Lethargic Man (anag.)

Pre-Midrashic Midrash

4Q215 Testament of Naphtali (part of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs) (p. 457)

Genealogy of Bilhah and Zilpah, who are here sisters, and daughters of Aḥiyoth and Hannah. Hannah was the niece of Rebecca's wet nurse Deborah. Ahiyoth was taken into captivity but freed by Laban, who gave him his maidservant Hannah as wife. He named his firstborn, Zilpah, after the city where he had been prisoner.

The whole text, in (English translation of) the Greek version, can be read here. There are differences in this version; there Naphtali's father is called Rotheus. This text, according to Wikipedia reached its final form in the second century CE.

Angelology and Enochian material

Who are the four archangels? If you'd asked me a few years ago, I'd have answered Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael, but it turns out the third member of this quartet is not as fixed as one might have expected; in 1 Enoch, it's Uriel in 9:1 (part of the Book of Watchers, written late C3 or early C2 BCE), but Phanuel in 54:6 (part of the Book of Parables, written C1 CE), here in 1QM (the War Scroll) col IX (p. 129), it's given as Sariel שריאל. This is apparently also the form in Manichæan prayers; see under Book of Giants below.

I'd been seeing references to the Book of Giants for a while, but had been under the impression it was one of the originally separate works which got combined into the present-day book of 1 Enoch. To my surprise, I discovered from 4Q530 Book of Giants (p. 1063) that this was not the case; it was a separate work of Enochian literature altogether.

Looking the text up on Wikipedia blew my mind slightly; the text made its way into the all-bar-extinct but once major religion called Manichaeism, and is attested in Iranian translation at Turfan in East Turkestan (the province the Chinese call Xinjiang, but that's a nakedly colonialist name, meaning "New Territory"), and I don't use it), thousands of miles away from where it originated in Judaea!

There are fragments of it to be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which in turn blew my mind by namechecking Gilgamesh (as גלגמיס, though also later as גלגמיש). One doesn't expect to find crossover between Mesopotamian and Israelite myths in that way (with the exception of the Flood narrative, the Mesopotamian version of which is by coincidence also found in the Epic of Gilgamesh).

Gilgamesh is here however not the legendary king of Uruk (which city, incidentally, gave Iraq its name), but is one of the Giants (גבריא). It's slight unclear as to whether the Giants are the same as the Nephilim; it seems to be so, but the text refers to "all the Giants [and the Nephilin]".

You can read the more complete, though also fragmentary, Manichaean version of the text here; the introduction says:

There were no details about individual feats of the giants in the Book of Enoch. Mani filled the gap with the help of the above-mentioned Liber de Ogia nomine gigante. This Ogias has been identified with Og of Bashan. [...] But possibly stories that primarily appertained to Ogias were transferred to the better known Og, owing to the resemblance of their names.

Og king of Bashan of course was described by Deuteronomy 3:11 as the last remaining of the Rephaim, who were considered giants, and identified with the giants (Nephilim) who were the progeny of the angels that fell to earth and went bad in Gen. 6:4 (which is one of the major subjects of the Enochian literature).