nature: “Gall is always dripping from his finger nails, his tread is harmful poison” (UL 12.18). They usually roam in bands. They ravage crops like scorching windstorms and spring up on animals and humans. They kill people, shedding their blood and devouring their flesh, sapping their stamina, incessantly consuming blood.36 Demons were considered impure. They were thought to live in places not belonging to the ordered world of humans, such as subterranean holes, ruins of houses, outside of the city, and in desert regions. Demons’ abodes were also rubbish heaps and latrines, places considered impure, where refuse resulting from the degeneration of human bodies, scraps of food, personal objects, and the like were to be found, through which they supposedly developed their noxious influence on humans. Places beside waters and alongside canals were also considered the habitations of demons.37 The Enochic giants are described as beings of enormous size, “three thousand cubits high” (1 En. 7:3; cf. 4QEna 1 iii 16). They ravage indiscriminately crops, humans, and animals, and finally they begin to kill and devour each other. Their shared characteristics with the Mesopotamian demons are their extreme size;

 Wim van Binsbergen and Frans Wiggerman, “Magic in History: A Theoretical Perspective, and Its Application to Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Mesopotamian Magic: Textual, Historical, and Interpretive Perspectives, ed. Tzvi Abusch and Karl van der Toorn (AMD 1; Groningen: Styx Publications, 1999), 3–34 (27). 35   E. g., UL 5.1–10; Epic of Erra 1.28–29. In Mesopotamian culture there is no systematic treatise on the origin of the demons like the one contained in the story of the watchers. References to their origin systematically mention the union of Anu and Earth, without adding any ethical interpretation. See also Marten Stol, Epilepsy in Babylonia (CM 2; Groningen: Styx Publications, 1993), 13. 36  Haas, Magie, 220–21. 37  Rivers, springs, etc., are in Babylonian and Jewish worldviews connected to the subterranean waters (the earth being a flat disk floating on the subterranean ocean). See W. G. Lambert, “The Cosmology of Sumer and Babylon,” and Rabbi Louis Jacobs, “Jewish Cosmology,” in Ancient Cosmologies, ed. Carmen Blacker and Michael Loewe (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), 42–65, and 66–86. 34

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obtrusive nature,38 roaming in bands, and attacking their victims indiscriminately. Ravaging the work of humans,39 devouring the flesh of animals and humans, and consuming their blood are other shared characteristics. Their origin – issuing from the sexual union of heavenly and earthly beings – is likewise similar. The Enochic story considers this union to be impure. Mesopotamian demons are also envisaged as being wind-like in nature. Enochic giants are able to fly with the help of their hands.40 The image of the demonic giants of Enochic tradition is influenced by the Mesopotamian demonological manual Utukkū Lemnūtu.41 However, the demons of Enochic literature cannot be the result of a literary borrowing, and their origins cannot be traced to a single textual source. The author of Watchers certainly had in mind a conception of demons before he worded his text. However, when shaping his myth on the impure and demonic origin of evil and when describing the children of the watchers with demonic traits he consciously used the wording of various parts of the Utukkū Lemnūtu – a Mesopotamian encyclopedic scientific work with which he was familiar.42

III. Naming the Sons of the Watchers: Gibbōrîm The offspring of the watchers are called in the Aramaic fragments ‫גברין‬, a word referring to armed men and warriors.43 In some cases they are mentioned along with the synonym ‫נפילין‬, translated as “monsters” (although there is no sign that

38  Demons as spiritual beings are of unlimited extension. Utukkū Lemnūtu 1.73 mentions demons as being tall and like dwarves. 39  4Q531 5 1 states that the giants were devastating fruit, wheat, trees, sheep, and cattle. The devastation and bloodshed of the giants are mentioned in 4Q531 1–5. 40 Utukkū Lemnūtu 5.72 mentions that they can fly off to heaven although they have no wings. Cf. 4Q530 (4QEnGiantsb) 7 ii 4. 41  Fröhlich, “Theology and Demonology.” Recently Drawnel (“The Mesopotamian Background of the Enochic Giants,” 14–38) has called attention to this parallel. 42 Unfortunately no data survives about schools and scribal tradition of Jews living in the exilic diaspora. It is not known if clerks and people who could read were trained in cuneiform, or if Utukkū Lemnūtu and other scholarly compilations and literary works were studied in original or if these works circulated in Aramaic translation. Aramaic works with a Mesopotamian background like Ahiqar, a copy of which was possessed by the Jewish community of Elephantine, testify to the existence of Mesopotamian Aramaic literature that was read outside of Mesopotamia. As a result of the perishable nature of the materials on which the bulk of Aramaic literature was written, much has been lost since antiquity, contrary to the better preserved cuneiform. 43  They are described as ‫“( גברין‬giants”) in 4Q201 (4QEna) 1 iii 16 (rec.); 4Q531 (4QEnGic) 1 3 (rec.), 5; ‫“( גבריא‬the giants”) in 4Q201 1 iii 18 (rec.); 4Q203 7a 7; 4Q530 (4QEnGiants antsb) 2 ii 3, 13, 15; 4Q530 7 ii 3; 4Q531 7 4; ‫“( כנשת גבריא‬a gathering of the giants”) in 4Q530 1 i 8; ‫“( ההיה גברוא‬Hahyah the giant”) in 4Q530 2 ii 6 (rec.); and ‫“( גברוא‬O giants”) in 4Q530 2 ii 16.

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these beings had a mixed – human and animal – nature).44 The name ‫ גברין‬refers to their state (armed, mighty men), not their stature which is described as gigantic in a single passage (1 En. 7:3). The term ‫ גבור‬does not involve the idea of a superhuman or gigantic stature. It was the Greek translation that introduced a term (γίγας) involving the notion of superhuman stature.45 Other names of the children issuing from the mixed (heavenly and earthly) marriages are “bastard” (‫ )ממזר‬and “spirit” (‫)רוח‬.46 1 Enoch 15:8 refers to the offspring of the watchers as spirits. According to 1 Enoch 15 the giants are spiritual beings, following their fathers’ nature: they do not eat, they are not thirsty and attack people. Their destructiveness first and foremost affects children and women, as they were born of women.47 The word “bastards” (Heb. ‫ )ממזרים‬is attested with “spirit,” along with related terms from 1 En. 10:9: “the bastards, the half-breeds, the souls of miscegenation, the sons of the watchers.” A non-Enochic source from Qumran, 4Q510–511, calls them in a list of demons ‫“( רוחות ממזרים‬the spirits of the bastards”) (4Q510 1 5–8; 4Q511 10 1–5).48 This expression refers to their mixed origin, a form of genealogical impurity. Actually, none of these words refers to the stature of the giants. However, their large stature is not simply a late addition influenced by the Greek gigantes. The superhuman, spiritual (windlike) nature of the demonic beings suggests that they were intended to have not only a gigantic but also a cosmic stature. The wind-like nature of the giants is corroborated by the reference to a quality that, among others, evokes the de The noun ‫ נפילין‬derives from the root ‫“( נפל‬to fall”) and can signify fallen people, fallen heroes, or an aborted embryo. The term used as a synonym of ‫ גברין‬may have the first meaning. However, a pun with the second meaning cannot be excluded. The term ‫ נפילין‬is associated with the synonym ‫ גברין‬in the following texts: ‫“( כל גבריא [ונפיליא‬all the giants [and monsters”) in 4Q530 2 ii 20–21; ‫“( נפיליא (?) (ו)]גבריא‬the monsters [?] and] the giants”) in 4Q530 2 ii 21; ‫“( גברין ונפילין‬giants and monsters”) in 4Q531 1 2. The term stands alone in ‫“( נפיליא‬the monsters”) in 4Q530 2 ii 6; 4Q531 1 8; ‫“( וכל נפילי ארעא‬and all the monsters of the earth”) in 4Q530 7 ii 8; ‫“( ולנ]פילין‬and to the m]onsters”) in 4Q531 7 2; and ]‫“( ונפילי[ן‬and monster[s]”) in 4Q532 2 3. 45 Hesiod (Theog. 185) describes the birth of the Gigantes, offspring of Gaia (Earth), and Uranus (Sky), following the generations of Titans, the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers, known for the gigantomachy, their battle with the Olympian gods. 46 See the terms ‫ ממזריא‬in 4Q202 (4QEnb) 1 iv 5 and ‫“( רוחות ממזריא‬the spirits of the bastards”) in 4Q204 (4QEnc) 1 v 2 (both reconstructed). 47  Unfortunately this part (1 Enoch 15) of the Book of Watchers has not been preserved in the Qumran Aramaic manuscripts. This part of the tradition is known only from the Greek and the Ethiopic translations. 4QEnc, the manuscript which supposedly contains part of this chapter is not legible at this place. This chapter was presumably part of Watchers in Aramaic but has not survived. 48  The complete list includes the spirits of the ravaging angels (‫ ;)מלאכי חבל‬the bastard spirits (‫ ;)רוחות ממזרים‬demons (‫)שדים‬, Lilith (‫)לילית‬, owls and jackals (‫)אחים וציים‬, and those who strike unexpectedly to lead astray the spirit of understanding (‫הפוגעים פתע פתאום לתעות רוח‬ ‫)בינה‬. As for the first item of this list, the noun ‫“( חבל‬destruction”) may be a pun based on the similarity of this word (from the root ‫ חבל‬II [“to act corruptly”; Pi. “to ruin, destroy”]) and a noun deriving from the root ‫ חבל‬I (“to bind, pledge [or bind by taking a pledge]).” 44

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mons: they are able to fly (4Q530 7 ii 4; cf. UL 5.72). Ancient Near Eastern visual imagery depicts super-human beings as having super-human stature. The enormous footsteps carved in the floor of the Syrian Iron Age temple of Ain Dara, for example, express the gigantic measure of the body of the deity venerated in the temple.49 Good and bad demons were also envisaged as giants in Mesopotamian art. Anzu is a giant and evil bird of prey who had stolen from the god Enlil the talisman-like insignia of supreme power. Huwawa, the guardian of the cedar forest, slain by Gilgamesh and Enkidu according to the Epic of Gilgamesh, was a giant demon.50 Protective spirits called apkallus, guardians of the heavenly tree of life and maintainers of world order, were also thought to have superhuman stature.51 The semi-divine being Gilgamesh – who according to Mesopotamian tradition was “two-thirds god and one-third human” – is described as follows in the standard version of the epic: “His feet were three cubits long, his legs six cubits tall.”52 Gilgamesh in Mesopotamian iconographic tradition is also a giant figure, judging from the famous statue that depicts him holding a full-grown lion in his left hand. Summing up, the description of the giants and their functions leads one to suppose that as demonic beings they were understood as having superhuman stature. At the same time, the word ‫ גברין‬refers to the warrior nature of the beings (and this is probably also the case with ‫“[ נפילין‬fallen ones”]), not their stature. Another military feature of the watchers tradition is the reference in 1 En. 8:1 to Asael’s teachings, which instruct humans how to make weapons, as well as dyes and cosmetics.53 The purpose of this comment is theological. It aims at changing the fundamental message of the story that evil in effect originates from a conscious and deliberate act of heavenly beings, and humans have no actual role in its origin. The human skill of making weapons prefigures a future sin, that of the bloodshed and wars in human history. It is important to stress here the absence of any motif connected with arms or war in Watchers. The revolt of the watchers is not an armed conflict. Their revolt against God lies in leaving their appointed place and descending to earth, and then giving false teachings there. As for the conflict between the offspring of the watchers and humans, no use of 49  For Ain Dara, see Ali Abou Assaf, “Zur Bedeutung der Fußabdrücke im Tempel von ʿAin Dara,” in Beiträge zur vorderasiatischen Archäologie: Winfried Orthmann gewidmet, ed. Jan-Waalke Meyer, Mirko Novák, and Alexander Pruss (Frankfurt: Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Archäologisches Institut, 2001), 20–23; John M. Monson, “The New ʿAin Dara Temple: Closest Solomonic Parallel,” BAR 26 (2000): 20–35, 67. 50 See Tablet 2 of Gilgamesh. The island of apple trees is guarded by a giant. See Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1:67. 51 On the apkallus, see Kvanvig, Primeval History, 107–81. 52  A Hittite version of the epic describes Gilgamesh as being eleven cubits tall. See George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, 1:447. 53 4Q201 (4QEna) 1 iii 23; 4Q202 (4QEnb) 1 ii 26.

