[5] This book tells of the background and fate of these ante-diluvial giants and their fathers, the Watchers (called grigori in the Slavonic 2 Enoch),[6][7] the sons of God or holy ones (Daniel 4:13, 17) who rebelled against heaven when — in violation of the strict "boundaries of creation"[8] — they commingled, in their lust, with the "daughters of men.
[4] Since before the latter half of the twentieth century, The Book of Giants had long been known as a Middle Iranian work (which some scholars now believe was written originally in Eastern Aramaic) that circulated among the Manichaeans as a composition attributed to Mani (c. AD 216 – 274)—a Parthian citizen of southern Mesopotamia who appears to have been a follower of Elkesai, a Jewish-Christian prophet and visionary who lived in the early years of the second century.
Indeed, the discovery of this text at Qumran led scholars, such as C. P. van Andel and Rudolf Otto, to believe that while these ancient Aramaic compositions of the book were the earliest known, the work probably had even earlier Hebrew antecedents.
Because of the book's fragmentation, it was difficult for the documents' linguistic researchers and specialists to know, in its subsequently varied permutations, the exact order of the content.
In this story, the giants came into being when the Watcher "sons of God" (who, per the story's corroborative Jubilees[18] account [Jub 4:15; 5:6],[5][19] God originally dispatched to earth for the purpose of instructing and nurturing humanity "in proper ritual and ethical conduct," "to do what is just and upright upon the earth") had sexual intercourse with human women, who then birthed a hybrid race of giants.
[8] These Watchers (grigori) and giants (nephilim) engaged in destructive and grossly immoral actions which devastated humanity, including the revealing of heaven's holy "secrets" or "mysteries to their wives and children" and to mankind generally.
Enoch, in his attempt to intercede on their behalf, provided not only the oracle that the Watchers and giants had requested, but also twin "tablets" that revealed the full meaning of their dreams and God's future judgment against them.
[8] When the Watchers and giants had at last heard heaven's response, many chose, in their transcendent pride and arrogance,[8] rather than to turn from their evil ways, to act in defiance against God.
[22] This version also contains a complete ending, telling how the forces of the Light, led by four angels identified with Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Istrael, subdue the demons and their offspring in battle.
Stuckenbruck suggests that "these similarities ... allow for the possibility that the author of Daniel 7 knew the early Enochic traditions well enough to draw on and then adapt them for his own purposes.
[13][25] However, due in no small part to the influence of the Alexandrian philosophers who ill-favored it — its contents thought by many of the Hellenistic era to be foolish or strange — the overall Enochic work rapidly ran afoul of ideas held by the Christian and Jewish doctors, who considered it a tainted product of the Essenes of Qumran.
[26] The book was soon banned by such orthodox authorities as Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth century and it gradually passed out of circulation,[5] finally becoming lost to the knowledge of Western Christendom — only sundry fragments remained.