The short answer: the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has its own canon. It has its own list of books, its own way of counting them, and its own order. The list includes books most readers have never seen in a Bible: Enoch, Jubilees, three books of Meqabyan, the Josippon, and eight Books of Church Order. The Church counts 81 books in all, 46 in the Old Testament and 35 in the New.
The Church says as much itself. Its English canon page opens the list with one line: "The canon of the Ethiopic Bible differs both in the Old and New Testament from that of any other churches."
Two things are easy to confuse here. One is the canon, which belongs to the Church's tradition. The other is any English edition of it, which is a set of choices made by a publisher. We publish one such edition ourselves, so this post marks where the tradition ends and our choices begin.
The Church's own page lists the books. It gives 46 for the Old Testament and 35 for the New, "that will bring the total of canonized books of the Bible to 81."
Read that list and you notice how it counts. Some entries hold more than one text. "I and II Samuel" is a single entry. So is "I and II Kings", and so is "Ezra and Nehemia". "II and III Maccabees" share one number, while "I Maccabees" has its own. The Church's 81 is a count of canonical books, and a canonical book can be several texts long.
That is why the number on a cover tells you less than it seems to. R. W. Cowley, in his 1974 study of the Ethiopian canon, put the difficulty in two sentences. The number of canonical books "is reckoned to be 81, but this total is reached in various ways." And "the naming of a book in a list does not necessarily uniquely identify it."
So a printed Bible can be faithful to the 81 and still show more headings than that. Our edition prints each text under its own heading. The 81 books come out as 90 printed volumes, bound in one A4 paperback of 700+ pages. 1 and 2 Samuel are one canonical book and two printed volumes. The same goes for Kings. The 81 and the 90 describe the same contents, counted two ways.
The Church's list does not follow the order most Western readers know.
Even within the tradition, the order is not fixed. Our edition's note on the canon puts it this way: "The Ethiopian tradition fixed the contents of the canon but never legislated the arrangement." Different lists give different orders, and an edition has to choose one and say which.
Enoch and Jubilees. These are the two most readers have heard of. The Church's page says Jubilees, "otherwise known as the Little Genesis", "has also been preserved entire only in the Ethiopic version." It describes Enoch as a book "which throws so much light on Jewish thought on various points during the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era."
In 1 Enoch the Watchers come down to earth and teach people new arts. One verse in our edition reads: "Azazel taught people to make weapons, swords, knives, shields, and armor." (1 Enoch 2:18, Charles 8:1). That is our modern English, set in the Ethiopian chapter divisions.
The Books of Church Order. These eight texts close the Ethiopian New Testament, which is how it reaches 35: 27 plus 8. They deal mainly with how the Church is ordered: its clergy, its sacraments, its prayer and its discipline.
The Church's English page lists "I Maccabees" and "II and III Maccabees". Our edition calls the same books 1, 2 and 3 Meqabyan. That looks like a contradiction. It is not.
Meqabyan is the Ethiopic name. Cowley writes of "the 3 books of 'Maccabees' (Mäqabeyan)", using the two names for one set of books. The English label renders the name. It says nothing about content.
On content, Cowley is direct. The three books, he writes, "are not the same as any of the 4 LXX books of Maccabees." The LXX is the Greek Septuagint, which carries the books of Maccabees that Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles include.
You can see the difference on the first page. The best known of the Greek books, 1 and 2 Maccabees, tell of the Jewish revolt against Greek rule. 1 Meqabyan opens with an idol-worshipping king named Tsirtsaydan and his threat to punish anyone who refuses to sacrifice to his idols. Its second chapter begins: "There was a man from the tribe of Benjamin whose name was Meqabis." Cowley's summary of the same book matches: a wicked idol-worshipping king, and "a Benjaminite called Meqabis" who taught that people should worship the true God.
The grouping matches too. The Church lists I Maccabees alone and II and III together, and our edition counts them the same way: three printed books, two canonical numbers.
So when you see "Maccabees" on an Ethiopian canon list, it names the Meqabyan. An edition that prints the Greek books of Maccabees in that slot has printed different books under a similar name.
Our edition was built book by book, and the route into English differs from one book to the next. These are our choices, not the tradition's:
This is why source notes matter. Two editions can share a table of contents and still give you very different texts.
Whichever edition you look at, including ours, these checks take a few minutes in a sample or a preview.
A page count on its own tells you nothing about canon or content. Neither does a book count. Both have to be read against the contents.
Clear Text Editions publishes The Ethiopian Bible in English, the 81-book canon in modern English prose with a named source for every book. It runs to over 1.2 million words.
The full book list is on the canon page, and the sources page names every source, book by book. If you want this edition, the order page has it.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts 81: 46 in the Old Testament and 35 in the New. Some of those canonical books contain more than one text. That is why an edition that prints each text on its own, as ours does, shows 90 printed volumes for the same 81 books.
No. Meqabyan is the Ethiopic name, and the Church's English page renders it as "Maccabees". R. W. Cowley's 1974 study of the canon states that the three books "are not the same as any of the 4 LXX books of Maccabees."
Yes. The Church lists Enoch as book 14 of its Old Testament, straight after Jubilees and the two books of Chronicles.
Eight texts on the order of the Church: its clergy, sacraments, prayer and discipline. In the Ethiopian count they belong to the New Testament, which is why it runs to 35 books rather than 27.
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