Book of Giants — Large Print

Introduction

There are stories older than civilization itself — stories that were told around fires when the world was young, passed from mouth to mouth across generations so ancient that the very languages they were first spoken in have crumbled into dust. Some of these stories survived in fragments, scratched onto clay tablets or copied painstakingly onto papyrus scrolls by scribes who understood, even then, that they were preserving something extraordinary. Others were buried — deliberately, it sometimes seems — by the very traditions that grew from their roots, deemed too strange, too dangerous, or too destabilizing to the emerging orthodoxies of the great monotheistic religions. And a precious few were lost entirely, swallowed by the earth itself, waiting in silence for the moment when human hands would once again draw them into the light.

The text you are about to encounter belongs to that last, most remarkable category. For nearly two thousand years, the work known as the Book of Giants existed only as a rumor, a ghost haunting the margins of better-known scriptures. Ancient writers referenced it. Early church fathers condemned it. Medieval scholars speculated about it. And then, in the middle of the twentieth century, in the caves of the Judean Desert along the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, fragments of it were found — brittle, darkened sheets of leather and papyrus that had somehow survived two millennia of heat, dust, and silence. Those fragments, now among the most studied and debated documents in the history of religion and archaeology, confirmed what some had long suspected: that beneath the surface of the canonical Bible lay a vast, teeming world of mythological imagination that the official traditions had done their best to suppress.

To understand why this text matters so profoundly, you need to understand the world from which it came. The Second Temple period in Jewish history — roughly the five centuries between the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem around 516 BCE and its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE — was one of the most intellectually and spiritually turbulent eras in human history. It was a time when Jewish thinkers were grappling with enormous questions: Why does evil exist in a world created by a good God? Why do the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper? What is the nature of the divine beings mentioned so cryptically in the oldest layers of scripture? And what, exactly, happened before the great flood that Noah survived — what was the antediluvian world really like, and why did God decide to destroy it?

The answers that emerged from this ferment of speculation were startling, vivid, and deeply unsettling to later religious authorities. A whole literature grew up around the figure of Enoch — the mysterious patriarch mentioned in the Book of Genesis who 'walked with God' and then simply vanished, having never died in the conventional sense. The various texts collected under the umbrella of Enochic literature imagined this figure as a cosmic traveler, a heavenly scribe, a prophet who had been granted access to the deepest secrets of the universe. And at the heart of the Enochic tradition lay a particular story — a story about rebellion, desire, cosmic catastrophe, and the monstrous offspring of forbidden unions — that would echo through centuries of religious imagination and leave its fingerprints on traditions as diverse as early Christianity, Gnostic mysticism, Manichean cosmology, and eventually the folklore of cultures far beyond the ancient Near East.

That story begins with a passage in Genesis so brief and so cryptic that it has puzzled readers for millennia. In the sixth chapter of that foundational text, just before the narrative of the flood, there appears a handful of verses describing how 'the sons of God' — the Bene Elohim — looked upon the daughters of men and found them beautiful. They descended from their heavenly stations, took human women as wives, and fathered children upon them. Those children were the Nephilim — a word that has been translated variously as 'giants,' 'fallen ones,' or simply left untranslated because no single English word quite captures its resonance. And then, almost as abruptly as it appeared, the passage ends, and the narrative moves on to Noah and the ark. Genesis offers no explanation for who these 'sons of God' were, no account of what became of the Nephilim, and no exploration of the catastrophic consequences of this celestial transgression.

The Enochic tradition rushed to fill that silence. The texts associated with Enoch — particularly the sprawling, composite work known as 1 Enoch, large portions of which were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls — expanded the Genesis fragment into a full-blown mythology. The 'sons of God' became the Watchers: a class of angelic beings assigned to observe and guide humanity, who instead fell into lust and disobedience. Their leader, Shemihaza, and his two hundred companions descended upon Mount Hermon and swore an oath to one another — a pact of mutual complicity in their transgression. They took wives from among human women, and those women bore them children of terrifying stature and appetite: the giants, the Nephilim, beings of such enormous physical power and spiritual corruption that they threatened to consume and destroy the very world they inhabited.