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weapons is mentioned: the gibbōrîm devour humans and animals indiscriminately, without using weapons. Their activity is described as an act of devouring (and not a military one), consuming crops, animals, and humans. This is similar to Mesopotamian demons. Evil demons are described in the series Utukkū Lemnūtu, often mentioned as the Seven (5.76–100, 167–82, 151–66; 12.1–12; 13.1–15; 16.1–22), as ravaging (6.1–39), striking humans (3.5), or murdering their healthy victims (3.31). The apparition of a demonic image results in trouble (7.29–40). Demons kill families (6.83–86), and hinder sexuality (6.166–88; 8.10–22). They are able to reside within the body (7.140–50), and ruin the body (3.28–53, 63, 95, 118–23, 137–46). Demons can appear as an epidemic (7.69–80) or a storm (16.104–8, 135–45), ravaging cattle and sheep (4.67–81; 6.77–90), and destroying the land (4.10–39 [esp. l. 37]). Godless demons destroy society (e.g., 13.16–25). The two hundred watchers figuring in the story of the watchers are ranked in a decimal military order, with each ten people having a chief.54 The twenty chiefs are called ‫( רבנין‬4Q202 [4QEnb] 1 ii 18; 4Q204 [4QEnc] 1 ii 24). Military language related to heavenly beings appears first in biblical texts.55 In the wars described in the deuteronomistic historiography YHWH is figured as a participant in holy war, depicted as a general directing the heavenly hosts.56 Members of the heavenly host are called gibbōrîm. Later texts such as the great historical overview in Daniel 10–12 describe the chief angels with the military term ‫שר‬.57 Their activity focuses upon directing the wars between nations on the earth. Qumran writings mention angelic beings who participate in the war between light and

 ]‫“( רבבי עש[רתא‬chiefs of te[n]”; 4Q202 [4QEnb] 1 i 17a). D. Miller (The Divine Warrior in Early Israel [HSM 5; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973]) relates the idea of the heavenly army/hosts to Canaanite tradition. The phrase “the host of heaven” introduced by Deuteronomy coincides with the expression “heaven of the heavens” in Deuteronomy and Kings, and the statement “he pitched [as a tent] the heavens” in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. According to Baruch Halpern a new conception of the sky developed in Jerusalem in the late seventh century BCE. See his “Late Israelite Astronomies and the Early Greeks,” in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina, ed. William G. Dever and Seymour Gitin (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 323–52 (326). 56  Gibbōrîm are mentioned as the corps of professional soldiers of David (2 Sam 10:7; 23:8, 9, 16, 17, 22; 1 Chr 11:11; 12:24). Angelic gibbōrîm are also mentioned in Ps 103:20 (‫;)גברי כוח‬ Joel 3:11 (as the tool of God’s judgment); Isa 13:3 (as the warriors of the holy war during the Day of Yahweh); possibly in Judg 5:23 (LXX translates the term as γίγαντες!). See Aleksander R. Michalak, Angels as Warriors in Late Second Temple Jewish Literature (WUNT II.330; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 89. The word ‫ עצומים‬in Dan 8:24 may be considered equivalent to gibbōrîm. See John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel (HSM 16; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977), 152 n. 37. 57  Michalak, Angels as Warriors, 90. In the so-called Book of Noah reconstructed by Milik (1Q19bis 2) we read ‫( גבורי גברים‬line 5), following the names of Gabriel and probably other archangels. 54

55 Patrick

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darkness.58 Similarly, the New Testament uses military language in association with angels.59 Enochic astronomical texts describe the order of the stars and their “leaders” that divide the year into four seasons: “The leaders of the heads of the thousands who are over all the creation and over all the stars,” as well as over the four additional days: “They are not separated from their position according to the calculation of the year” (1 En. 75:1). The angel Uriel is “over all the heavenly luminaries,” which are “leaders of days and nights – the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the serving entities that go around in all the heavenly chariots” (v. 3). The text also refers to a possible error in how the heavenly bodies function due to the disobedience of their leaders to the eternal rules: “Many heads of the stars will stray from the command and will change their ways and actions, and will not appear at the times prescribed for them” (1 En. 80:6). If celestial beings are called members of a heavenly host, it is only logical to call their offspring warriors, according to their parents’ status. In addition, there is another link between the watchers’ offspring and the “military” tradition related to them. In this study the spiritual nature of the watchers and the demonic nature of the giants were previously examined, as was the similarity of these characteristics to those described in Mesopotamian demonological literature. Mesopotamian written tradition frequently calls spiritual beings, such as gods and demons, qarrādu (“hero”; “warrior”).60 The term semantically corresponds to the Hebrew and Aramaic term gibbōr that denotes the sons of the watchers. The majority of the instances of qarrādu in Mesopotamian tradition relates to gods who are repeatedly called warriors in various texts.61 The demonological catalogue Utukkū Lemnūtu regularly refers to spiritual beings and demons as “warriors.”62 Some of these “warriors” are benevolent (5.151) but the references 58  The Qumran War Scroll (1QM 15:14) mentions heavenly beings as girding themselves for a battle. Participants of the war against the powers of Belial are “heavenly warriors” (1QH 11:35–36). 1QM uses military language when mentioning military units, such as ‫“( דגל‬banner”) and other terms. The Aramaic 4QWords of Michael mentions ‫“( גדודי נורא‬fiery troops”) as a designation for angels (‎4Q‎529 ‎1 ‎2)‎. The term appears in rabbinic literature and magical texts as a generic title for angels as well as the name of a specific brigade of angels. See Michalak, Angels as Warriors, 88, 91–94. 59  Matthew 26:53 refers to angelic troops using the word legiōn: δώδεκα λεγιῶνας ἀγγέλων (“twelve legions of angels”). God is a kind of emperor who spearheads the angelic army. Also note that seventy-two angels are responsible for the nations (3 En. 17:8). 60  The adjectival form is qardu (fem. qarittu, qarattu) and means “heroic.” The term is often associated with gods (males and females, such as Ishtar) and demons (CAD 13:129). Similarly, note the abstract noun qardūtu (“heroism, valor”) and qarrādu (“warrior”) (CAD 13:142–43). 61  In the series Utukkū Lemnūtu, qarrādu often designates “the hero Marduk,” as in the great Marduk hymn (10.1–42). Marduk or another god in other texts can be designated “hero” (2.9, 5.116). Similarly, the copper drum is called the “hero of heaven” (e.g., 7.15, 19, 47, 87; 9.48; 12.83, 87; 16.120, 147). 62  Henryk Drawnel, “Some Notes on the Aramaic Manuscripts from Qumran and Late Mesopotamian Culture,” RevQ 26/102 (2013): 145–67 (158).

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to warriors “who walk before Nergal” (5.160) and that of the Seven (Sibitti) (6.155) denote harmful demonic beings. The term gallu (“policeman”) for demons denotes their activity as armed men. They are visualized in a demonic hierarchy.63 An important source for the term, the Epic of Erra – a visionary poem about the assault of Erra, the god of pestilence, against the realm of the gods and that of humans – regularly uses the word “warrior” to describe the demonic armies.64 Erra himself is the lord of demons and as such he is called the “warrior of the gods” (1.4, 130). His weapons are of deadly venom (1.131; 2.35; 4.1, 19, 104). A group of demons, the Seven (sibitti), are called warriors in the epic (4.141), often described as “warriors unrivalled” (e.g., 1.8, 18, 23; 2.11, 25; 4.140), and as the “sword of pestilence” (5.58).65 The Seven originate from Anu, king of the gods, who “sowed his seed in the earth,” which bore him seven gods (1.28–29). Their task is “… to wreak destruction, to massacre the people of this land and fell the livestock.” They accomplish their task through causing mayhem, setting fire, taking the form of lions, earthquakes, winds, and spewing viperous venom (1.32–38). Mesopotamian ideas about the demonic warriors who cause destruction are consistent with the violence of the Enochic ‫גברין‬. It seems that the literary model for these figures again is Mesopotamian demonological texts, first of all the catalogue Utukkū Lemnūtu, and also the Epic of Erra.

IV. Genesis 6:1–4 and the Book of Watchers As mentioned previously, 1 Enoch 6–11, 15 contains the story of Shemiḥazah and expansions of it. Manichaeism was not the first religion that engaged the problem of the message of the story of Shemiḥazah, that sin originated from heaven through the watchers. It was certainly this view that initiated the comment of 1 En. 8:1–2 that Asael’s teachings introduced metallurgy and the making of weapons to men and taught the production of eye-shadow, cosmetics, and dyes to women. It is not reported when these teachings were actually given; accordingly, they might have even preceded the descent of the 63  The book of Jubilees presents Mastema as the head of hierarchized demonic hosts (10:7– 9), and his title in the Hebrew fragments of Jubilees is ‫“( שר‬commander”; “prince”), as in ‫שר‬ ‫( המשטמה‬4Q225 2 i 9; 4Q225 2 ii 7, 13, 14bis; 11Q11 ii 4). Note also ‫( מלאכי המשטמה‬4Q225 2 ii 6; 4Q387 2 iii 4; 4Q390 1 11; 4Q390 2 i 7) and ‫( מלאך המשטמה‬4Q270 6 ii 18; 4Q271 4 ii 6; 4Q495 2 3). The name of the demon Legion in the New Testament (Mk 5:9; Lk 8:30) designates a military unit (it is to be noted that the demon speaks in plural!). Cf. Mk 5:15. 64  The text of the Epic of Erra (eighth century BCE) was understood to have magical properties. Citations of it inscribed on amulets served as prophylactic against the plague. For a critical edition of the epic, see Luigi Cagni, The Poem of Erra (SANE 1.3; Malibu: Undena Publications, 1977). 65  Peter Machinist and Jack M. Sasson call the demons “personified weapons.” See their “Rest and Violence in the Poem of Erra,” JAOS 103 (1983): 221–26 (226).

