Giants/A named giant
A name on the list
Ahiram
One of the giants the fragments name and then drop. His office, his father, and his dream are in the lacunae. The list is the point: they were persons.
Also named ʾAḥiram, Ahirom.
- Office
- Named, then lost
- Father
- Unnamed Watcher
- Tradition
- Qumran
- Cited
- 4Q531
Ahiram appears in a broken catalogue of names. That is almost all. The Book of Giants is a work whose most famous characters survive because two columns of 4Q530 survived. Ahiram is a reminder of how much camp-life is missing: conversations, boasts, a wife, a particular violence, a particular fear.
The name itself is West Semitic — “my brother is exalted” — and is worn by a Byblian king of the early first millennium. Whether the giant is that memory, or only the same name-pattern, cannot be settled from the scrap. He is here because the book insisted on naming, and the cave insisted on forgetting.