The nephilim giants get one ambiguous sentence in Genesis and an entire book at Qumran. The Book of Giants picks up where the Watchers left off and follows their children, who are enormous, articulate and frightened, because they have worked out that the flood is coming for them in particular.

The narrative is worth knowing in outline. The Watchers and their offspring set the premise, and the dreams the giants have are the heart of the book: Ohyah sees a tablet washed clean, Mahaway flies to Enoch to ask what it means, and the answer is not reassuring. The Qumran fragments are what actually survives in Aramaic.

The parallels are the surprise. Gilgamesh appears in the text by name, which puts a Mesopotamian hero inside a Jewish book about fallen angels, and giants elsewhere in the ancient sources show how widely the motif travelled. King Og of Bashan survives in the Bible as a giant with a measurable bed.

The story did not stop when the sect did. The Manichaean version carried the book east as far as Central Asia, in Persian, Sogdian and Uyghur, centuries after the community by the Dead Sea had gone. The reconstructed text and its fragments are collected in The Book of Giants.