But the Watchers brought more than just their forbidden desire to the human world. They brought knowledge — and in the Enochic framework, this knowledge was deeply ambiguous, simultaneously illuminating and catastrophically dangerous. Azazel, one of the most prominent of the fallen angels, taught humanity the arts of metallurgy and warfare, the crafting of weapons and armor, and the cosmetic arts that made women beautiful in ways that inflamed desire. Other Watchers taught astrology, the reading of omens, the working of enchantments and spells. This transmission of forbidden knowledge — what scholars call the 'revelation of secrets' — was understood not as a gift but as a pollution, a contamination of the human world with powers that humanity was not yet ready or worthy to wield. The result was violence, corruption, and an escalating spiral of destruction that eventually prompted the divine council to intervene.

It is within this richly imagined mythological framework that the text you are about to read takes on its full significance. While 1 Enoch focuses largely on Enoch himself — his heavenly journeys, his visions, his role as intercessor and scribe — the work presented here turns its attention to the giants themselves: the Nephilim, the monstrous children of the Watchers, who fill the earth with violence and who, in their own way, begin to sense the approach of the divine judgment that will destroy them. This is a text about power and its limits, about the consequences of transgression across generations, about what it means to be a being caught between two natures — half divine, half human — in a world that has no place for such hybrids.

The discovery of fragments of this text among the Dead Sea Scrolls was one of the most electrifying moments in twentieth-century biblical scholarship. The scrolls themselves were found beginning in 1947, when a Bedouin shepherd stumbled upon ceramic jars in a cave near Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. What he had found was the library of a Jewish sect — most likely the Essenes — who had hidden their texts in the caves sometime around 68 CE, as Roman legions moved through the region suppressing the great Jewish revolt. The collection included the oldest known manuscripts of books of the Hebrew Bible, as well as a treasure trove of previously unknown or only partially known texts: sectarian rules, hymns, biblical commentaries, apocalyptic visions, and fragments of the Enochic literature, including pieces of what scholars would eventually identify as the Book of Giants.

The reconstruction of this text from its fragmentary remains has been one of the great detective stories of modern scholarship. The fragments are incomplete — some are little more than a few words, others preserve longer passages — and the work of piecing them together, identifying their relationship to one another and to parallel texts found in other languages and traditions, has occupied some of the finest minds in the fields of Dead Sea Scrolls studies, Second Temple Judaism, and the history of religion. What has emerged from that painstaking labor is a narrative of remarkable power and strangeness: a story that feels simultaneously ancient and urgently contemporary, that speaks to questions about the nature of evil, the limits of power, and the relationship between the human and the divine that have lost none of their force in the two thousand years since these words were first committed to writing.

The Book of Giants — Reconstructed Texts

A group of fallen angels came down to Earth, bringing both secret knowledge and destruction.

They learned things they were never supposed to know.

Sin spread everywhere.

They became violent and killed many people.

Their children grew into giants.

The angels used Earth’s resources for themselves.

They took everything the land produced.

They ruled over the sea, the sky, and all living things.

They ate the fruit, grain, and trees.

They took animals, from wild beasts to tiny creatures, and watched everything happening on Earth.

They joined in terrible acts, bringing corruption to humanity.

The two hundred fallen angels began experimenting with different creatures, including humans.

They took donkeys, rams, goats, and other animals from the land and sky.

They used them in unnatural ways, mixing them in ways that were never meant to happen.

This corruption led to chaos, violence, and monsters roaming the Earth.

They ruined the world.

They created giants and unnatural creatures.

Their evil spread everywhere.

The Earth was filled with bloodshed, and the giants were never satisfied.

They destroyed everything and devoured whatever they could.

Monsters attacked whatever stood in their way.

The land was torn apart.