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watchers.66 This explanation makes humans share in the responsibility for the deeds of the angels: it was the cosmetics of the women that raised their lust and weapons were prepared even before the birth of the giants. Genesis 6:1–4, which was inserted into the primeval history, is a rather strange inclusion in a series of narratives and genealogies. The three sentences of this pericope stand alongside each other in no precise relationship. Earlier research considered the verses as a torso (Gunkel) or a “fragment of myth.” Genesis 6:1–4 is neither a torso nor a fragment of a myth. It can be suggested that it represents a reflexion of the tradition that is evident in the Enochic story of the watchers. Joseph Blenkinsopp argues convincingly that J is the latest source in the biblical narrative on primeval history, and that it supplements and comments on the Priestly source.67 It has a clear thematic continuity focusing on the question, “How did things go wrong?” The narratives of Genesis 1–11 give a series of examples about transcending the limits of humanity, breaking through the boundary between the human and the divine, and the resulting divine rearrangement of the world order. Genesis 1–11 comprises four stories (all of them related to the J source) on the origin of evil, all followed by a re-creation of the divine-human relationship: the Eden narrative (Genesis 2–3), the first homicide committed by Cain (ch. 4), the report on “the sons of God” and human women (6:1–4), and the building of the tower of Babel (ch. 11).68 The Eden narrative heading the list suggests that the origin of evil is human curiosity (initiated by a non-human being) resulting in disobedience. Subsequent stories of Genesis 1–11 emphasize the human factor in the process of things going wrong. This concept is very different from the deterministic view of the Enochic tradition that relates the origin of the natural evil to a single event dominated by non-human factors and followed by a punishment to be expected in an eschatological future. The statements of Gen 6:1–4 are in some ways identical with that of the Shemi­ ḥazah story. This is evident, for example, with regard to the sons of God (‫בני‬ ‫ )האלהים‬and human women: “When humankind began to increase on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of the gods saw how beautiful human women were, and took for themselves such as pleased them” (vv. 1–2). Two important elements are missing from this text when compared to Watchers: first, the description of the sons of God as watchers, and secondly the ethical evaluation of their deed.69 The next verse (“Yahweh then said, ‘My spirit 66  Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 171–72, remarks that the teachings of Asael may not be placed in Watchers in strict chronological order. 67 Blenkinsopp, Creation, Un-creation, Re-creation. 68  Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The Origins of Evil in Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition: The Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4 in the Second and Third Centuries B.C.E.” in The Fall of the Angels, ed. Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck (TBN 6; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 87–118. 69  Shemiḥazah is conscious of the nature and possible consequences of his plan; this is the reason that he makes his companions swear. The narrator of 1 Enoch adds that the watchers became impure through their relationship with women.

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shall not abide in humankind for ever seeing that they are but flesh. Their life span will be one hundred and twenty years’”) relates to the genealogies of Genesis 5, with its extremely long human life spans.70 On the other hand, Gen 6:3 might be a hidden reference to the Enochic tradition, calling to mind the divine spiritual beings (‫ )רוחות‬and their mingling with humans that resulted in an offspring with dual (spiritual and bodily) nature.71 The last verse of the unit states: “The Nephilim were on the earth at that time, and even later. That was when the sons of the gods had intercourse with human women and children were born to them. These were the heroes (‫ )גבורים‬of old, men of renown” (v. 4). The nǝphîlîm and gibbōrîm are mentioned here as contemporaries of the marriages of the heavenly beings with earthly women; they are not explicitly described as the offspring of the sons of God.72 Both gibbōrîm and nǝphîlîm are polysemous words that are open to various interpretations.73 It seems that ambiguous terms were deliberately used here. In the Enochic tradition gibbōrîm and nǝphîlîm are synonymous terms for demons who originate from divine beings. The introduction of the phrase “men of renown” (‫ )אנשי השם‬and “of old” in Gen 6:4 places the nǝphîlîm and gibbōrîm into a historical perspective. The “men of renown” of past times recall to the reader the tradition of heroes like Gilgamesh seeking to find immortality in renown. However, the element ‫ השם‬of the expression may be a reference to God, introducing a second meaning which relates the “men of renown” to God.74 The statement of Gen 6:4 placed in a historical milieu suggests a different interpretation for the nǝphîlîm and gibbōrîm from that of Enochic tradition. The terms gibbōrîm and nǝphîlîm mean in Genesis 6 simply the great heroes of history, alive or dead. The word gibbōrîm has its common meaning of “warrior” and “hero,” without a demonic connotation. Similarly, the synonym nǝphîlîm is to be interpreted here as a reference to the fallen heroes. The punishment of the deluge which comes up unexpectedly is introduced by the verses of Gen 6:5, 11. They indicate that punishment is caused by the 70 Blenkinsopp,

Creation, Un-Creation, 121.  According to Gen 2:7, the life-force of a human being is in the “breath of life” (‫)נשמת חיים‬ that God breathed into the nostrils of Adam, created from the dust of the ground. Although an essential theme, there is not enough space here to consider the ideas related to the presence and role of a ‫ רוח‬in the human body and theological statements about the divine element of humankind. 72 Cf. Ezek 32:17–32. Tablet 12 of the epic of Gilgamesh relates the dialogue between Gilgamesh and Enkidu on the fate of the dead. Heroes who suffered “the death of the iron,” those who were killed in the battle, as well as those “whose bodies were cast upon the earth” have a particular lot in the nether world. See Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, 2 vols. (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979–83), 2:176. 73  Wright, The Origin of Demons, 90. 74 Sources from the Babylonian and Persian periods use abstract nouns to denote the name of a god, as one finds with ‫ הכבוד‬in Ezekiel 1. Although the use of ‫ השם‬as a name of God is documented only in later times the possibility of this word in Gen 6:4 containing a hidden reference to the deity cannot be excluded here. 71

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wickedness of humans (‫)רעת האדם‬, and the bloodshed (‫ )חמס‬among them. The reference to violence is presumably not unrelated to the Enochic tradition but this link remains hidden in the biblical narrative, resulting from an interaction of Enochic and Yahwistic ideas and texts.

The Sons of the Watchers in the Book of Watchers and the Qumran Book of Giants Contexts and Prospects Matthew Goff Florida State University

I. Introduction: Questions, Contexts and Prospects There has been great interest over the past generation in 1 Enoch and other ancient Jewish texts in which Enoch is prominent, such as 2 Enoch and Jubilees. But when I look at the high quality of the ever growing scholarship on these writings, I am surprised by some of the gaps which are large, if not, one can say, gigantic. The watchers and their wives have received much more attention than their offspring, the giants.1 The issue of the sons of the watchers does not revolve solely around the Book of Watchers. Milik’s 1976 monumental publication of the Qumran Aramaic Enochic texts includes a preliminary edition of a work he entitled the Book of Giants.2 This composition, which is of a highly fragmentary nature, offers another iteration of the watchers tale, in which the focus is placed more on the offspring than their angelic fathers. It was probably written in the second century BCE. While there are scattered references to the sons of the watchers in numerous ancient Jewish texts (e.g., Bar 3:26–28; Wis 14:6; 3 Macc 2:4; CD 2:19), the Qumran Book of Giants is the only extant composition in which these creatures are the main characters. Only two monographs devoted exclusively to this work have been produced, by Stuckenbruck and Reeves.3 No book length study on this composition has been written since the official publication of the relevant fragments about fifteen 1  The term “giant” is a vague term that is used for a range of creatures found in folklore throughout the world. I follow the conventional usage of referring to the sons of the watchers as giants, a tradition found in both LXX Genesis 6 and the Greek manuscripts of Watchers (e.g., 1 En. 7:2Pan). 2 Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 3  Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary (TSAJ 63; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997); John C. Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean

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years ago in DJD 31 and DJD 36, by Puech and Stuckenbruck, respectively.4 A lot of basic interpretive work on the Book of Giants remains to be done.5 How does the Book of Giants portray the giants? What can be established about their physical appearance? What ultimately happens to them in this text? How should one arrange the fragments of the work? This is important for understanding the narrative and sequence of events in the composition (see the article in this volume by Stuckenbruck). Why did people tell such stories and write them down? Should we understand the Book of Giants as simply an entertaining tale about the days before the flood or did the composition circulate with a type of authoritative textual status? While Giants clearly draws upon the watchers myth, how exactly should the composition be understood in relation to Watchers? Since the watchers myth derives from an interpretation of Genesis 6, should the Book of Giants be understood, like the Book of Watchers, as an interpretation of the book of Genesis, or should we think of the giants composition as getting its basic story only from Watchers? How should the Book of Giants be understood in relation to the biblical tradition of the Canaanite giants, such as the Rephaim or the Anakim? Or in relation to other roughly contemporary Jewish Aramaic writings, such as Daniel? There was a vibrant and extensive discourse in the late Second Temple period regarding Noah’s flood, evident not only in Watchers but also the Animal Apocalypse and Jubilees, among other texts – how does the Book of Giants contribute to our understanding of this discourse? What later, post-Second Temple texts attest traditions about the giants? Here of particular value are the pseudo-Clementine Homilies, which contains a retelling of the watchers myth, and the late rabbinic work known as the “Midrash of Shemḥazai and Azael,” which Milik correctly identified as attesting extensive traditions found in the Qumran giants text.6 Milik also deserves credit for realizing that there are striking parallels between the Qumran Book of Giants and the Manichaean Book of Giants, a work from the third century CE that circulated with canonical status within this religious tradition.7 This later material does not simply help us trace the trajectory and reformulation of Second Temple giant Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions (HUCM 14; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992). 4  Émile Puech, Qumrân Grotte 4.XXII: Textes araméens, première partie: 4Q529–549 (DJD 31; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 9–115; Stephen J. Pfann et al., Qumran Cave 4.XXVI: Cryptic Texts and Miscellanea, Part 1 (DJD 36; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 8–94. 5  Matthew J. Goff, When Giants Walked the Earth: The Sons of the Watchers in Enochic Literature and Ancient Judaism (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, forthcoming). 6 Milik, The Books of Enoch, 317–39. For a recent study of the version of the watchers myth in the Homilies, see Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, “Manna-Eaters and Man-Eaters: Food of Giants and Men in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 8,” in The Pseudo-Clementines, ed. Jan N. Bremmer (SECA 10; Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 92–114. 7  Milik, The Books of Enoch, 298–317. For an overview of Manichaean scripture, see Nicholas J. Baker-Brian, Manichaeism: An Ancient Faith Rediscovered (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 66–95.

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traditions into late antiquity and beyond. Since the Qumran Book of Giants is so fragmentary, these later texts, rabbinic, Christian, and Manichaean, may attest versions of tropes and traditions that were once important elements in the Qumran text but poorly attested or even non-existent in its extant fragments.8 My goal in this paper is not to engage all of the questions I have raised. I bring them up because they strike me as important and deserve exploration in subsequent scholarship on the Qumran Book of Giants and the broader issue of giants in ancient Judaism. In this essay I address two basic points. The first regards the portrayal of the giants in the Qumran Book of the Giants. When people discuss the giants, they often have in mind the account of them in the Book of Watchers, in which they are incredibly violent and destructive. But their depiction in Giants is different from that of Watchers. The sons of the watchers in the former text are, while violent, less disturbing and should not be understood solely in negative terms, when compared to their representation in the latter text. The Qumran Book of Giants allows us to appreciate and better understand the diversity of giants traditions in Enochic texts and ancient Judaism in general. Two, I would like to suggest one way that the Manichaean Book of Giants can contribute to the study of the Qumran Book of Giants. This relates to the major issue of the fate of the giants. The Manichaean giants book supports the possibility, I argue, that in the Qumran giants work not all of the giants were killed and that some of them may have even prayed to God for mercy.9

II. The Giants in the Book of Watchers The Book of Watchers contains a disconcerting account of the days when giants walked the earth. The core text for this is 1 En. 7:3–5: They (the sons of the watchers) were devouring the labor of all the sons of men, and men were not able to supply them. And the giants began to kill men and to devour them. And they began to sin against the birds and beasts and creeping things and the fish and to devour one another’s flesh. And they drank the blood.10  8 A related topic that deserves more study is the extent to which Enochic giant traditions are preserved and reconfigured in Islam. See John C. Reeves, “Resurgent Myth: On the Vitality of the Watchers Tradition in the Near East of Late Antiquity,” in The Fallen Angels Traditions: Second Temple Developments and Reception History, ed. Angela Kim Harkins, Kelley Coblentz Bautsch and John C. Endres, S. J. (CBQMS 53; Washington, D. C.: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2014), 94–115.  9 I also explore this theme in “Wild Cannibals or Repentant Sinners? The Value of the Manichaean Book of Giants for Understanding the Qumran Book of Giants,” in Manichaeism East and West: Proceedings for the Eighth Meeting of the International Association of Manichaean Studies, ed. Samuel Lieu and Erica Hunter (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 10  This translation is from George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). In the Aramaic versions of this passage (4Q201 1 iii 17–21; 4Q202 1 ii 21–24), the giants have insatiable appetites and

