Genesis gives the Nephilim one sentence. 1 Enoch gives them a few chapters as the villains. The Book of Giants tells it from their side.
What survives
It reaches us in pieces, in Aramaic, from several Qumran caves. The pieces are small, and the reconstruction is careful guesswork. What emerges is a story with real menace.
The giants have begun to dream. One sees a garden with gardeners watering trees, and then a flood that destroys everything except one tree with three branches. Another sees a stone tablet submerged and a hand wiping names from it. They do not understand, and they are afraid.
So they send one of their own, a giant named Mahway, flying across the world to Enoch, the only man who can interpret them. The answer is what they fear. Near the end, in a line that survives, one of them seems to admit that strength will not save them. It is close to pathos, and you do not expect that.
Gilgamesh is in it
This is the startling detail. The fragments name Gilgamesh, and a figure called Hobabish who seems to be Humbaba, the monster from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
So the author knew the Mesopotamian stories, and folded their heroes into a Jewish account of the world before the flood. The great king of Uruk becomes one of the violent giants the flood was sent to end. It is one civilization reading another’s scripture and answering it.
How it ended up in Central Asia
Now the strange part of its afterlife. In the third century AD, a Persian prophet named Mani took the book for his new religion, which spread from Rome to China. Early in the twentieth century, German expeditions found scraps of a Manichaean Book of Giants at Turfan, in what is now northwest China. Nobody knew the source until the scholar J. T. Milik connected them to the Qumran fragments in the 1970s.
The West forgot it. A later Latin list of forbidden books mentions a work about a giant named Ogias, possibly a memory of the same thing. The book survived at the far ends of the known world and came back in pieces.
Why it was cut
It was never in. No Bible we know of ever included it. It belonged to the Enochic tradition, and when that tradition lost favor, this book lost readers along with it. Mani’s use of it would not have helped.
Where to start
The surviving fragments take about twenty minutes to read. Read them after 1 Enoch 6-16, so you know who these characters are.
Common questions
What is the Book of Giants?
An Aramaic Jewish text from around 200 BC, surviving in fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls. It tells the story of the Nephilim from the point of view of the giants themselves, who dream of their coming destruction.
Is the Book of Giants part of the Book of Enoch?
They are closely related but separate. It expands the Watchers story in 1 Enoch and uses Enoch as a character, and some scholars think it once circulated alongside the Enochic books.
Why does Gilgamesh appear in the Book of Giants?
The fragments name Gilgamesh and Hobabish, an echo of Humbaba, as giants. It suggests that the Jewish authors knew Mesopotamian legend, and counted its heroes among the violent giants before the flood.