Ogias the Giant, also known as The Book of Giants, is an apocryphal Jewish book expanding a narrative in the Hebrew Bible. Its discovery at Qumran dates the text's creation to before the 2nd century BCE.
Contents |
Ogias the Giant is thought to have been based on the Book of Enoch, a pseudepigraphical Jewish work from the 3rd Century BCE, itself based on an obscure passage from Genesis (6:1-4) concerning Nephilim, which, in the Enoch version, are the offspring of fallen angels; they saw the beauty of the daughters of men, married them, and thus fathered Giants in the land. The book concerns itself with filling in the details about the giants and their offspring that the Book of Enoch is lacking.
Aramaic fragments, along with other fragments of the Book of Enoch, were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran:
In the version of the Book of Giants which was spread by the Manichaean religion, the book became well traveled and exists in Syriac, Greek, Persian, Sogdian, Uyghur, and Arabic, although each version is somewhat distorted, incorporating more local myths. In 1904, German expeditions to Central Asia (Turpan in present northwest China) brought back many fragments of Manichaean holy texts, some of which were identified as belonging to The Book of Giants.
The text relates how before the Biblical Deluge, a giant named Ogias fought a great dragon. A brief mention of this giant, "Ohia", is found in the Babylonian Talmud (Nidah, Ch 9), where it is said "סיחון ועוג אחי הוו דאמר מר סיחון ועוג בני אחיה בר שמחזאי הוו" ("Sihon and Og [from the Book of Numbers] were brothers, as they were the sons of Ohia the son of Samhazai [one of the leaders of the fallen angels in the Book of Enoch]"). The version found at Qumran also describes the hero Gilgamesh and the monster Humbaba as two of the giants accompanying Ogias.