Abstract: The Book of Giants (BG), an Enoch text found in 1948 among the Dead Sea Scrolls, includes a priceless trove of stories about the ancient prophet and his contemporaries, including unique elements relevant to the Book of Moses Enoch account. Hugh Nibley was the first to discover in the BG a rare personal name that corresponds to the only named character in the Book of Moses besides Enoch himself, a finding that some non-Latter-day Saint Enoch scholars considered significant. Since Nibley’s passing, the growth of new scholarship on ancient Enoch texts has continued unabated. While Nibley’s pioneering research compared the names and roles of one character in Moses 6–7 and BG, scholars have now been able to examine the names and roles of nearly all of the prominent figures in the two books and analyze their respective accounts in more detail. Not only are the overall storylines of the two independent accounts more similar than could have imagined a few years ago, a series of recent studies have added substance to the claim that the specific resemblances of the Book of Giants to Moses 6–7—resemblances that are rare or absent elsewhere in Jewish tradition—are more numerous and significant than the resemblances of any other single ancient Enoch text—or, for that matter, to all of the most significant extant Enoch texts combined. Of particular note is new evidence in BG that relates to the Book of Moses account of Enoch’s gathering of Zion to divinely prepared cities and the ascent of his people to the presence of God.

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[Editor’s Note: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article is reprinted here as a service to the Latter-day Saint community. Original pagination and page numbers have necessarily changed, otherwise the reprint has the same content as the original.

[Page 96]See Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, “Moses 6–7 and the Book of Giants: Remarkable Witnesses of Enoch’s Ministry,” in Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses: Inspired Origins, Temple Contexts, and Literary Qualities, ed. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, David R. Seely, John W. Welch and Scott Gordon (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation; Springville, UT: Book of Mormon Central; Redding, CA: FAIR; Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2021), 1041–256. Further information at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/ancient-threads-in-the-book-of-moses/.]

The Latter-day Saint story of Enoch has been called the “most remarkable religious document published in the nineteenth century.”1 This is true for at least three reasons.

* First, the account is highly original. For example, according to a preliminary linguistic analysis by Stanford Carmack,