Hurtaly or Hurtali is a legendary

giant In folklore, giants (from Ancient Greek: ''wiktionary:gigas, gigas'', cognate wiktionary:giga-, giga-) are beings of humanoid appearance, but are at times prodigious in size and strength or bear an otherwise notable appearance. The word ''gia ...

. He appears in ''

Gargantua and Pantagruel ''The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel'' (), often shortened to ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' or the (''Five Books''), is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the advent ...

'' by Rabelais, as an ancestor of

Gargantua ''La vie tres horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel jadis composée par M. Alcofribas abstracteur de quinte essence. Livre plein de Pantagruelisme'' according to 's 1542 edition, or simply Gargantua, is the second novel by François ...

.
Text at French Wikisource. Hurtaly is there said to have survived

Noah's Flood The Genesis flood narrative (chapters 6–9 of the Book of Genesis) is a Hebrew flood myth. It tells of God's decision to return the universe to its pre- creation state of watery chaos and remake it through the microcosm of Noah's ark. The B ...

, by sitting astride Noah's Ark ("'"). He is characterised as a ' ("a fine eater of soups"), and as the son of Faribroth, father of Nembroth. A biography of Rabelais states that Hurtaly is based on the Biblical Og, King of Bashan, and that Rabelais was paraphrasing the ''Pirkei of Rabbi Eliezar of Hyracanus''.Printed a few years later (1544). Screech p.46 calls the derivation of ''Hurtaly'' from ''ha-palit'', 'he who survived' ''just possible''. He comments on the 'Jewish dimension' as an example of the 'erudition' of Rabelais, and non-'destructive' comic approach (p.47). This legend is also mentioned in the Jewish Encyclopedia of Adler and Singer (article "Og"), where it is also attributed to the Pirke of Rabbi Elieza

Notes

{{Gargantua and Pantagruel Fictional giants Rabelais characters Literary characters introduced in the 1530s