Exploring the Book of Enoch and Giants

A scroll fragment sits in Vault 19 at the Shrine of the Book in

Jerusalem.

Fragment 4Q531.

The Book of Enoch was removed from the Bible by the Council

of Laodicea

in the year 364.

Banned, hidden, called dangerous by the church.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls surfaced at Qumran in 1947,

11 copies of Enoch came up,

more than most books that made it into the Old Testament.

That fragment is from the Book of Giants.

It names the bloodlines that survived the flood.

The last family in that line is hunted to the last man at

Gath under King David.

Old blood. In the next several minutes, you will see what the text

names, where the archeology stands, and why only

one of four bloodlines gets a closing chapter.

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Every week, we uncover what was removed from scripture.

But here's what makes this stranger.

The Book of Giants is not one fragment.

It is 10 of them: 1Q23,

1Q24, 2Q26,

4Q203,

4Q530,

4Q531,

4Q532, 4Q556,

4Q206, 6Q8. Identified,

cataloged, and classified by Loren Stuckenbruck,

the world's leading authority on the text.

Composed in Aramaic in the third or early second century before

Christ.

Older than the Gospels, older than the Mishnah,

older than the Latin

word Bible. And it names them: Ohia,

Hahiah, Mahway. And in fragment

4Q530, column two, the giant

Gilgamesh appears by name. The same Gilgamesh from the

Mesopotamian epic sitting in a Jewish text that the church spent

17 centuries pretending did not exist.

The giants are not abstractions in the Book of Giants. They are characters.

They speak. They dream. They send messengers to Enoch for

interpretation. In one fragment, the giant Mahway

flies to Enoch to ask what their visions mean.

Enoch reads them a tablet of judgment. The flood is coming.

The fathers will be bound. The children will perish. Most of them.

That is the seam the church needed to close because the same text

that says most of them perish names the ones who do not.

The Book of Enoch in the Michael Knibb translation from Oxford in

1978 in chapter seven verse two says

the giants stood three thousand cubits, that they devoured the produce

of men, that they devoured beasts and birds and fish, and that

they devoured one another's flesh.

The Ge'ez direct translation by Ephrem Isaac, published Oxford

1983 from manuscripts kept in the Aksum highland

monasteries, preserves the same passage word for word.

George Nicholsburg's Fortress Press commentary, published

2001, classifies it as the oldest stratum.

Not editorial, not late, original.

And in Genesis chapter six verse four, in every Bible printed in

every language since Laodicea, the phrase is right there in the open,

"The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also

afterward." And also afterward. Three Hebrew

words, the Vulgate left them in, the King James left them in,

every modern translation leaves them in, but none of them tells you what comes

afterward. The Ethiopian Church reads the next verse

with Enoch

open beside it. The Western Church reads it and moves on.

The man who held the keys to the Aramaic fragments that explain what came

afterward was Józef Milik, a Polish French scholar,

one of the original Qumran translators.

In 1976, Milik published The Books of Enoch,

Aramaic Fragments of Qumran, Cave Four.

It was the foundational edition. It was supposed to include the full Book of

Giants

material. It did not. Milik held the rest back.

He kept it. He worked on it for thirty more years.

In 2006, he died, and the full publication was never

completed. Loren Stuckenbruck and Emil Puech have

spent the years since reconstructing what Milik knew.

Some of the Aramaic fragments he annotated remain in private hands today.

He held it, then he died with it. The fragments name them:

Ohia, Hahiah,

Mahway, Gilgamesh.

Old blood. Most of those names die in the flood,

but the

fragments also know, and the Hebrew Bible knows, and four

separate Old Testament passages confirm, that some of the line did

not.

There are four of them after the flood.

They have names, they have titles