Giants/A dream
Hahyah’s night
The garden of two hundred
Gardeners water an orchard. Two hundred trees, great shoots from the stumps, then fire and a covering of water. The Watchers are the trees. Their sons are the shoots.
- Dreamer
- Hahyah
- Remnant
- Three roots in the orchard
- Cited
- 4Q530 ii 6–12; 6Q8
This is the best-preserved dream in the Aramaic book. Hahyah speaks in the assembly: in this very night he was watching. There were gardeners, and they were watering. Large shoots came out of their roots. He watched until tongues of fire, until the dirt was covered with all the water, and the fire burned the garden. Here is the end of the dream.
Stuckenbruck and others read the two hundred as the Watchers of 1 Enoch 6. The gardeners may be angels tending what will be judged. The three roots that a Cave 6 fragment keeps in the garden are the remnant — the same three names that survive the washed tablet, the same three sons of Noah.
It is a merciless allegory because it is also horticulture. A stump that still sends a shoot is a Watcher’s fertility. Fire and water together are the double sentence of 1 Enoch 10: the abyss of fire for the fathers, the deluge for the world that held the children.