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There is a tendency to interpret the giants and their crimes as an allusion to contemporary political violence of the Hellenistic age.11 While the giants certainly can be understood in this manner, the significance of these creatures is not limited to such readings. The focus of the composition is not the present moment but the distant past. Watchers contains an iteration of the flood myth. The giants embody the violence and iniquity that plagued the world in the primordial period which had to be subdued for the present world order to be formed. The giants accord well with the mythic theme of the overthrow of chaos, as classically expressed in Mesopotamian texts such as the Enuma Elish. The deeds carried out by the giants are disturbingly violent. They do not just kill people. They eat them: first the food of the people, then the people, then each other. They are destructive to other creatures and themselves. They constitute an undoing of the natural order. The crimes of the giants are driven by their uncontrollable appetites. They become even more fearsome when one understands them to be, as it states in the Panopolitanus Greek text and many Geʿez manuscripts, three thousand cubits tall (over a mile in height).12 In Watchers the complaints and accusations of the victims of the giants’ violence arise from the earth (1 En. 7:6; 8:4). When they reach heaven, a scenario of divine punishment unfolds against the giants and their fathers (10:1–15). A common trope in ancient Judaism is that the giants perished in the flood. This is attested, for example, in the Animal Apocalypse, the Wisdom of Solomon, 3 Baruch, and 4QAdmonition Based on the Flood (4Q370).13 The Book of Watchers reflects knowledge of this motif and adapts it. The text’s interest is not the flood itself, what sort of animals were aboard, or how long the rains lasted (but see they eat flesh (4Q201 1 iii 21). But no extant text in the Aramaic states whose flesh they ate. It is reasonable, however, to speculate that in these texts they consumed, as the passage quoted above claims, animals, humans, and each other (see also the reconstruction in Milik, The Books of Enoch, 150, 166). This is explicit in the Ethiopic and Greek (Panopolitanus) witnesses to the passage. Jubilees and the Animal Apocalypse, which both date to the second century BCE, depict the giants as eating other creatures (Jub. 7:22; 1 En. 86:5). This suggests that the details regarding cannibalism in 1 Enoch 7 were not later (post-Aramaic) additions to the passage. See further Matthew J. Goff, “Monstrous Appetites: Blood, Giants, Cannibalism and Insatiable Eating in Enochic Literature,” JAJ 1 (2010): 19–42; Luca Arcari, “Illicit Unions, Hybrid Sonship, and Intermarriage in Second Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Book of Giants, Jubilees,” in Family and Kinship in the Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature, ed. Angel Passaro (DCLY 2012–13; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 405–54 (419–20); Siam Bhayro, The Shemihazah and Asael Narrative of 1 Enoch 6–11 (AOAT 322; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2005), 68–70; George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 183. 11  Anathea E. Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 20, 331; Richard A. Horsley, Revolt of the Scribes: Resistance and Apocalyptic Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010); Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 170. 12  The height given for them in Tana 9 (Geʿez) is 300 cubits. 13 1 En. 89:6; Wis 14:6; 3 Bar. 4:10; 4Q370 1 4–6.

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1 En. 10:2). The flood is re-imagined as a paradigm for divine punishment. The angels are bound and thrown into the earth to await the final punishment (vv. 4–8, 11–15). The giants are to destroy one another in a “war of destruction” (‫֯קרב‬ ‫ ;אבדן‬v. 9; 4Q202 1 iv 6). This action destroys their physical bodies but their spirits remain. They are charged with carrying out violent acts, such as attacking people, in particular women who give birth. The demise of the giants becomes an etiology for the existence of demons in the world (15:8–12). God appoints the archangel Gabriel to incite the war in which the giants perish, in a way that makes it quite clear how he thinks about them: “Go, Gabriel, to the bastards (μαζηρέους), to the half-breeds, to the sons of miscegenation; and destroy the sons of the watchers” (10:9).14 The angels show shame and regret for their activities. They have Enoch petition God on their behalf for mercy (13:4–6). He does so, without success. The giants, unlike their fathers, give no indication that they had any regrets or wanted to cease their heinous crimes. The giants in Watchers are, quite literally, evil bastards. And God treats them as such. They do not deserve mercy and receive none.

III. The Giants in the Qumran Book of Giants When the Aramaic Enoch manuscripts were discovered in the 1950s, it was observed that some of them contained narrative material that did not accord with any text of 1 Enoch. These fragments were thus classified as “4QPseudo-Enoch.” Milik argued that the material in question was at some point removed from the story, in order to explain why narrative found in the Aramaic Enoch texts are not attested in the Greek or Ethiopic manuscripts of 1 Enoch.15 He later realized in the early 1970s that these “Pseudo-Enoch” texts should be understood as comprising a composition distinct from the booklets of 1 Enoch. He entitled it the Book of Giants.16 The material conventionally classified as belonging to this composition are 1Q23–24; 2Q26; 4Q203, 4Q530–33; 4Q206a 1–2 (= 4Q206 2–3) and 6Q8. 14 This reading is in GPan and the Ethiopic. It is not in Syncellus. See Bhayro, The Shemihazah and Asael Narrative, 99. 15  Józef T. Milik, “Le travail d’édition des fragments de Qumrân: Communication de J. T. Milik,” RB 63 (1956): 60–62 (60). See also Matthew Goff, “When Giants Dreamed about the Flood: The Book of Giants and its Relationship to the Book of Watchers,” in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and The Scriptures, ed. Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar (BETL 270; Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 61–88 (63–64). 16  Milik also realized that non-Cave 4 texts that had already been published, principally 2Q26 and 6Q8, belong to this composition as well. See his The Books of Enoch, vi, 309; idem, “Turfan et Qumran: Livre des Géants juif et manichéen,” in Tradition und Glaube: Das frühe Christentum in seiner Umwelt, ed. Gert Jeremias, Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, and Hartmut Stegemann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 117–27; idem, “Problémes de la littérature hénochique à la lumière des fragments araméens de Qumrân,” HTR 64 (1971): 333–78 (336–72).

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Milik’s ‘discovery’ of this new giants composition was sparked by the Manichaean Book of Giants. This is why the Qumran text in question has the same title. Fragments of this Manichaean text became available when they, along with numerous other manuscripts, were discovered around 1900 in Turfan, a Silk Road site located in Xinjiang province, in northwestern China. The Turfan Book of Giants fragments, which derive from manuscripts copied in the eighth and ninth centuries, were written in various Central Asian languages, including Sogdian, Middle Persian, and Uyghur. They attest to the spread of the Manichaean religion from Mesopotamia into Central Asia. The Turfan fragments of the Manichaean Book of Giants were initially published in the 1940s by Henning and additional textual fragments of the composition have appeared in more recent years.17 Milik understood the Manichaean Book of Giants as an often literal translation of the Qumran Book of Giants.18 Assessing the relationship between the Qumran and Manichaean giants books remains an interpretative problem. While Milik’s adjudication of the issue is overly maximalistic, there are too many parallels between the two texts to deny that there is some sort of direct literary link between them. The Turfan giants book not only attests the figure of Enoch and the angel Shemiḥazah (Shahmīzād) (e.g., M101l; B; H).19 Parts of the composition resonate with the Qumran Book of Giants but not Watchers or any other booklet of 1 Enoch. For example, the Manichaean text includes figures with the names Ohya, Ahya, and Māhawai. There are no named giants in 1 Enoch. The Qumran Book of Giants, however, includes giants that have virtually the same names as those in the Turfan text: Ohyah, Hahyah and Mahaway.

17 Walter

B. Henning, “The Book of the Giants,” BSOAS 11 (1943–46): 52–74; Jens Wilkens, “Neue Fragmente aus Manis Gigantenbuch,” ZDMG 150 (2000): 133–76; Enrico Morano, “Il ‘Libro dei Giganti’ di Mani,” in Il mito e la dottrina. Testi manichei dell’Asia centrale e della Cina. Vol. 3 of Il Manicheismo, ed. Gherardo Gnoli et al. (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2008), 69–107, 367–73. 18  Milik, The Books of Enoch, 310. He also argued (ibid., 58) that the (Qumran) Book of Giants was originally the second book, after Watchers, in an early form of 1 Enoch. Milik referred to this putative collection as an “Enochic Pentateuch.” He suggested that Giants was replaced in this collection during the fourth century by the Similitudes of Enoch, because Christian editors did not like that Giants was popular among the heterodox Manichaeans. These views have not fared well in subsequent scholarship. See, for example, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 18–19; Jonas Greenfield and Michael Stone, “The Enochic Pentateuch and the Date of the Similitudes,” HTR 70 (1977): 51–65 (55). For further discussion of the question of whether Giants and Watchers circulated as part of a collection of Enochic texts, see Goff, “When Giants Dreamed,” 64; Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, “Notes on Fragments of 4Q206/206a, 4Q203–204, and Two Unpublished Fragments (4Q59?),” Meg 5–6 (Devorah Dimant FS) (2008): *187–*199. 19  Unless otherwise stated, the citation format of the Manichaean Book of Giants follows that of Henning, “The Book of the Giants.”

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There are also striking parallels with regard to the narratives of both works. Ohyah and Hahyah are brothers in the Qumran text, as are Ohya and Ahya in the Turfan fragments (4Q530 2 ii 15; H). One fragment of the Manichaean Book of Giants partially preserves a text in which Enoch interprets a dream about a tree (D). In a major narrative of the Qumran giants book, Ohyah and Hahyah have dreams, one of which is about a garden filled with trees (4Q530 2 ii 6–12). Enoch interprets them, although almost nothing of his interpretation survives (4Q530 7 ii 11). Such parallels raise the exciting prospect that the Turfan Book of Giants, even though it is centuries later than the Dead Sea Scrolls, and far removed geographically from Palestine, preserves variations of authenthic, Early Jewish giant traditions. The Qumran Book of Giants contains a portrait of the giants that is quite different from that of the Book of Watchers. There is no indication that they are 3,000 cubits tall. The composition makes several brief references to the violence of the giants, including murder (e.g., 1Q23 9 +14 +15; 4Q532 1 ii + 2 9). No extant text of the composition, however, depicts them as eating people or drinking blood. The narrative drama of the Qumran Book of Giants centers not on the violent activities of the giants but their visions and their efforts to understand them. The two dreams of two brothers in 4Q530 2 ii suggests a doublet theme. Doubling the dreams, a motif found in both Genesis (in the Joseph novella; Gen 41:32) and 1 Enoch (in the Book of Dreams; cf. ch. 83), may have been intended as a way to convey that the dreams constitute a legitimate communication from the heavenly world, a point on which there may have been some doubt, since the recipients of the visions are giants. Hahyah, as mentioned above, dreams of a garden filled with tall trees. They are all destroyed by fire from heaven and water, except for one tree with three roots. Ohyah has a dream in which God descends with his angelic retinue for judgment, an image quite similar to the throne theophany of Daniel 7.20 Hahyah’s vision is clearly a reference to the flood, with the surviving tree with three roots denoting Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, who repopulate the world after the flood. Ohyah’s vision signifies theophanic judgment. The two dreams of the giant brothers combine the themes of the flood and the final judgment. The sons of the watchers having dreams is never a topic in Watchers. The giants are disturbed by the dreams but do not fully understand them. They dispatch Mahaway to journey to Enoch, so that he can interpret them. According to 4Q530 7 ii, Mahaway flies over a massive desert to reach him (ll. 4–5). This suggests that the giants have wings, or at least Mahaway does, an image that never appears in Watchers. This giant is selected for this journey because he has traveled to Enoch on a previous occasion, alluding to an episode not preserved among the extant fragments of the composition (4Q530 2 ii 22–23). A version of 20 See

the essay by Amanda Davis Bledsoe in this volume.