Terrifying creatures appeared and grew stronger.

They didn’t understand the full impact of their actions.

Their choices made the Earth worse.

The fallen angels’ influence caused great destruction.

In the end, everything would collapse because of them.

Yet, even after all this, they were never satisfied.

The giants began having strange dreams and visions. One of them, Mahway, the son of the angel Barakel, had a dream that disturbed him. He saw a tablet placed in water. When it was pulled out, only three names remained while the rest had disappeared. This seemed to warn that almost everyone would be wiped out, leaving only a few survivors—Noah and his family—after a great flood.

A tablet was soaked in water.

The water rose and covered it.

When it was lifted out, most of the names were gone.

Mahway told the other giants about his dream, and they tried to understand what it meant.

He realized the vision was a warning of disaster.

He admitted his fear to the others and spoke of the spirits of the dead, who cried out for justice against those who had killed them.

He saw that they would all die soon, and their time was almost up.

Ohyah, one of the giants, asked Mahway who had given him this vision.

Mahway said his father, Barakel, had been with him.

Before he could finish, Ohyah interrupted, shocked by what he had heard.

He shouted, “This is unbelievable! If even a woman who cannot have children gives birth, then something truly impossible is happening.”

Ohyah spoke to Hahyah, saying that destruction was coming to the Earth.

When they realized this, they cried before the giants.

Ohyah then told Hahyah that it was not their fault, but Azazel’s.

He said the giants were the children of fallen angels, and they would not let their loved ones be abandoned.

He also said they had not been completely defeated, and they still had strength left.

The giants began to understand that they could not win against the powers of Heaven. One of the speakers might have been Gilgamesh.

A giant declared that he was strong, with great power in his arms.

He had fought against mortals and waged war, but he now realized he could not defeat his enemies.

They lived in Heaven, in sacred places, and were far stronger than him.

He had been called a wild beast and a wild man.

Then Ohyah spoke and said he had a dream that disturbed him.

It kept him awake and forced him to see a vision.

He now understood something important.

His vision was about a tree being uprooted, except for three roots.

It carried the same message as a previous dream.

As he watched, three roots remained.

Then something moved them into a garden.

Ohyah tried to ignore what the vision meant.

At first, he claimed it only referred to the demon Azazel.

Now, he suggested it was only about the rulers of the Earth.

The vision spoke about the fate of their souls.

Ohyah told the giants what Gilgamesh had said.

The leader had cursed the rulers, and the giants were pleased by his words.

Then he left.

The giants were troubled by more dreams.

Two of them woke up, frightened by what they had seen.

They went to their fellow giants and described their visions.

One of them had dreamed of a garden.

Gardeners were watering trees.

Two hundred trees had large branches growing from their roots.

Then, fire spread and burned the entire garden.

The dreamers went to the giants and told them what they had seen.

Someone suggested they should find Enoch to explain the meaning of the dreams.

Ohyah spoke to the giants and told them about his own dream.

He had seen the Ruler of Heaven come down to Earth.

When he finished, the giants and monsters became terrified.

They called Mahway and asked him to go find Enoch.

Mahway was sent to find Enoch, the wise scribe, to ask him about the visions.

He flew through the air like strong winds, moving like an eagle.

He left the land behind and passed through a great desert.

When Enoch saw Mahway, he greeted him.

Mahway told him the giants and monsters were waiting for answers.

They wanted to know what their dreams meant.

Enoch sent back a tablet with a warning.

The message was written in his own hand and was addressed to Shemihaza and his followers.

He warned them about the things they had done.

Their wives and children had followed their wicked ways.

The land itself was crying out against them.

Because of their actions, destruction was coming.

A great flood would wipe out all life on land and sea.

But there was still a chance to change.

They were told to break free from evil and pray.

In another vision, Enoch saw something that filled him with fear.

He collapsed to the ground when he heard a voice.

He saw a being who lived among humans but had not learned from them.

Here the surviving fragments break off.