Sources & Further Reading

A short reading list for anyone interested in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Bible. Each entry says what the source is and what it covers, with a link to the source itself. The list is not exhaustive, and we don’t endorse any particular conclusion drawn from any source. We’ve simply found these useful while putting together the canon material on this site.

Academic studies of the Ethiopian canon

• R. W. Cowley, "The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today" (Ostkirchliche Studien 23, 1974, pp. 318-323).

  The standard Western academic reference, distinguishing the “narrower” canon (46 OT + 35 NT = 81 books) from a “broader” canon that adds church-order works. Most downstream lists cite this article. Open mirror.

• Anke Wanger, "The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Church" (THE-733, EUCLID University, 2013).

  Master’s thesis surveying four Tewahedo authorities: the Fetha Negest, the EOTC’s 1996 Faith, Order of Worship and Ecumenical Relations, the Ethiopian Bible Society’s 2007 Metsehaf Kidus Amharic Bible, and the Ge’ez Synodos canon-list. Wanger notes that the four authorities do not fully agree on which books are counted. PDF.

• Bruk A. Asale, "A Millennium Translation Based on the Ge’ez and LXX" (The Bible Translator 65/1, 2014, pp. 49-73).

  An independent academic account of the Ethiopian Bible Society’s 2007 Amharic “Millennium” Bible (the first Amharic Bible translated from the Ge’ez and the LXX rather than the Hebrew Masoretic Text) and the discussion that followed it. Open PDF.

• Bruk A. Asale, "The EOTC Canon of the Scriptures: Neither Open nor Closed" (The Bible Translator 67/2, 2016).

  Argues that the EOTC’s concept of canon does not map neatly to the Western “open” / “closed” categories. Publisher page.

• Pierluigi Piovanelli, "The Rest of the Words of Baruch in the Ethiopic Tradition" in The Embroidered Bible (Brill, 2018).

  Philological treatment of Paralipomena Jeremiae (also known as 4 Baruch or Saqoqawä Eremyas) as it has been transmitted in Ge’ez. Publisher page.

Ethiopian Orthodox church and community sources

• Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, official English site, “The Bible.”

  The EOTC’s own list of canonical books, using the Tewahedo-specific English names (Tegsats, Metsihafe Tibeb, Joshua son of Sirac, Sirate Tsion, Tizaz, Gitsew, Abtilis, Dominos I & II, Book of Clement, Didascalia). Link.

• Mahibere Kidusan / EOTC Sunday School, “Holy Scriptures.”

  An EOTC-affiliated lay-organization page summarising the 81-book Tewahedo Bible (46 OT + 35 NT). Link.

• Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project (ethiopianorthodoxbible.wordpress.com).

  A community translation project producing English editions of EOTC books. The project’s canon page enumerates the OT in the 46-book official form, with the Jeremiah corpus listed as a single bound book containing Lamentations, Letter of Jeremiah, Baruch, and Ethiopic 4 Baruch. Canon page.

• Ethiopian Bible Society, Metsehaf Kidus, the 2007 Millennium Amharic Bible.

  The first complete Amharic Bible based on the Ge’ez and LXX, published for the Ethiopian millennium celebration. Bible Society of Ethiopia (UBS profile).

Encyclopedic and general references

• Wikipedia: “Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon.”

  An accessible English-language summary of the canon’s structure, citing Cowley and several other sources. The About the Canon page on this site is a digest of this article.

• Wikipedia: per-book articles.

  Useful starting points for individual books in the Tewahedo canon: Book of Enoch, Book of Jubilees, Meqabyan, 4 Baruch, Josippon.

• The Fetha Negest (“Law of the Kings”).

  The 1240 AD Coptic nomocanon translated into Ge’ez around 1450, which lists the books of scripture as part of Ethiopian church law. Available in Paulos Tzadua’s English translation (1968). archive.org scan.

Editions and translations of individual books

Foundational public-domain editions of books in the Tewahedo canon that are not part of the 66-book Protestant Bible. The list is organised per book, and tracks which translation we prefer if a book is shipped on this site, with at least one fallback. Modern scholarly editions (Robinson in Charlesworth 1985; Herzer 2005; and others) are often the more authoritative translations, but they are still in copyright and so are not linked here.

• R. H. Charles, The Apocalypse of Baruch translated from the Syriac (London: A. & C. Black, 1896).

  The standard public-domain English translation of 2 Baruch. archive.org.

• R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913).

  Two-volume reference edition that covered most of the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha for much of the 20th century. archive.org (vol. 2).

• R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch translated from Dillmann’s Ethiopic text (Oxford: Clarendon, 1893; revised 1912).

  Classic English translation of 1 Enoch. archive.org.

• R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees, or The Little Genesis (London: A. & C. Black, 1902).

  English translation of Jubilees from the Ge’ez. archive.org.

• J. Rendel Harris, The Rest of the Words of Baruch (London: Clay, 1889).

  Earliest English-language critical edition of 4 Baruch / Paralipomena Jeremiou; collated against the Ethiopic. archive.org.

• Robert A. Kraft & Ann Elizabeth Purintun, Paraleipomena Jeremiou (SBL Texts and Translations 1, Pseudepigrapha Series 1, 1972).

  Twentieth-century scholarly English translation of the Greek Paralipomena Jeremiou. CCAT released an electronic edition in 1987. CCAT HTML edition.

