Og King of Bashan, Enoch and the Books of Enoch: Extra-Canonical Texts and Interpretations of Genesis 6:1–4’* Ariel Hessayon
Chapter 1 ‘Og King of Bashan, Enoch and the Books of Enoch: Extra-Canonical Texts and Interpretations of Genesis 6:1–4’* Ariel Hessayon It is not the Writer, but the authority of the Church, that maketh a Book Canonical [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), part III, chap. 33 p. 204] For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the giants (Deuteronomy 3:11) Renaissance Humanist, Franciscan friar, Benedictine monk, Doctor of Medicine and ‘Great Jester of France’, François Rabelais (c.1490–1553?) was the author of La vie, faits & dits Heroiques de Gargantua, & de son filz Pantagruel (Lyon, 1564). A satirical masterpiece with liberal dollops of scatological humour, it tells the irreverent story of Gargantua, his son Pantagruel and their companion Panurge. Gargantua and Pantagruel are giants and in an allusion to the Matthean genealogy of Christ the first book begins with a promised account of how ‘the Giants were born in this world, and how from them by a direct line issued Gargantua’. Similarly, the second book introduces a parody of the Old Testament genealogies: And the first was Chalbroth who begat Sarabroth who begat Faribroth who begat Hurtali, that was a brave eater of pottage, and reigned in the time of the flood. Acknowledging readers would doubt the veracity of this lineage, ‘seeing at the time of the flood all the world was destroyed, except Noah, and seven persons more with him in the Ark’, Rabelais described how the giant Hurtali survived the deluge. Citing the authority of a rabbinic school known as the Massoretes, ‘good honest fellows, true ballokeering blades, and exact Hebraical bagpipers’, Rabelais explained that Hurtali did not get in the ark (he was too big), but rather sat astride upon it, with ‘one leg on the one side, and another on the other, as little children use to do upon their wooden 6 Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England horses’.
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