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this earlier journey of Mahaway is preserved in the Manichaean Book of Giants (Text B).21 The two voyages of Mahaway constitute another example of Giants’ doublet theme. Although almost nothing of Enoch’s interpretation of the dreams is extant, he presumably reaches the unsurprising conclusion that, since the dreams allude to the flood and divine judgment, the visions signify that punishment has been ordained against the giants. Enoch conveys to the giants and their fathers that divine judgment has been ordained against them. He writes two tablets to them, another iteration of the doublet theme. Mahaway presumably brought them back from his visits with the sage. The text of Enoch’s second tablet is preserved in 4Q203 8. It purports to be a “copy” (‫ )פרשגן‬of a tablet written by Enoch. This tablet indicates that the compilers of the Book of Giants knew of the tradition that Enoch is a writer of texts, a trope that is prominent, as is well-known, in Jubilees 4 and throughout 1 Enoch.22 4Q203 8, as a copy of a tablet attributed to Enoch, also attests the perspective that is important in Jubilees that the patriarchs of old were authors who wrote texts and handed them down to subsequent generations (e.g., 10:14; 21:10). The Qumran Book of Giants praises Enoch as a “scribe of distinction” (‫ספר‬ ‫ ;פרשא‬l. 4; 4Q530 2 ii 14). The Aramaic root ‫ פרש‬denotes not simply “to distinguish,” suggesting the exalted status of Enoch, but also “to separate,” perhaps alluding to his separation from human society, since he is removed from the human realm by a vast desert. Since Enoch is asked to interpret dreams, his scribal epithet likely contains some form of wordplay between ‫ פרש‬and ‫פשר‬, a verb that means “to interpret.” Watchers also praises Enoch as a scribe (1 En. 12:4; 15:1). In his second tablet Enoch summarizes the crimes of the giants and their fathers (ll. 7–11). The beginning of line 12 reads: “has reached Raphael.” What reaches this angel is not extant. The missing subject is probably a complaint regarding injustice, lodged by the victims of the giants, that ascends from the earth up to heaven.23 As mentioned above, punishment against the watchers and their sons occurs in Watchers once complaints raised from earth reach heaven. Enoch in 4Q203 8 can be understood as analogously telling the giants and watchers that a complaint against them has reached heaven and that this will result in some form of retribution. Lines 12–14 are fragmentary but appear to state that there will be “destruction” (‫ )אבדנא‬which will affect all those who live in deserts and  A new edition of this text is presented by Jens Wilkens in his contribution to this volume. C. VanderKam, Enoch: A Man for All Generations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 110–21. 23  The missing subject may have been a form of ‫קבל‬. This root elsewhere in 4Q203 8 signifies complaints made against the watchers and the giants. This word describes the complaints of those who have been murdered, presumably by the giants, in 4Q530 1 i 4. Forms of ‫ קבל‬in Watchers describe the complaints that ascend to heaven. See, for example, 4Q201 1 iv 11 and 4Q202 1 iii 11, which both attest forms of 1 En. 9:3 (cf. 4Q206 1 xxii 4 [1 En. 22:5]). 21

22 James

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seas – two extremes of the earth’s climate, a merismus that suggests that the whole world will be destroyed.24 This suggests that Enoch is aware that the dreams of the giants signify their destruction in the flood, understood as a cataclysmic event that will annihilate even sea creatures, unlike the flood in Genesis itself (6:7).25 The Qumran Book of Giants is an important, if overlooked, text for understanding the figure of Enoch in Early Judaism. He is not only an interpreter of dreams. He is a scribe and a sort of prophet, who conveys divine rebuke via writing. In Giants Enoch is a source of divine knowledge. In Watchers, by contrast, he is a recipient of divine knowledge, a visionary who recieves revelation from angels. In this regard Giants is closer to the “Birth of Noah” story in 1 Enoch 106–7, in which Methusaleh travels a great distance to reach Enoch to learn more about the infant Noah, whose strange appearance disturbs his father Lamech.26 Mahaway analogously travels a great distance to acquire special knowledge from Enoch. Jubilees 4:23 states that Enoch resides in the garden of Eden, where he observes and writes down the sins that take place on earth.27 4Q203 8 offers an example of the kind of writing that Jubilees attributes to Enoch.28 One can infer that in Giants Enoch should likewise be considered to be writing condemnation in Eden.

 So also Stuckenbruck, DJD 36, 33; Reeves, Jewish Lore, 116. The key text, following the reconstruction in DJD 36, reads: “Behold, destru[ction … all who are in the heavens, and who are on the earth,] and who are in the deserts, and wh[o] are in the seas. And the interpretation of [this] matter [will become] evil upon you (pl.).” 25  The contrast of desert and seas corresponds to the fire and water in Hahyah’s dream (4Q530 2 ii 9–10). 26  A variation of this story appears in Genesis Apocryphon 2 and 5. Several articles are devoted to the “Birth of Noah” story in these texts in Katell Berthelot and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, eds., Aramaica Qumranica: Proceedings of the Conference on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran in Aix-en-Provence, 30 June–2 July 2008 (STDJ 94; Leiden: Brill, 2010). In this volume see Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The Lamech Narrative in the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen) and Birth of Noah (4QEnochc ar): A Tradition-Historical Study” (pp. 253–75); Esther Eshel, “The Genesis Apocryphon and Other Related Aramaic Texts from Qumran: The Birth of Noah” (pp. 277–97); Matthias Weigold, “Aramaic Wunderkind: The Birth of Noah in the Aramaic Texts from Qumran” (pp. 299–315). See also VanderKam, Enoch, 127. 27 “He was taken from human society and we led him into the garden of Eden for (his) greatness and honor. Now he is there writing down the judgment and condemnation of the world and all the wickedness of mankind.” This translation is from James C. VanderKam, The Book of Jubilees: Critical Text and Translation, 2 vols. (SAeth 87–88/CSCO 510–11; Leuven: Peeters, 1989), 2:28. 28  In Watchers Enoch conveys divine condemnation of the watchers to them. He does this not via writing but rather direct interaction (1 En. 15:2; note, however, that this message is preserved in a “book” [‫ ;ספר‬14:1; 4Q204 1 vi 9]). Also, in contrast to the written condemnation in 4Q203 8, in Watchers Enoch pens a “memorandum of petition,” as part of a failed effort by the angels to obtain mercy from God (13:4–6). 24

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IV. The Fate of the Giants For a missive that emphasizes divine judgment, Enoch’s second tablet ends on a strange note: a plural imperative: “pray!” This is the first and only word of line 15. It is followed by a long vacat, indicating that this was intended to be the last word of Enoch’s message. Why would a text that emphasizes destruction and punishment end with a call to pray? This has been understood as an ironic request, as if they had a chance for God to save them.29 Enoch’s tablet indicates that divine judgment has been ordained against the giants. No extant text, however, of the Qumran Book of Giants actually says what happens to them. The composition, however, seems to state that the giants, or at least some of them, develop a fear of death. In 4Q531 23, for example, an unnamed speaker states “I will be killed and I will die” (l. 3). This fear is expressed several other times, suggesting it is an important theme (e.g., 4Q530 1 i 5; 4Q530 2 ii 1; 4Q531 19 3–4). The giants may have come to understand the harsh sentence laid against them and became afraid about what will happen to them. In some texts of the composition someone acknowledges sin. In 4Q531 18 a speaker, perhaps a giant, states “we who have sinned” (l. 3). There is a fragmentary reference to a group weeping and prostrating before someone in 4Q203 4 6. There are even remnants of what appears to be a prayer in 4Q203 9, in which a speaker tells God that “nothing has defeated you.” This could be uttered by a giant who follows Enoch’s recommendation and acknowledges in prayer the power and superiority of God (l. 4; cf. 4Q203 7b i 5). These texts can be understood as giants expressing a fear of death and a strong sense of repentance. But the internal evidence in the Qumran composition is not overwhelming. The fragments that mention sin and death are in very poor condition and difficult to integrate into an understanding of the Qumran Book of Giants as a whole. The Manichaean Book of Giants can shed light on the possibility that at least some of the giants in the Qumran text felt remorse and sin over their crimes. In one Uyghur fragment of Mani’s Book of Giants, classified as Mainz 344a and published by Wilkens, a giant acknowledges his sins and prays for forgiveness: [The book] of the confession of the [strong] giant [Sāhm]. The strong [giant] Sāhm bent [both] his knees, [bowed] and arose before the god of the sun, [whose head] is Splendor, and asked for forgiveness.30

In another Uyghur fragment, U222, Sāhm claims to be filled with “abhorrent sin” because he has killed many creatures.31 Sāhm, according to Text H of the  Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, 93.  Wilkens, “Neue Fragmente,” 157. See also idem, “Funktion und gattungsgeschichtliche Bedeutung des manichäischen Gigantenbuch,” in Der östliche Manichäismus. Gattungs- und Werksgeschichte. Vorträge des Göttinger Symposiums vom 4./5. März 2010, ed. Zekine Özertural and Jens Wilkens (AAWG 17; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 63–85. 31 Wilkens, “Neue Fragmente,” 135–43, 171–73. 29 30

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Manichaean Book of Giants, is the Sogdian name given to Ohya.32 The giant who confesses is thus parallel to Ohyah of the Qumran Book of Giants. It is not clear in the Manichaean text whether the prayers of this giant are successful. It is reasonable to think, however, that this is the case. In the Manichaean Book of Giants a significant number of giants are not killed. According to Text G, one half of the giants are moved westward and the other eastward. The westward group is relocated in cities specifically built for them – thirty-two cities in an area near Mount Sumeru, the omphalos mundi of Indian tradition.33 No reason is given as to why the giants are placed in cities. The division of the giants along an east-west axis suggests two opposed fates for them – one half was killed and the other survived. This could be explained by positing that some of the giants repented and changed their ways while others did not. One must exercise caution when using a later text to interpret an earlier one. The Manichaean text, however, can be understood as preserving a theme that is important in the Qumran Book of Giants but poorly preserved in its extant fragments – that some of the giants realized their sins, prayed for forgiveness (4Q203 9) and may have even received mercy from God. The Manichaean work allows for the possibility that the repentance of some of the giants was an important theme in the Qumran work that is unfortunately not well attested among its surviving texts. The repentance of the giants was likely triggered by Enoch’s interpretation of the dreams as portending their destruction in the flood and his communication of God’s judgment against them. The giants likely disagreed about how to respond to the visions, once they learned of Enoch’s interpretation. In 6Q8 1 Ohyah asks Mahaway, “Who has shown you everything?” Then Ohyah rudely interrupts Mahaway while he answers. The visionary, Ohyah, appears to question the interpretation of the vision disclosed to him, which Mahaway learned from Enoch. (Ohyah does not seem as contrite as Sāhm-Ohya in the Manichaean text). Ohyah does not seem to like what Mahaway told him. One can speculate that there was a difference of opinion among the giants when they learned what the visions meant, that the flood was coming as punishment for their crimes. Some, understanding that they would be killed for their crimes, realized their sinful 32  This name derives from Iranian epic tradition. See Prods Oktor Skjærvø, “Iranian Epic and the Manichaean Book of Giants. Irano-Manichaica III,” AOASH 48 (1995): 187–223. 33  This mountain is an archaic Indian mythic trope that is prominent in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. It is often called Mount Meru. The Sanskrit prefix “su-” means “good” or “auspicious.” In the Mahābhārata Meru is called “the king of mountains that sparkles with gold” (1[19].216.33) and a lush mountain filled with animals, trees and rivers that is “thirty-three leagues high” and “where the gardens of the gods are located” (3[41].247.8; cf. 1[5].15.5–10). See I. W. Mabbett, “The Symbolism of Mount Meru,” HR 23 (1983): 64–83; Akira Sadakata, Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins (Tokyo: Kōsei Publishing Co., 1997), 26–30; J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Mahābhārata, 3 vols. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973–78), 1:72, 417, 2:703; Reeves, Jewish Lore, 160.