• D. P. Curtin, First / Second / Third Book of Ethiopian Maccabees (2018).

  Public-domain English translations of the three Meqabyan from Amharic, released to the public domain via Wikimedia permissions. Wikisource. Curtin has published 1 and 2 Meqabyan; he has not published 3 Meqabyan, and outside of his Ch. 1 release, the print editions of 1 and 2 Meqabyan are still in copyright.

• Wikisource community translations of 1, 2, and 3 Meqabyan (CC BY-SA 4.0).

  Anonymous standard-English translations of all three Meqabyan, released under a free-culture licence. The only complete free-licence English text of 3 Meqabyan currently online. Useful when Curtin’s print editions are not available. 1 Meqabyan, 2 Meqabyan, 3 Meqabyan. The 1 Meqabyan page uses a 7-chapter division that does not match the canonical Ge’ez 36-chapter division; the texts of 2 and 3 Meqabyan match the canonical chapter counts (21 and 10).

• G. H. Box, The Apocalypse of Ezra (II Esdras III-XIV) (SPCK, 1917).

  Scholarly English translation of 4 Ezra proper (chs. 3-14), the Jewish apocalypse that the Ethiopian church transmits as Ezra Sutu’el. archive.org.

• Richard Laurence, Primi Ezrae libri ... versio Aethiopica, latine angliceque reddita (Oxford, 1820).

  The first published English translation of the Ethiopic 4 Ezra, by the same translator who produced the first Western edition of 1 Enoch. The Ethiopian recension covers chs. 3-14 only. HathiTrust.

• James Cooper & Arthur John Maclean, The Testament of Our Lord, Translated into English from the Syriac (T.&T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1902).

  Standard early-twentieth-century English of the Testamentum Domini, the Syriac text most closely related to the first book of Mashafa Kidan in the Ethiopian canon. The Ge’ez recension diverges from the Syriac in places. We ship Cooper and Maclean’s text at /ethiopiancanon/bookofthecovenant1/ with a recension caveat. archive.org.

• Montague Rhodes James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924).

  Includes English translations of the Epistle of the Apostles (related to the second book of Mashafa Kidan), shipped at /ethiopiancanon/bookofthecovenant2/, and the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Peter (corresponding to book 2 of Qalementos / Ethiopic Clement), shipped at /ethiopiancanon/clement2/. For most other books of Qalementos, no public-domain English translation is currently available. archive.org; ongoing transcription on Wikisource.

• G. H. Schodde, “The Apostolic Canons, Translated from the Ethiopic” (Journal of Biblical Literature 5, 1885, pp. 61-72).

  Public-domain English of the Ethiopic recension of the Apostolic Canons (the Abtelis portion of the Sinodos). 57 canons; the Greek Apostolic Constitutions appendix has 85, and the Western reception 50. archive.org (JSTOR mirror); mirror PDF on biblicalstudies.org.uk.

• George Horner, The Statutes of the Apostles, or Canones Ecclesiastici (London, 1904).

  Critical edition with parallel Ethiopic, Arabic, Coptic and English of the Te’ezaz / Statutes section of the Sinodos. The English translation of the Ethiopic recension (pp. 127 to 232 of Horner’s volume) is what we ship at /ethiopiancanon/teezaz/. archive.org. The remaining sub-collections of the Sinodos (Ser’ata Seyon and Gessew) have no public-domain English translation; the standard modern critical edition is Bausi’s Il Senodos etiopico (CSCO, 1995), in Italian and still in copyright.

• J. M. Harden, The Ethiopic Didascalia (SPCK, 1920).

  The standard English translation of the Ethiopic Didascalia, a 43-chapter church-order text, which we ship at /ethiopiancanon/didascalia/. archive.org.

• Thomas Pell Platt, The Ethiopic Didascalia (Oriental Translation Fund, London, 1834).

  The first English translation of the Ethiopic Didascalia, with parallel Ge’ez. Useful as a check on the more recent Harden edition. archive.org.

• William Wright, “Some Apocryphal Psalms in Syriac” (Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 9, 1886-1887).

  Editio princeps in English of the Syriac Psalms 152-155, alongside Psalm 151. Note that Psalms 152-155 are part of the Syriac tradition, not the Ethiopian Psalter; the Ethiopian Psalter contains Psalm 151 but not 152-155. Tertullian Project (transcription by Roger Pearse, released to the public domain).

• Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English (London: Bagster, 1851).

  The standard public-domain English translation of the Septuagint, including 1 Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah as separate books. ebible.org; structured JSON via bible.helloao.org.

• King James Version with Apocrypha (1611, with revisions through 1769).

  Includes 1 Baruch (with the Letter of Jeremiah folded as Baruch ch. 6), Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, 1 & 2 Esdras, Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel. ebible.org.

Manuscript and digital-text resources

• Beta Maṣāḥᵯft (Universität Hamburg).

  A digital catalog of Ethiopian (Ge’ez) manuscripts and works, with critical transcriptions of biblical and parabiblical texts under CC BY-SA 4.0. Link.

• Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota.

  Holds the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library (EMML), the largest collection of Ethiopian manuscripts outside of Ethiopia. Link.

• EMML printed catalogs (Getatchew Haile, vols. I-X).

  Detailed manuscript-by-manuscript indexes of the EMML collection. Several volumes are available on archive.org. archive.org search.