The Named Giants

For something close to sixteen centuries, this book did not exist. The Book of Giants — the Aramaic text that names the offspring of the fallen Watchers and gives them voices — was lost to the Western Church completely. It survived only in scraps: Manichaean adaptations, copied and recopied, carried east, abandoned at last in the dry caves of Central Asia where medieval fragments of it were eventually found. The original Aramaic was simply gone. Then, between 1947 and 1956, in the caves above the Dead Sea, it came back. The Qumran discoveries returned the Book of Giants to scholarship in fragments from Caves 1, 2, 4, and 6 — the manuscripts catalogued 1Q23 and 1Q24, 4Q203, 4Q530 through 4Q533, and 6Q8. Loren Stuckenbruck’s 1997 critical edition is the standard reference; García Martínez and Tigchelaar’s Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition gives the most accessible English.

And what it returned is stranger than 1 Enoch prepares anyone for. 1 Enoch keeps the Giants at a distance — a population, a height, a hunger, three thousand ells of devouring. The Book of Giants walks in close. It gives them names. It gives them speaking parts, and arguments, and dreams. Strangest of all, it gives them the knowledge of their own coming end, and then lets you watch them carry it. These Giants think. They are afraid. They reason with one another in assembly and they send for help. Whatever they are, they are not the mindless monsters the word has trained us to expect — and that is the first thing this page asks you to set down.

Ohyah

Ohyah is a son of Semjaza — the chief of the fallen Watchers, the one who swore the first oath. His name survives in the fragments 4Q530 and 4Q531 as ’why’; the meaning is contested, perhaps the Hebrew root for to live, perhaps a loanword carried in from an older West Semitic past. Stuckenbruck will not settle it. What the text does settle is his character. Ohyah is the articulate one, the brother who speaks first when the Giants gather to argue, and he is one of the two who will be given the dreams.

He is also the first to understand. Before any of the others, Ohyah looks at the dreams and sees plainly what they mean: the end of his kind, all of it, coming. And then he does the strangest thing in the whole corpus. He does not rage, and he does not despair. He proposes that they send a messenger — to Enoch. To the one human being who walks with God. To the very patriarch whose nearness to heaven his own father’s rebellion had provoked. A doomed Giant, sending to a saint, to ask for an interpretation and perhaps for mercy. 4Q530 records the assembly agreeing to it. Mahaway’s Embassy to Enoch →

Hahyah

Hahyah — Aramaic hhy’ — is Ohyah’s brother, another son of Semjaza, and the one to whom the second dream is given. Where Ohyah dreamed of a garden torn up by the roots, Hahyah dreams of a grove of great trees and a fire that takes every one of them. The fragments give him fewer words than his brother; he is the quieter one. But the dream he carries is, if anything, the more terrible of the two, and when the assembly sets the two visions side by side, they read them the same way: as a sentence already passed. The Dreams of Ohyah and Hahyah →

Mahaway

Mahaway is the son of Baraqel — Baraqijal, the Watcher who taught astrology, the reading of the sky. It is a fitting inheritance for what the assembly asks of him. Mahaway is chosen to make the journey: to carry the two dreams to Enoch and bring back what they mean. And the journey is no errand on foot. Mahaway flies — a Giant lifting through the upper air, past the orbit of the sun, to reach the dwelling of the one man who walks with God. The fragments are torn, but the shape of it holds: he rises, he finds Enoch, he asks, and he comes back down to the waiting assembly with the answer in his mouth. It is one of the strangest and most beautiful passages the Dead Sea gave back.

Of every figure in the Watchers-and-Giants narrative, Mahaway is the one the site finds hardest to look away from. He did not choose his blood. He is the offspring of the fall, and he knows the fall has already doomed him — and still he flies, of his own will, to ask a holy man what should be done. There is no defiance in it, and no false hope. Only a doomed creature going, soberly, to the one door that might open. The tradition does not give him an escape. It gives him dignity, which is the rarer thing. Mahaway’s Embassy to Enoch →

Gilgamesh in the Aramaic fragments

Then a name appears in the fragments that stops the modern reader cold. Gilgamesh. Aramaic glgmš, preserved in 4Q530 and 4Q531 — and not as an allusion, not as a borrowed flavour, but as one of the Giants himself, seated in the same doomed assembly as Ohyah and Hahyah. The hero of the oldest epic the world has kept, the king of Uruk who walked to the edge of the earth searching for a way not to die, is here. He is one of them. He is going to drown.

The move is theological, and it is precise. The Mesopotamian Gilgamesh is two parts god, one part man — and that fraction of divinity is the source of his glory. The Book of Giants takes the same fraction and renames it. Not divinity at all. Contamination. The tainted blood of the fallen Watchers, running in a famous body. The Aramaic authors knew the epic; everyone in the ancient Near East knew the epic. They did not deny Gilgamesh. They re-filed him — out of the catalogue of heroes and into the catalogue of the doomed.

Humbaba in the Aramaic fragments

Gilgamesh does not come alone. The fragments carry a second borrowed name beside his: Humbaba — Aramaic hwbbš or hwmbbš — the monster of the cedar forest, the guardian whose roar shook the mountains, the creature Gilgamesh and Enkidu hunted down and killed in the epic. In the Book of Giants he is not killed. He is one of the assembly. The hero and the monster he once slew sit in the same doomed company now, waiting for the same water.

That is what the site hears underneath the Gilgamesh and Humbaba fragments — the sound of a very old memory shared across peoples. One nation kept these figures as gods and demigods and forest-monsters. Another nation, reading the same names, recognised something else: the offspring of fallen angels, the giant population that the Flood was sent to end. Two traditions, one buried event. The Aramaic authors were not inventing. They were correcting the file.

The unnamed multitude

Behind the named few stands the rest of them — the host. The Book of Giants names Ohyah, Hahyah, Mahaway, Gilgamesh, Humbaba, and then it stops naming, because the rest cannot be counted. They are the assembly that argued over the dreams. They are the multitude whose violence rose up off the earth until heaven could no longer ignore it. The text keeps a handful of names for the record and lets the rest stand as what they were: a population, too many to list, all of them already condemned. It is the same editorial instinct the demon-catalogues would inherit centuries later — name a few, file the rest as a category.

What survived after the Flood

None of them lived. Ohyah, Hahyah, Mahaway, Gilgamesh, Humbaba — every named Giant went down in the Flood with the whole uncounted host. The bodies drowned. The bloodline ended in the water. That much, the tradition is willing to call finished.

The bodies. Read that word again, because the tradition was careful with it. 1 Enoch 15 and the Book of Jubilees 10 do not say the Giants ended. They say the bodies ended — and that something walked out of each drowned Giant and kept going. The dispersed spirits became the demonic population of the world after the water: the unclean spirits the Gospels record, the named entities the grimoires later catalogued, the things the Catholic exorcist still meets across a kitchen table in the present hour. The Giants died. Their ghosts went to work. See “The Operations That Survived” for the editorial throughline →

Two of these Giants dreamed the end before it came. One of them flew through the upper air to carry those dreams to a saint and ask what they meant. For the visions Ohyah and Hahyah were given, see The Dreams of Ohyah and Hahyah. For Mahaway’s flight, see Mahaway’s Embassy to Enoch. For the rebellion that fathered them all, return to The Watchers’ Fall.