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ways and heeded Enoch’s suggestion that they pray. Positing this would explain the fragmentary references to speakers being afraid to die, realizing their sins, and the prayer fragment in 4Q203 9. Other giants, by contrast, did not heed these warnings and continued in their iniquity. So understood, the imperative “pray” in 4Q203 8 15 can be taken as a genuine proposal put forward by Enoch. This proposal is admittedly speculative. But it does fit the fragments and has the support of the Manichaean Book of Giants. This suggestion can also be supported by the “Midrash of Shemḥazai and Azael,” a rabbinic story about the sons of the watchers.34 In this midrash there are two brothers, Heyya and Aheyya (‫הייא‬ ‫)ואהייא‬, whose names are similar to Ohyah and Hahyah in the Qumran text. Heyya and Aheyya are the sons of the angel Shemḥazai. One of them has a vision in which a garden of trees is destroyed except for a tree with three branches, which they understand as prefiguring the flood, as in the Qumran Book of Giants. But Heyya and Aheyya do not die in this cataclysm. In two variants of this text, preserved in Bereshit Rabbati and Pugio Fidei, these brothers live on and become the fathers of Sihon and Og, important Canaanite giants in the Hebrew Bible.35 The sons of the watchers function not as a paradigm of God’s punishment of iniquity through the flood, but as an etiology for the early inhabitants of Canaan. The giants function as a link between the early history of Israel and the antediluvian age. In both the “Midrash of Shemḥazai and Azael” and the Manichaean Book of Giants, two of the most important later texts that preserve Enochic giant traditions, at least some giants are not killed in a flood but rather have long lives. These reflections on the fate of the giants raise a key issue for the interpretation of the Qumran Book of Giants: why would God give the giants a vision about the flood in the first place? Why give them the opportunity to know about the flood before it happens? If God’s plan is to kill them, why bother? The dreams disclosed to Ohyah and Hahyah may signify that God, by making clear to the giants what the punishment for their crimes would be, gives them the opportunity to repent. This may be a variation of the tradition often associated with the 120 years of Gen 6:3.36 And, even though there is no explicit evidence 34  The varying versions of this tale and the differences between them are examined in Goff, When Giants Walked the Earth. 35 See the essay in this volume by Brian Doak. 36  There is long standing tradition that these years signify the length of time the generation of the flood was given to repent, which they refused to do (e.g., Tg. Onq. Gen 6:3; Tg. Ps.-J. Gen 6:3; cf. 4Q252 i 1–3; Jub. 5:9). There is no explicit reference to the 120 years tradition in Watchers, although there is a mention of 120 years, in an unfortunately fragmentary context, in the Manichaean Book of Giants (M101l). See James L. Kugel, The Bible As It Was (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 112–14; Pieter van der Horst, “‘His Days Shall Be One Hundred and Twenty Years’: Genesis 6:3 in Early Judaism and Ancient Christianity,” in idem, Jews and Christians in Their Graeco-Roman Context: Selected Essays on Early Judaism, Samaritanism, Hellenism and Christianity (WUNT I.196; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 66–70.

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for this proposal in the Qumran Book of Giants, the Manichaean Book of Giants suggests that this narrative element could have been present in the Qumran text and that the prayers of the giants, in striking contrast to those of the angels in Watchers, could have been successful.

V. Conclusion While the fate of the giants in the Qumran Book of Giants I have laid out cannot be proven, at the very least one should recognize that the portrait of the giants in this text is quite different from that of Watchers. The giants are often alluded to in ancient Jewish literature as creatures whom God punished for being wicked (e.g., CD 2:17–19; 3 Macc 2:4). It would be reasonable to expect that the discovery of a text that focused on the giants would provide us with all sorts of lurid details about just how evil and destructive they were. But that is not what we get with the Qumran Book of Giants. The composition does not stress the violence of the giants but rather their dreams. No other ancient Jewish text to my knowledge depicts the sons of the watchers as visionaries. The Qumran Book of Giants indicates that ancient Jewish traditions about the giants were more diverse than previously understood.

The Book of Giants among the Dead Sea Scrolls Considerations of Method and a New Proposal on the Reconstruction of 4Q530 Loren T. Stuckenbruck Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

I. Introduction Since J. T. Milik’s seminal publication The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments from Qumrân Cave 4 in 1976,1 increasing attention has been given to the existence of the Book of Giants (hereafter BG) among the Dead Sea materials.2 While the identity of all ten manuscripts that have been associated with BG cannot be verified,3 it has at least been possible for scholars to make salient observations about a work that is distinguishable in tone, focus, and content from the Enochic Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36, especially chs. 6–16) and that, in smaller portions of the text, displays similarities with later Manichaean materials. For example, like the Book of Watchers, the BG fragments draw heavily on 1  Józef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 2  Milik’s discussion of BG among the Dead Sea Enochic fragments can be found in The Books of Enoch, 4, 6–7, 57–58, 230, 236–38, 298–339, and Plates XXX–XXXII. The following mss. are often assigned to BG: 1Q23, 1Q24, 2Q26, 4Q203, 4Q206a, 4Q530, 4Q531, 4Q532, 4Q533, and 6Q8. In addition to Milik’s work, see the discussions and publications of these materials by Loren Stuckenbruck in Qumran Cave 4.XXVI: Cryptic Texts and Miscellanea, Part 1, ed. Stephen Pfann et al. (DJD 36; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 3–94 (1Q23, 1Q24, 2Q26, 4Q203 [Plates I–II], 4Q206a, 6Q8); Émile Puech, Qumrân Grotte 4.XXII: Textes araméens, première partie: 4Q529–549 (DJD 31; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 19–115 (and Plates I–VI). 3  For example, there is less certainty in this respect about 1Q24 belonging to the composition than about the others; cf. Stuckenbruck, DJD 36, 67–72. The possibility of regarding 6Q14, 1Q19 11, 13–15; 4Q186; 4Q534 7; 4Q536; 4Q537; and even 4Q489–490 as belonging to BG has been variously discussed, though the case for the inclusion of these ms. fragments is not strong. Concerning these doubtful suggestions, see Milik, The Books of Enoch, 55–58, 309 (1Q19 11, 13–15); Klaus Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984–2004), 1:229 n. 1, 259 (1Q19 11, 13, 15), 268 (6Q14); 2:162–65 (4Q534 7 and 4Q536); John Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions (HUCM 14; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992), 79, 110 (4Q537); and Puech, DJD 31, 11 n. 7 (referring to considerations by Milik on 4Q534–536, 1Q19 and 4Q186) and n. 9 (4Q489–490).

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the rebellious angels myth, though they cast the spotlight on the plight of their giant offspring and, unlike any other extant Jewish composition from the Second Temple period, give them proper names. Several of these names, as well as designations for a couple of the giants’ fathers, have been linked to equivalents among the Manichaean fragments, thus suggesting that BG may have survived in some form alongside other early Enochic traditions as they were carried from the Levant eastward all the way to China. It is one thing to assert the existence of a book among a wide range of very fragmentary materials, another to press an assessment of its contents into meaningful details. One aspect of the latter has been the challenge to think of BG among the Dead Sea Scrolls in terms of its structure. In this regard a number of attempts have been made to offer a narrative sequence into which some of the existing fragments can be made to fit.4 It must be emphasized, of course, that any relative sequencing of Aramaic Book of Giants fragments must be regarded as provisional, as it may be tempting for contemporary interpreters, at some level, to posit a storyline that projects one’s own sense of what it should look like rather than, strictly speaking, to reconstruct on the basis of evidence at hand. For this reason, it is especially important to keep criteria for reconstruction in mind and, significantly, to rank them in order of probability. What follows in the brief discussion below is an overview of criteria subject to consideration, a proposed outline of BG, and then a note that takes the physical reconstruction of one of the BG manuscripts as a point of departure for further observations on the shape of the work.

II. Methodological Considerations in Reconstructing the Qumran Book of Giants First, priority should, where possible, be given to the physical evidence. While this criterion may initially seem obvious, it consists of several aspects that need to be distinguished, as in (a), (b), and (c) immediately below. The examples given, while not exhaustive, may be taken as representative. 4  See Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer, 1:258–68; Florentino García Martínez, Qumran and Apocalyptic: Studies on the Aramaic Texts from Qumran (STDJ 9; Leiden: Brill, ­ iants 1992), 97–115; John Reeves, Jewish Lore, passim; Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of G from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary (TSAJ 63; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 11–24; idem, “The Sequencing of Fragments Belonging to the Qumran Book of Giants: An Inquiry into the Structure and Purpose of an Early Jewish Composition,” JSP 16 (1997): 3–24; James Davila, http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity/rt/otp/abstracts/bgiants (accessed July 2015). Further contributions on the placement of individual fragments have been made by others, for example, Émile Puech, “Les fragments 1 à 3 du Livre des Géants de la grotte 6 (pap6Q8),” RevQ 19/74 (1999): 227–38, idem, “Les songes des fils de Šemiḥazah dans le Livre des Géants de Qumrân,” CRSAIBL 144 (2000): 7–26; idem, DJD 31, 11–12.

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(a) In some instances sequences can be verified on the basis of codicological relationships among fragments within a single manuscript. In relation to BG this can be observed most clearly, for example, in 4Q203 7b i–ii. In 7b i the fragmentary text from the bottom of a column, only visible from the end of the lines, refers to giving birth (l. 3), to the “watchers” (l. 4), and to the imprisonment by an unnamed character of a culpable group (the rebellious angels?) speaking in the first person plural (l. 5 – “he has imprisoned us and overpowered yo[u?”). In column ii of 4Q203 7b, the beginning of three lines, again from the bottom of the column, can be read: “to you (sg.)” (l. 1), a reference to “the two tablets” (l. 2), and a phrase, specifying that “the second (tablet?) until now has not been rea[d” (l. 3). It can therefore be inferred that what the notorious characters say about their fate in 4Q203 7b i precedes the disclosure of the contents of a second tablet, while it may very well have followed the disclosure of the contents of the first. This is significant, because in 4Q203 8 the text purports to contain “a copy of the s[ec]ond tablet” (l. 3) that announces punishment to come upon the rebellious angels (ll. 6–15).5 We may deduce that the contents of fragment 8 of 4Q203 therefore follow the words visible on fragment 7b ii, according to which the reading of the second tablet has not yet taken place. It would not be unreasonable to propose that 4Q203 8 is found on the column immediately following 4Q203 7b ii. Another combination, based on similar length and line spacing of preserved fragments is proposed by Puech for 4Q532 1 ii and 2, though the reconstruction of a continuous text remains impossible.6 (b) Among the fragments within the same manuscript, it has been possible to posit a sequence or continuous text based on the contiguous placement of fragments originally found as separate pieces. One example in which physical evidence within the same manuscript is important for reconstruction relates to the connection between 4Q203 7a and 7b, two fragments that, though separate, of course contain not only the same scribal hand, but are preserved in a reconcilable shape with line spacing above and below their respective texts. The corresponding horizontal placement of the bottom three lines of each fragment has made it attractive to read the text continuously from the line endings in one fragment (7b) to the beginnings of the following lines in the other (7a).7 A further instance from BG manuscripts can be observed in 4Q530.8 The fragments 5 For

the text and translation, see Stuckenbruck, DJD 36, 28–33.  Puech, DJD 31, 97–104 (esp. 102–4). 7  Cf. Milik, The Books of Enoch, 311–17, whose relative placement of 4Q203 7a and 7b is followed by almost all scholars. Although I have questioned the assumption of this relationship in previous publications (see, e.g., DJD 36, 20–21) and regard the matter as not fully verifiable, the blank space above the parallel lines of these fragments, as well as the congruent marginal space below, which is at the bottom of the column, makes their placement next to one another a real possibility. 8  The image of the fragments reconstructed as described below is found in Puech, DJD 31, Planche II (which combines fragments from PAM 43.568, 42.046, and 42.081). 6

