The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary. Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum, vol. 63.

• Author: COOK, EDWARD M.
• Position: Review

The Book of Giants from Qumran: Texts, Translation, and Commentary. Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum, vol. 63. By LOREN T. STUCKENBRUCK. Tubingen: J. C. B. MOHR (PAUL SIEBECK), 1997. Pp. xvi + 289. DM 198.

The ancient pseudepigraph The Book of Giants is partially preserved in two groups of manuscripts, both discovered in the twentieth century. One group, from the Turfan basin in Chinese Turkestan, is Manichean and written in Middle Persian. The other is Jewish, written in Aramaic, and was discovered among the fragmentary documents from Cave Four near the Wadi Qumran in the Judean wilderness. The Aramaic texts are much older than the ones from Turfan, but since both are fragmentary, each can be used to interpret the other.

J. T. Milik first published some of the Qumran texts in his study of the Book of Enoch (The Books of Enoch [Oxford: Clarendon, 1976]), and until recently scholars had to rely on his work for information about them. Since 1991, however, the unpublished Qumran texts have been generally available. Stuckenbruck's monograph is the first to publish, translate, and discuss all of the Aramaic fragments of The Book of Giants. He stresses that his book is not an editio princeps, since he worked from photographs only, not from the actual manuscripts, but his study includes all that may be inferred from such access, including remarks on paleography and the placement and order of fragments.

The book falls into two main parts. The first deals with matters of introduction, and includes discussions of previous research, the sequencing of the Qumran fragments, the "character" of the Book of Giants, its date, and its provenance and purpose. Stuckenbruck proposes that BG was written "sometime between the late 3rd century and 164 B.C.E." (p. 31). He argues that it was not an Essene text, and that only the most general conclusions can be drawn about its origin and purpose, alluding to the ideological confrontation of Jewish belief and Hellenism in the third and second centuries B.C.E.

His discussion of time of composition is detailed but unsatisfying. The specification of 164 B.C.E. as a terminus ante quem implies that the canonical book of Daniel, dated to that time, was influenced by or otherwise alludes to BG; but he denies that this is necessary (p. 31, n. 119). But if Daniel and BG both separately draw from a common theophanic tradition, as Stuckenbruck suggests, then BG's history is severed from Daniel's. Stuckenbruck is therefore...