Ethiopian Bible in English: What to Check Before Choosing an Edition

If you are looking for an Ethiopian Bible in English, begin with the contents page. Does “Enoch” mean 1 Enoch? Are the books called “Maccabees” actually the Ethiopian Meqabyan? Does the volume include the additional writings of the broader New Testament? Those questions will tell you more about what you are buying than a large number on the cover.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo tradition counts eighty-one books, but that number has been reached in different ways. To understand an edition, we need to know which texts it contains, how it groups them, and where its English comes from. Once those questions are answered, the contents become much easier to navigate.

Why can two lists both say eighty-one?

In his 1974 study, R. W. Cowley described a narrower enumeration of fifty-four Old Testament books and twenty-seven New Testament books. The broader enumeration counted forty-six and thirty-five. Both total eighty-one.

In the broader enumeration Cowley describes, the New Testament includes four sections of Sinodos counted as books, two Books of the Covenant, Ethiopian Clement, and the Didascalia. Sinodos manuscripts can contain additional material in varying arrangements. The broader Old Testament enumeration uses different groupings and identifications. Simply adding eight to the narrower total will therefore give the wrong picture. The labels “narrower” and “broader” describe collections whose contents need to be examined, rather than two sizes of an otherwise identical book.

Writing in 1974, Cowley also reported that some works assigned canonical authority were difficult to obtain in print. His account is historical evidence, rather than a survey of editions available today. A church’s account of its Scriptures and the contents of a particular publisher’s volume answer different questions.

Start with the books whose names can mislead

The Enoch of the Ethiopian Orthodox biblical tradition is the whole of 1 Enoch, preserved complete in Ge’ez. It has 108 chapters in the usual modern numbering followed by this collection. The Book of the Watchers is its opening section, chapters 1–36; the Ethiopian tradition preserves the sections that follow it as well.

Those later sections are the Parables (37–71), the Astronomical Book (72–82), the Dream Visions (83–90), and the Epistle of Enoch with concluding material (91–108). These divisions follow the collection’s introduction and can be compared with R. H. Charles’s English edition. Ethiopian editions may divide the chapters differently. The separate works known as 2 Enoch and 3 Enoch are not additional books of the Ethiopian biblical canon.

“Maccabees” requires an equally careful look. The Ethiopian Meqabyan include a king named Tsirutsaydan, brothers who refuse his worship of idols, and extended arguments about resurrection. These are distinct works from Greek Maccabees. An English contents list should make that identity clear before the reader reaches the first chapter.

Clement presents another trap. Ethiopian Clement, or Qalementos, is a different work from the letter usually called 1 Clement. The word Didascalia also appears in the titles of different church-order texts. An edition should identify the Ethiopic work and explain its textual basis. A familiar title is useful only when we know what stands behind it.

Ask where the English comes from

“Translated from Ge’ez” and “a modern revision of an earlier English translation” describe different kinds of editorial work. Both can produce readable books. They give the reader different routes back to the evidence, however, and an edition should say which route it follows.

Fifth Estate’s collection uses Joseph B. Lumpkin’s modern English renderings of Enoch and Jubilees, drawing on earlier translations. The Meqabyan introduction describes a translation from Ge’ez manuscripts, using British Library Or. 506 as its base and other copies to examine uncertain readings and differences. The Covenant books have their own source histories, explained in their introductions.

The reason for comparing manuscripts is quite ordinary: people copying by hand miss words, repeat lines, and sometimes skip from one occurrence of a phrase to the next. In the Meqabyan introduction, one particularly clear example occurs at 2 Meqabyan 9:19. The edition reports that a verse absent from its three British Library witnesses survives in the older Addis Ababa copy. This is the publisher’s report of its collation, not a fresh comparison of the Ge’ez witnesses undertaken for this article. “Ancient manuscript” alone tells us very little about how an editor handled the passage.

What is in The Lost Books of the Ethiopian Bible?

The Lost Books of the Ethiopian Bible gathers writings preserved in the Ethiopian tradition outside the Protestant canon. Readers can use it alongside a familiar Bible to study the works missing from that Bible. Genesis, the Gospels, and the other shared Protestant books are outside the collection’s scope.

Its contents run from Enoch and Jubilees through works familiar from the Apocrypha, including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch. It also contains all three Meqabyan, the Ezra books, Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh, additions to Esther and Daniel, and further Jeremiah and Baruch writings. The second part contains Sinodos, both Books of the Covenant, Ethiopian Clement, and the Didascalia.

The contents page groups these into twenty-five entries. Some entries encompass several books: Sinodos contains four and the Covenant contains two. This is an editorial arrangement for the collection, not an alternative claim about the canonical total. Josippon, also called Zena Ayhud and named in some broader-canon lists, is not included.

Choose a first reading that gives you something to compare

Jubilees makes a good beginning for a reader who knows Genesis. It returns to familiar people and events while supplying names, dates, and explanations Genesis leaves unstated. Its account of the Watchers is especially instructive: the angels initially descend to teach humanity (chapter 4) and subsequently sin (chapter 5). That sequence gives readers a specific point to compare with 1 Enoch.

The Covenant takes the study in another direction. Alongside teaching about resurrection, it asks who should care for the sick, how a congregation should pray, and how poor people should be buried. These are useful questions to bring to a collection whose unfamiliar titles can otherwise make its contents seem remote.

The book includes access to the Fifth Estate Reader Library, which offers more than 1,000 texts, alongside audio, videos, and study materials. Companion notes can be read alongside the corresponding texts. When comparing translations, check the numbering as well as the wording: chapter and verse divisions sometimes reflect an edition’s decisions.

Sources

This article draws on the General Introduction, contents, Sources of the Texts, and the Enoch, Jubilees, Meqabyan, and Covenant introductions in Breandan Lumpkin’s The Lost Books of the Ethiopian Bible: Texts Preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Outside the Protestant Canon (Fifth Estate, 2026; ISBN 9781958450307). The manuscript comparison described above is the edition’s account of its editorial work. Cowley’s linked article, “The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today,” Ostkirchliche Studien 23 (1974), 318–323, supplies the additional discussion of canonical enumeration.