Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony

A work entitled the "Book of Giants" figures in every list of the Manichaean canon preserved from antiquity. Both the nature of this work and the intellectual baggage of the third-century Persian prophet to whom it is ascribed remained unknown to scholars until 1943. Discovery of a fragmentary Aramaic version at Qumran enables John C. Reeves to connect the dots and demonstrate that the motifs of Jewish Enochic literature, in particular those of the story of the Watchers and Giants, form the skeletal structure of Mani's cosmological teachings, and that Chapters 1 to 11 of Genesis fertilized Near Eastern thought, even to the borders of India and China.