The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the oldest organized Christian churches in the world, tracing its roots back to the 4th century AD. Because the Ethiopian Church developed somewhat independently from the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, it preserved a canon of scripture that was not subject to the same later political edits and councils that removed certain books from the Western Bible.
The Ethiopian Church maintained a unique preservationist philosophy: If the Apostles read it or if it contained historical truth, it was sacred. Unlike the Western churches, which trimmed "apocryphal" books (like Maccabees, Tobit, and Judith) to fit a theological standard, the Ethiopians kept everything.
While the "standard" Ethiopian canon is often cited as 81 books, certain English translations compile 88 books to include additional "broader canon" texts and apocrypha not found in Western 66-book Bibles.
: It includes books that were excluded or lost in the Western tradition, such as the Book of Enoch Book of Jubilees Ancient Language : The original texts are written in , an ancient Ethiopian liturgical language. Book Count
The Ethiopian Old Testament contains the books found in the Jewish Tanakh and the Protestant Old Testament, but it also includes:
If curiosity persists, the next step is to listen: to hear these texts in chant, to see a manuscript up close, and to read translations alongside commentary from Ethiopian scholars. Texts like these are best approached not as artifacts to be cataloged but as conversations to be entered—across centuries, across languages, across faith practices—where every marginal note may be an invitation to deeper understanding.
The Ethiopian Bible is written primarily in (the ancient liturgical language, similar to the role of Latin in the West). The canon is usually grouped into four major sections.
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