The cited article is of specialist interest, but when I saw it I was quick to read it. Fortunately, it is open access.
Turfan is a region in Northeast China in which the Manichean religion flourished in the early Middle Ages. More than a century ago it began to be excavated by German and then Japanese archaeologists. They found a treasure trove of—generally highly fragmentary—medieval Manichean manuscripts in Middle Iranian dialects, Old Turkic, Syriac, and Chinese. They were effectively the Manichean Dead Sea Scrolls
Among the discoveries were precious fragments of the ancient Book of Giants, translated into Middle Persian, Sogdian, Parthian, and Old Turkic. Regular readers will be familiar with the Book of Giants, which amounts to a fourth Book of Enoch.
It was written originally in Aramaic at around the same time as the works collected in the book of 1 Enoch. It tells the story of the giants found in the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36), but from the perspective of the giants. Enoch himself is a character. Fragments of the original Aramaic book were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I have already mentioned that our soon-forthcoming book, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 2 (MOTP2) will include, for the first time ever, English translations of all surviving fragments of the Book of Giants in all the languages listed above.
The editor's nightmare for a new collection of texts is that some important new manuscript will turn up just too late to be included. Thus, I was relieved to see that this article did not include any new fragments of the Book of Giants! We were already aware of one or two lost fragments of the book, but we had access to transcriptions of these, so we could still include them.
We did have a new manuscript turn up very late in the game for another text in this volume. But I will tell you that story when the time is right.
For some other PaleoJudaica posts on Turfan, see here and links and here. And for posts on the Book of Giants, follow the links collected here.
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