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numbered 4Q530 2 i-ii and 3, which produce a fragmentary text of two columns, are in turn complemented by an association with fragments 6, 7 i-ii, and 8, all of which stem from the upper portion of the scroll. This results in a continuous, though incomplete, text of three columns. In the reconstruction, then, 4Q530 2 ii and 4Q530 7 i attest material from the same column (the second of the three column sequence). Although a combination of multiple fragments, for the sake of simplicity this second column is referred to as 4Q530 2 ii. This composite text is immediately followed by 4Q530 7 ii, which preserves material from the third column in the sequence of three columns. To this constellation of joins and placements of fragments may be added another two larger separate fragments, numbered 9 through 12 (with fragments 10–12 constituting a series of joins), so that a substantial portion of text from the lower part of the column is recoverable. On other grounds, we shall have reason to consider these fragments in the final section below. Finally, two further joins of very small fragments, 1Q23 16 + 17 and 1Q23 24 + 25, have been suggested by Florentino García Martínez9 and Klaus Beyer,10 respectively. While the former is plausible, the latter is open to doubt11 and they do not, in any case, have an impact on our reconstruction of BG as a whole.12 (c) Finally there may be instances of textual overlap or possibly continuous text, based on fragments from different manuscripts. If there are a relatively high number of manuscripts belonging to the same work (in the case of BG perhaps as many as ten), that overlapping text exists from different copies should not come as a surprise.13 It is conspicuous, however, that this rarely, if at all, seems to be the case among the very fragmentary pieces. The most likely possibility for this to date has been proposed by Émile Puech, who finds in 6Q8 fragments 3 (lines 1–2) and 2 (lines 1–3) text that can be inserted into missing parts of 4Q530 2 ii 7–8 and 9–11, respectively.14 Though having previously argued against supplementing 4Q530 2 ii through 6Q8 3 and 2, I am now more convinced of its likelihood.15  9 García

Martínez, Qumran and Apocalyptic, 100.  Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer, 1:267 n. 1. 11 Cf. Stuckenbruck, DJD 36, 58–60, 62–63. 12 For other doubtful overlaps and joins that are even less likely, see Puech, DJD 31, 12, 112. 13  The phenomenon occurs in a number of works, for which multiple copies are preserved among the Dead Sea materials: most well known are instances pertaining to Serekh ha-Yaḥad (1QS and 4QS mss.), Hodayot (1QHa and 4QH mss.), Serekh ha-Milḥamah (1QM and 4QM mss.), and Musar le-Mevin (1Q and esp. 4Q mss.). 14  Puech, DJD 31, 28, 33–34. Milik, The Books of Enoch, 309, and Reeves, Jewish Lore, 148 n. 217, had already proposed that 6Q8 2 is a fragment of the dream vision in 4Q530 2 ii; however, it is Puech who first formally worked this out as a real possibility based on his reconstruction of a continuous text. 15 Concerning my doubts, see Stuckenbruck, DJD 36, 80, in which I draw attention to the parallels between 6Q8 2 and the later “Midrash of Shemḥazai and Asael,” which in turn preserves a vision found in neither of the dreams in 4Q530 2 ii nor overlaps in content with 6Q8 2. This later text’s overlap with 6Q8 2, however, is also reconcilable with the content of 4Q530 2 ii. 10

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Second, some clues in the fragments within single manuscripts and among the manuscripts as a whole allow for a relative placement of some materials. Most important for inferring the shape of the narrative are the related terms “two,” “second (tablet),” or “a second time,” since they imply a “first (tablet)” or “a first time” in the story. The clearer instances are the following: 4Q203 7b ii 2–3: “two tablets[” (l. 2); “the second (tablet?) until now has not been rea[d” (l. 3). 4Q203 8 3: “a copy of the s[ec]ond tablet, which is a le[tter” 4Q530 2 ii 3: “then the two of them dreamed dreams” 4Q530 7 ii 7: “I have been sent] here, and [com]e to you a second time[”

From the broken narrative, these texts allow us to infer that BG was structured around a series of double phenomena (dream visions, tablets, journeys) linked to the giants, among whom are brothers called Hahyah and Ohyah, who are given dreams in the storyline (4Q530 2 ii 7–11 and 16–20, respectively), and Mahaway, who travels to Enoch the second time in order to secure an interpretation for these dreams. The second journey of Mahaway, which implies a first, suggests that earlier in the narrative there has been an initial dream, perhaps (if the number “two” is determinative) a pair of dreams, to which Enoch had also previously given an interpretation.16 How precisely the two tablets are related to Enoch’s dream interpretations remains unclear, though the second tablet in 4Q203 8 is attributed to the handwriting of “Enoch the scribe of note/interpretation” (l. 4), precisely the designation applied to Enoch by the giants before they send Mahaway for an interpretation (4Q530 2 ii 14 after Hahyah’s dream, and reconstructable after that of Ohyah in l. 22). Third, there is a much less certain approach to reconstructing BG which appeals to external sources that share its basic storyline. These sources are the Book of Watchers (perhaps even more remotely, Jubilees 5–10 as well), and the later Manichaean fragments insofar as they preserve smaller-scale parallels of content with the Dead Sea BG evidence. In the case of the Book of Watchers, there is a clear connection with BG, which probably takes the storyline of Watchers as a point of departure: the fragments, for example, mention the rebellious angels Shemiḥazah (partially restored in 4Q203 8 3 and 4Q203 14 2) and Azazel (4Q203 7a 6). The former is only elsewhere mentioned in Second Temple literature among the 1 Enoch Aramaic fragments (e.g., 4Q201 1 iii 6; 4Q201 1 iv 1; and 4Q202 1 iv 9, corresponding to 1 En. 6:7; 8:3; 10:9) and the latter, though found only among the Dead Sea materials at 4Q180 1 7–8 and 4Q181 (11QT 26 4, 13 refers to the goat figure in Lev. 16:8, 10, 26), is no doubt the equivalent of the angel designated Asael in the 1 Enoch fragments (4Q201 1 iii 9; 4Q202 1 ii 26, 16  An account of Mahaway’s first journey to Enoch may be preserved in the Manichaean Book of Giants. A new edition of the relevant text of this composition is provided by Wilkens in the present volume.

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corresponding to 1 En. 6:7; 8:1).17 The BG fragments exhibit further correspondences to the Book of Watchers: both recount, for example, the rebelling angels’ initial aberration from heaven and their siring of progeny called Nephilin (cf. esp. 4Q531 1; 1 En. 7:2–3), an account of the giants’ misdeeds (cf. 4Q531 2 + 3 and 1Q23 9 + 14 + 15 with 1 En. 7:3–5), a cry of lament raised by the souls of dead humans (cf. 4Q530 1 i 4; 1 En. 9:10),18 and a description of procreative bliss in the eschaton (cf. 1Q23 1 + 6 + 22, 1 En. 10:17–19).19 Beyond the Book of Watchers, there is comparable wording between a prayer utterance in 4Q203 9–10 and a prayer uttered by Enoch in the first part in the Book of Dreams (1 En. 84:2–6),20 though no real literary link can be established.21 These common elements would make it possible to think that the general third person account of the fallen angels’ and giants’ misdeeds came near the beginning of the book, while the outlook towards conditions in the eschaton would appropriately belong at or near the end. A prayer text, if one attributed to Enoch, would be even more difficult to place. While not entirely hypothetical, a reconstruction based on a comparison of BG with the Book of Watchers is easily caught up in hypothetical reasoning and one’s Vorverständnis regarding what constitutes a proper storyline. If one may take the position of Enoch’s intercession in 1 Enoch 84 as a point of departure (cf. the reference to the angels’ wrong-doing in v. 4), the text in 4Q203 9–10 may be placed earlier in the narrative, that is, as a petitionary prayer in advance of a divine response to the events set in motion by the angels’ and giants’ misdeeds. The same is even more true when it comes to comparisons with the much later Manichaean materials. Given the very different geographical, socio-religious, and ideological context of the Manichaean texts, it is tenuous from the start to think that any inferences can be drawn regarding the larger shape of the much earlier Aramaic Dead Sea fragments.22 The disparateness of the materials make it all the more remarkable that there can be any overlap in content at all. Without being thoroughgoing or dealing with instances in which onomastic changes (e.g., characters’ names) may have been due to the change of the language media,23 we  The restoration by Puech of “A[sael” in 4Q531 7 7 (DJD 31, 60–61) is only based on the spelling in the 1 Enoch mss. 4Q201–202. 18 On this, see Milik, The Books of Enoch, 230, according to whom the BG text corresponds to that of the Greek Codex Panopolitanus. See further Puech, DJD 31, 24. 19  For further, less certain parallels between BG and the Book of Watchers, see Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants, 24. 20  Cf. Michael A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 2:10, 193–94. 21 For analysis and discussion, see Stuckenbruck, DJD 36, 34–38. 22  The difficulties of any straightforward carrying over from the Dead Sea Aramaic to the Manichaean texts relating to BG are illustrated well by the discussions of Matthew Goff and Jens Wilkens in this volume. 23  For an overview and attempt at sequencing the relevant Manichaean materials in relation to BG traditions, including those from the Dead Sea, see Enrico Morano, “New Research on Mani’s Book of Giants,” in Der östliche Manichäismus. Gattungs- und Werksgeschichte. Vor17

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can note the more straightforward correspondence between the name(s) Māhawai in the Manichaean texts24 and Mahaway in the Aramaic BG,25 in which the character, acting in a mediary role, encounters Enoch “the scribe.”26 With regard to the question of identifying a context otherwise not apparent, the Middle Persian Manichaean fragment published by W. B. Henning as M101l, at lines 43–56, offers a helpful parallel to 1Q23 1 + 6 + 22.27 The combination of fragments in the 1Q23 text (lines 1–5) refers by number to “200 donkeys, [2]00 wild asses … 200 sheep” and to “2[0]0 rams,” before mentioning “thousands” coming “from a gr[apevine” (from the originally separate frg. 22), and the Manichaean fragment mentions several animals numbering to “200,” before referring to 6,000 jugs of wine.28 Provided that a tradition-historical link can be accepted, the Manichaean fragment not only supports the join of 1Q23 22 to fragments 1 and 6 of this manuscript; it also suggests a possible context for the mention of animals and wine in abundance: a prediction uttered by Enoch regarding the fertility to follow the destruction, whether this is post-diluvian or to be anticipated among the eschatological blessings.29 Again, it has to be emphasized that comparisons between the BG from Qumran and the Manichaean sources are by definition provisional. Both sets of textual materials are very fragmentary, and their larger frames – that is, how the documents in which they are located open and conclude – remain elusive. In addition, it is not rare that significant words are only partly visible, so that attempts to restore them, sometimes with more than one possibility in view, remain uncertain. Finally, the three methodological areas outlined above in general may be thought to proceed from establishing first what is most certain to making suggestions on the basis of inference, sometimes on the basis of clear textual indicators, sometimes on the basis of one’s vague sense of narrative.

