The Named Giants

The Book of Giants is the Aramaic text recovered at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls in fragments from Caves 1, 2, 4, and 6. The principal manuscripts are 1Q23 and 1Q24 (with overlap in 4Q203), 4Q530 through 4Q533, and 6Q8. The text was lost to the Western Church entirely; traces survived only in the Manichaean adaptations preserved in medieval Central Asian fragments until the 1947–1956 Qumran discoveries returned the original Aramaic to scholarship. Loren T. Stuckenbruck’s 1997 critical edition is the standard reference; Florentino García Martínez and Eibert Tigchelaar’s Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition (1997–98) gives the most accessible English translation.

The text catalogues the Giants by name in a way 1 Enoch does not. Where 1 Enoch records the Giants as a population (the offspring of the Watchers, three thousand ells in height, devouring the earth), the Book of Giants names them individually and gives them speaking parts, dreams, embassies, and the consciousness of their own coming end. The Giants are recorded as having moral and intellectual interiority; they think, they fear, they discern, they petition. The text is one of the most theologically strange and underread documents in the Second Temple corpus.

Ohyah

Ohyah is one of the principal Giants of the narrative and one of the sons of Semjaza, the chief of the fallen Watchers. His name in Aramaic (’why’) is preserved in 4Q530 and 4Q531; the etymology is debated, with possible connections to the Hebrew root for “to live” (ℏayℏ), though Stuckenbruck cautions that the name may be loanword from older West Semitic mythology. Ohyah is one of the two Giants who receive the prophetic dreams of the cosmic destruction; he is the more articulate of the brothers, the one who speaks first in the recorded debates among the Giants.

The text records Ohyah as the Giant who recognises, before his fellows, that the dreams point to the end of his population. His response in the narrative is one of the strangest in the corpus: he proposes that a messenger be sent to the patriarch Enoch — the same Enoch whose ascent his father’s rebellion had provoked — to ask for an interpretation and, possibly, for intercession. The decision to send the embassy is recorded in 4Q530. See Mahaway’s Embassy to Enoch →

Hahyah

Hahyah (Aramaic hhy’) is the brother of Ohyah, also a son of Semjaza, and the recipient of the second of the two prophetic dreams. His dream — the great trees consumed by fire — complements Ohyah’s dream of the garden uprooted, and together the two visions are read by the Giants’ assembly as the announcement of the coming judgement. Hahyah is the quieter of the brothers; the recorded fragments give him fewer speeches but the dream attributed to him is in some ways the more terrible of the two. See The Dreams of Ohyah and Hahyah →

Mahaway

Mahaway is the son of the Watcher Baraqel (sometimes Baraqijal, the Watcher who taught astrology). In the narrative he is the Giant chosen by the assembly to fly to Enoch in the heavens, carry the dreams to him, and ask for an interpretation. The flight itself — the journey of a Giant through the upper air, beyond the orbit of the sun, to find the patriarch who walks with God — is one of the most striking single passages in the Book of Giants. The fragments are damaged but the outline is preserved: Mahaway flies, reaches Enoch’s habitation, asks his question, and returns with the answer to the assembly of his fellow Giants.

The site reads Mahaway as the most theologically poignant figure in the entire Watchers-and-Giants narrative. He is the offspring of the fall, knows himself to be doomed by his lineage, and yet flies to ask the saint who walked with God for guidance. The encounter is dignified, sober, and tragic. See Mahaway’s Embassy to Enoch →

Gilgamesh in the Aramaic fragments

One of the most unexpected features of the Book of Giants is the appearance of the name Gilgamesh (Aramaic glgmš) as one of the named Giants. The fragments preserve the name in 4Q530 and 4Q531, in a context that places him as a fellow of Ohyah and Hahyah in the assembly of doomed Giants. The Sumerian and Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh — the hero who searches for immortality after the death of his companion Enkidu — was widely transmitted in the ancient Near East, and the Aramaic-speaking Jewish authors of the Book of Giants evidently knew the figure and integrated him into the Watchers narrative.

The integration is theological. Where the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine and one-third human, the Jewish Book of Giants recasts that divinity as the contamination of the fallen Watchers’ bloodline. Gilgamesh in this reading is not a king of Uruk but one of the offspring of the descent, doomed alongside Ohyah and Hahyah, awaiting the same end. The Mesopotamian hero is reframed as a particular instance of a general category that the Watchers tradition catalogues.

Humbaba in the Aramaic fragments

Alongside Gilgamesh, the Book of Giants preserves the name Humbaba (Aramaic hwbbš or hwmbbš), the monstrous guardian of the cedar forest in the Mesopotamian epic. Where the epic of Gilgamesh records Humbaba as a fearsome creature whom Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay, the Book of Giants names him as another of the Giants — an offspring of the fall, fellow to Ohyah and Hahyah in the assembly. The integration suggests the Jewish authors knew the Mesopotamian narrative as a kind of older record of the same population, retold in a different theological key.

The site reads the Gilgamesh and Humbaba appearances as evidence of a deep ancient memory: figures the Mesopotamian tradition called gods or demigods, the Watchers tradition reads as the offspring of fallen angels. The two traditions describe the same population from different vantages.

The unnamed multitude

Beyond the named individuals, the Book of Giants speaks of the Giants as a population — the assembly that debates the dreams, the host whose end is recorded, the multitude whose violence provoked the Flood. The named figures are the principals; the unnamed multitude is the body of the doomed population. The text’s editorial logic is the same as the demonological catalogues that came after: a few are named for the record; the body is preserved as a category.

What survived after the Flood

The named Giants did not survive the cosmic correction. Ohyah and Hahyah and Mahaway and Gilgamesh and Humbaba died in the deluge along with the unnamed multitude. The bodies drowned; the lineage was extinguished.

But the spirits of the dead Giants, according to 1 Enoch 15 and the Book of Jubilees 10, were not extinguished with the bodies. The dispersed spirits became the demonic population of the post-Flood world — the unclean spirits the Gospels record, the named entities of the Goetia, the spirits the Catholic exorcists meet in the present hour. See “The Operations That Survived” for the editorial throughline →

For the dreams these named Giants received, see The Dreams of Ohyah and Hahyah. For Mahaway’s flight to Enoch, see Mahaway’s Embassy to Enoch. For the broader narrative context, return to The Watchers’ Fall.