The time between the end of the Tanakh and the beginning of Jesus’ ministry was obviously a fervent breeding ground.

Were there other books that also played a role even if to a lesser extent?

There is the Book of Jubilees which mirrors Enoch in that it survived as Ethiopian Orthodox apocrypha in Ge’ez. Like Enoch we have Greek and Aramaic fragments. Also, less well preserved unfortunately, is the Book of Giants which survives in fragments in both a version used by Manichean groups and also Greek and Aramaic. I intend to discuss the Book of Giants a bit next.

Wow, maybe there are Higher Forces at work.

I just found out that at the end of the month editors James Davila and Richard Bauckham are releasing the second volume of their own Old Testament pseudepigrapha, designed to supplement the original set from James Charlesworth.

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I bring it up because it will contain new translations of all extant versions of the Book of the Giants!

The Book of Giants: General Introduction
James R. Davila
The Aramaic Book of Giants
Loren T. Stuckenbruck
The Book of Giants: Iranian Manichean Version
Prods Oktor Skjærvø
The Manichean Book of Giants: Old Turkic Version
Peter Zieme

But before anyone gets too excited, remember, while it will be extremely supercool to have all this material together in one place, all versions are extremely fragmentary. To give you some idea of what we’re up against see these old translations online.

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** you do not have permission to see this link **

To see what scholars are up against look here-

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Now with the Book of Jubilees we are in much better shape. It’s a mirror of the situation with 1 Enoch.

There is the two volume critical edition from Hermeneia.

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I will get it when I can find a cheap used copy like I did with 1 Enoch.

In the meantime, just like with 1 Enoch, there is an inexpensive translation with a great intro and notes sans critial apparatus.

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Like any good Pusherman I am happy to share my addictions. I’m not even close to being rich so early on I took a vow to never pay full price for my drug of choice. With patience and research I’ve been mostly successful in my quests. Consequently I have a personal library with many used and second hand texts. I have about half a shelf of books that are individually valuable. First editions of favorite authors, art books and such. (My prize is a 1912 first of my favorite book** by Lord Dunsany, the Irish fantasist, which I bought at an estate sale for 15 bucks american. I still wonder who fell asleep and let that happen. I suppose I’m still enough of a mystic to imagine that books seek me out.) The most I ever paid for a book was a large sized reproduction of a 17th century astronomical text that contains charts for both the Ptolemaic and Copernican solar systems. Given my interests and its beauty I couldn’t resist.

I’m occasionally asked about “Black Sites” where books currently under copyright can be downloaded on PDFs for free. My moral calculation is like this. I support the author so if I can afford a book I feel compelled to buy it. But I have absolutely no sympathy for the merciless, rapacious academic press. If I was a student and I was faced with the prospect of buying a hundred dollar textbook you can be damn sure I would secure a pirated copy, if possible. And some of the religiously themed publishers are the worst. For every Hermaneia that will publish inexpensive versions of their works there is Brill (ugh!) and DeGruyter. Effem. A while back I wrote about my experience of finding a copy of the current critical edition of the Hekhalot Literature published by Brill for $200!!! (Imagine having to go to the library every time you wanted to read the New Testament. Some books you have to have your own copy.) I was lucky. I found a cheap used copy. But I would have had no qualms about downloading it at all. Anyway that’s how I look at it.

**51 Tales, a collection of Dunsany’s short-short stories, prose poems really, the longest a page and a half. Dunsany’s work is a rich liqueur better sipped than gulped.

The Ferryman is always an interesting character in world mythology. My favorite is Urshanabi in the Epic of Gilgamesh who ferries Gilgamesh across the Waters of Death in his journey to Dilmun, the Land of the Living, the Sumerian ‘Eden’.

The story so far…

The Sons of God, in the older tradition divine beings in God’s court, in later iterations angels, eye lasciviously the daughters of the earth and have their way with them. From these unions come the Giants who go mad and rampage over the earth destroying humans and themselves and who are ultimately wiped out along with most of the people in the Flood.

Except…when you give it a closer look, the story of the Nephilim becomes…ambiguous.

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
-Gen 6:4 NRSV

And they conceived from them and bore to them great giants. And the giants begot Nephilim, and to the Nephilim were born †Elioud†. And they were growing in accordance with their greatness.

They were devouring the labor of all the sons of men, a 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. Then the earth brought accusation against the lawless ones.
– Enoch 7:2-5 Nickelsburg

As I’ve pointed out before there really is no clue in the Genesis account that the Nephilim are evil or are the cause of the Flood. You have to go to other passages elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures to detect hints of this. I won’t get bogged down in the discussion but the source of the term Nephilim is itself disputed. It has been interpreted as those who have fallen or those who have caused others to fall, “fall” potentially meaning “fallen in battle”. The source of the definition as “giants” seems to be the Septuagint (LXX) which translated the term as Gigantes. Confusingly enough, the LXX also translated the term gibborim, “mighty men” in the same verse, as Gigantes as well. Did they mean “giants” in the sense of mythical beings who were real dang tall or in some other metaphorical sense?

Many ancient mythologies have stories of divinely begotten heroes whose function was to rid the earth of monstrous giants, agents of chaos, who lived at the dawn of history. Some non-Hebrew examples that come to mind are the wars between Zeus and the Titans, or between Odin and the Frost Giants. The Genesis account seems at least obliquely to be pointing back to some similar scenario.

There’s another problem though. We have references to the “descendants” of the Nephilim in other parts of the Hebrew bible.

But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”
-Number 13:31-33 NRSV

This passage occurs when the folks Moses sends to spy out the Promised Land come back and give their report. But wait a minute! If the Flood wiped out everyone but Noah and his family then where the heck did these “descendants of the Nephilim” come from? They are clearly depicted as some of the original inhabitants of Canaan. Interestingly here the LXX also translates Nephilim as Gigantes, “giants”, clearly pointing back to Genesis 6:4.

The “offspring of the Anakim” are also referred to in Duet 1:28, 2:10-11,20-21. There is also a non-biblical tradition that it was giants who originally built the Tower of Babel. Much later on Eusebius makes an offhand comment in one of his works about the city of Babylon being founded by “survivors” of the Flood.

Huh?

But go back and reread the verse in Genesis. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward… Hmmmm… The simplest explanation, although never explicitly stated, is that we have traditions that somebody, perhaps supernaturally, survived the Flood besides Noah and his family.

Now let’s go to the account in 1 Enoch.

And they conceived from them and bore to them great giants. And the giants begot Nephilim, and to the Nephilim were born †Elioud†.
-1 En 7:2 Nickelsburg

Even stranger… The product of the unholy union of divine beings and human women were…giants. But then the giants begot Nephilim. And the Nephilim begot…something. That last term is a guess as Nickelsburg admits. The text is corrupted and the term resembles no Hebrew word that can be determined by transposing characters. At some point scholars just throw up their hands. This sounds though like three different generations. As we’ll see later there are other examples in 1 Enoch of the union of divine beings and humans producing other creatures than giants. (And in the Book of Jubilees as well.)

I think the larger point here is that Giants are hybrid creatures testifying to their origins. They are thus depicted in various ways in our texts. They are not simply real tall, supernaturally strong beings. In the traditions they always have an ambiguous, shape shifting aspect, which becomes important when you consider their influence on later demonology and the world of spirits.