Giants/The two versions
Qumran and the Kawān
Two books, one camp
The same story was kept by a Jewish sect by the Dead Sea and, centuries later, by Mani as one of his seven canonical books. The names change. The tablet and the tree do not.
- Cited
- Aramaic fragments; Manichaean Middle Persian, Sogdian, Uyghur
J. T. Milik identified the Qumran work in the 1970s by reading it against Mani’s Book of Giants, the Kawān, whose fragments had turned up in Turfan — Chinese Turkestan — in Middle Persian, Sogdian, and Old Turkic. Without the Manichaean book, the Aramaic scraps were harder to order. Without the Aramaic, Mani’s giants looked like a curiosity of Iranian epic.
Mani (third century CE) made the book scripture. He recast Ohyah as Sām and brought in Narīmān and Atambīš, the way the Qumran book had already recast Gilgamesh and Humbaba. A Jewish camp of Watchers’ sons becomes, in Manichaean cosmology, an episode in the mixture of light and darkness. The dreams survive the conversion: a tablet scraped until a remnant of words; a garden cut down to one tree with three branches.
The Qumran copies — 1Q23, 1Q24, 2Q26, 4Q203, 4Q530–533, 6Q8 — are all Aramaic, all fragmentary, all from the last two centuries before the common era into the first century CE. They are a Second Temple Jewish work that presupposes the Book of Watchers and refuses to treat the Nephilim as an anonymous plague. The Kawān is what happens when that work travels east and is loved by a prophet who needed a story about imprisoned demons.
Read them together and the camp comes into focus: named sons, an assembly, three dreams of erasure, a scribe who still answers letters, and a flood that is both water and editing. Apart, each version is a ruin. Together they are almost a book.