träge des Göttinger Symposiums vom 4./5. März 2010, ed. Zekine Özertural and Jens Wilkens (AAWG 17; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 101–11. 24  So the Middle Persian fragment L lines 1–7 (the “Leningrad fragment”) in Werner Sundermann, “Ein weiteres Fragment aus Manis Gigantenbuch,” in Orientalia J. Duchesne Guillemin Emerito Oblata (Acta Iranica 23; Leiden: Brill, 1984), 491–505 (here pp. 495–96); the Middle Persian Kawân (M101) fragment c, lines 4–22 published by Walter B. Henning, “The Book of the Giants,” BSOAS 11 (1943–46): 52–74 (here pp. 56–57 and 60: Māhawai refers to “my father Virōgdād”); a Uyghur fragment (Text B) in Henning, ibid., 65 (Enoch addresses a figure as “son of Virōgdād”; see also the article by Wilkens in the present volume); and in the Sogdian fragment Text C, lines 1–18 in Henning, ibid., 65–66. 25 See 1Q23 27 2; 4Q203 2 4; 4Q530 2 ii 21; 4Q530 7 ii 6; 4Q531 25 3; 6Q8 1 2, 5. 26  So in line 11 of fragment L cited in n. 24 above. Significantly, fragment L refers to “two stone tablets,” written by Enoch (cf. 4Q203 8 3–4), which may have been brought to the giants by Māhawai. 27  Henning, “The Book of the Giants,” 57, 61. 28  Milik, The Books of Enoch, 301–2. 29 Cf. Stuckenbruck, DJD 36, 51–52.

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III. A Sequenced Outline Derived from Extant Dead Sea Fragments Below I offer an outline of the Dead Sea Scrolls BG. It is an outline that focuses on the relative location of materials, rather than being a reconstruction of a full narrative. Alongside each section, those materials that have contributed to the placement are indicated. Those sections placed in double squared brackets ([[…]]) are less certain or likely, while the precise relative location assigned to some sections, as well as confidence regarding the narrative context of some of the fragments, is speculative (e.g., especially C, E, F, H, L, P): (A) Account about the angelic rebellion, their siring giant offspring through women of the earth (4Q531 1) (B) The giants’ violent activities on the earth against humans and the natural order (4Q531 2 + 3; 1Q23 9 + 14 + 15; cf. 4Q532 1 ii + 2) (C) The souls of humans who have been killed raise a complaint to God (cf. 4Q530 1; 1 En. 8:4–9:11) (D) [[A report about these matters is brought to Enoch’s attention (4Q206a 2?)]] (E) Enoch raises a petition to God about the situation, appealing to his royal rule (4Q203 9–10; cf. 1 En. 84:2, 5) (F) [[Conversations among the giants about their own activities (4Q203 1?)]] (G) The giants are given a first (pair?) of dreams (2Q26?; cf. “Midrash of Shemḥazai and Asael”; Manichaean Book of Giants [M101j]). (H) The giant Mahaway travels to Enoch the first time (cf. 4Q530 7 ii 7). (I) A first tablet written by Enoch denouncing the angels and giants is brought back (by Mahaway?) and read to the giants (cf. 4Q203 7b ii and 4Q203 8; cf. Sundermann’s Fragment L recto, ll. 6–8 and 9–11, respectively). (J) Discussion between the giants Ohyah and Hahyah about their dreams (6Q8 1) (K) An account of a rebellious angel’s powerlessness before God’s angels (4Q531 22, esp. ll. 4–5) (L) Ohyah tells Gilgamesh(?) about his dream (4Q531 22 9–12) (M) Intramural fighting among the giants (4Q531 7; cf. 1 En. 7:5; 10:9; Jub. 5:7, 9) (N) Punishment by imprisonment of Azazel and giants (4Q203 7a + 7b i; cf. 1 En. 10:4–8) (O) Reading of the second tablet written by Enoch that pronounces punishment on the angels and giants, who are told to pray (4Q203 8; 4Q530 1; cf. 4Q203 7b ii) (P) [[Complaint by the souls of humans who have been killed; cf. 4Q530 1]] (Q) Some giants rejoice (because they hope not to be punished?) (4Q530 2 ii 1–3) (R) The giants Hahyah and Ohyah are given a second pair of dreams (4Q530 2 ii 4–20) (S) The giant Mahaway is sent by the giants a second time to Enoch for an interpretation of the dreams (4Q530 2 ii 20–24; 4Q530 7 ii 3–10). (T) Enoch interprets the second pair of dreams (4Q530 7 ii 10–11) (U) [[Mahaway reports his encounter with Enoch back to the giants (4Q531 14?)]] (V) A prophecy or vision of eschatological reproductive bliss (by Enoch?) (cf. 1Q23 1 + 6 + 22; cf. 1 En. 10:17–11:2)

A continuous sequence within the above outline is, as mentioned, hard to establish for BG as a whole. The longest manuscript-based sequence within the work

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is found in sections Q through T, that is, within the combination of fragments that form the continuous narrative in 4Q530 2 ii and 4Q530 7 ii.

IV. A Proposal for Reconstructing the Remaining Length of 4Q530 Thus far, there is no reason to doubt the position of these sections in 4Q530 relative to one another. However, can anything be said regarding the location of this section within BG as a whole? The relative sequence in 4Q530 2 ii–7 ii has been placed near the end of the work; however, this placement, as is the case with most of the other sections in BG, arises on the basis of clues in the narrative (especially as they relate to the number “2”) that allow for the inference of a longer preceding narrative. Might there be any further evidence to support this hypothesis? In answer to this question, we consider the upper part of 4Q530 2 ii–7 ii, for which a photo is provided in Plate 19 of this volume.30 It is among these fragments that, in my opinion, a codicological reconstruction of part of the manuscript and, therefore, of BG contained therein can be attempted.31 In particular, the presence of similarly shaped sets of damage points may indicate a single turn of the manuscript at this point, with the congruent shapes having been contiguous in the rolling of the manuscript before the damage ensued. In the case of 4Q530 2 ii–7 ii, one may note two sets of three damage points, which look like rounded bumps, to the right and the left in the reconstructed column in the top margin (see, respectively, Plate 19, photos no.’s 1 and 3). Since the damage points on the left (from above the reconstructed second column to above the margin between the second and third) are closer to one another than those on the right (from the end of the first column to the beginning of the second),32 it is clear that the scroll was originally rolled from left to right, that is, the text to the left 30 Most important for the observations below are the fragments numbered 2 and 7 in DJD 31, Planche II, between which a further fragment, numbered 6, is inserted that helps to fill out more content on the first four lines of the column and make it possible to ascertain the original lengths of thes lines. The photos on the plate in the present volume of fragments 2 (Plate 19 no. 1 on the right) and 7 (Plate 19 no. 3 on the left) are not scaled to original size, nor are they presented here according to the same scale. My measurements are based on my study of the fragments on visits to the scrollery in the Israel Museum in July 2008 and March 2012. Photos of 4Q530 8 (Plate 19 no. 2) and 4Q530 9 (Plate 19 no. 4) are provided to indicate the extent of text below 4Q530 2 ii (i.e. no.’s 1 and 3). 31 Hartmut Stegemann has outlined a theoretical and methodological basis for physical reconstructions of manuscript fragments in his influential article, “Methods for the Reconstruction of Scrolls from Scattered Fragments,” in Archaeology and History in the Dead Sea Scrolls: The New York University Conference in Memory of Yigael Yadin, ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman (JSPSup 8; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 189–220. 32  More precisely, the distance between the zeniths of the first and third bumps on the left is 1.60 cm, whereas the distance between those on the right is 2.45 cm.

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of 4Q530 2 ii–7 ii would have been rolled in increasingly smaller turns until the manuscript presumably came to an end, whether or not the most internal part of the scroll contained a handsheet. Moreover, the approximate distance between the zenith of the middle bump of the right set and that of the left is 11.05 cm. If the rate of reduction due to the inward rolling of the scroll can be set at .85 cm (see the measurements in n. 32) and if .85 is extended to the remaining inward rolls, then a further ten turns (amounting to a reduction of 8.5 cm = .85 × 10), beginning from the middle of the left damage points, would reduce as follows: 8.55, 7.7, 6.85, 6.0, 5.15, 4.3, 3.45, 2.6, 1.75, and .9 cm, respectively. Adding these distances (of scroll turns) together, we come to a length of 47.25 cm remaining in the scroll. Based on the average line length of 4Q530 2 ii (9.75 cm) and the average width of the margin between the three reconstructed columns of 4Q530 (1.69 cm), following the second column there would have been space for a remaining four columns of text (9.75 + 1.69 cm = 11.44 cm per column plus margin), amounting to 45.76 cm of space, with 2.51 cm left over. If the most interior part of the scroll had space for a handsheet, then more than 2.51 cm would have been required, leaving space for at least three columns of text following 4Q530 2 ii. In other words, after 4Q530 7 ii, which contains Mahaway’s second encounter with Enoch, there would have been space for at least an additional two, though no more than three, columns of text. None of these observations allows us to infer anything about the length and number of the preceding columns of 4Q530. These measurements given above, however, confirm – even if allowing for a small margin of error – that at 4Q530 2 ii through 7 ii (covered by sections Q through T in the sequence suggested above) we are nearing the end of the scroll in terms of how many times it could be further rolled inward. Sections U and V in the sequence would probably not have covered the remaining material in its entirety, but nonetheless may indicate some of what the remaining part of BG, at least in 4Q530, contained.33

V. Conclusion The discussion above has not answered more questions than it has raised. The methodological points for reconstructing BG among the Dead Sea Scrolls outline principles for consideration, beginning with the more certain and ending with considerations that appeal to materials nearer (portions of 1 Enoch, Jubilees) and further afield (Manichaean fragments) that share some details with the BG fragments from Qumran caves 1, 2, 4, and 6. We have nonetheless seen that, despite all efforts to keep the reconstruction methods distinct, they can, to some extent, 33  The working assumption here is that other manuscripts such as 1Q23 or even 4Q531 consisted of a version of BG that did not vary greatly in content from that of 4Q530.

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be fluid, as the physical placement of some pieces are strengthened or even suggested by the content of other documents. Furthermore, I have offered some observations of one of the BG manuscripts, 4Q530, which help to establish the place of its contents in 4Q530 2 ii–7 ii within the scroll. The remaining length, whether two or three columns of text following 4Q530 7 ii, suggests that the book contained more material than the sketchy outline based on preserved materials may leave one to infer. The present analysis is not the last word on the subject. Nevertheless, it hopefully provides the grounds for further reflection, whether that involves other proposals for reconstruction or evokes calls for even more caution than has been exercised here.

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Fig. 1: 4Q530 fragment 7.

Fig. 2: 4Q530 fragment 2.

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Fig. 3: 4Q530 fragment 8.

Fig. 4: 4Q530 fragment 9.

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Part Three

Enochic Traditions in Central Asia and China Exploring Connections and Affinities between Giants in Ancient Judaism and Manichaeism

The Book of Giants Tradition in the Chinese Manichaica1 Gábor Kósa Eötvös Loránd University

The various lists of Mani’s canonical writings include a work called the Giants or the Book of Giants: Coptic sources term it pjwme NNqala