The Ethiopian Bible is traditionally counted as 81 books. For most of them, public-domain English translations exist. R.H. Charles translated 1 Enoch and Jubilees. George Horner translated the Sinodos. George Schodde translated the Apostolic Canons. For the Old Testament, Brenton's Septuagint follows the same Greek textual tradition the Ethiopian church used.
Then there is the Josippon.
The Ethiopian Josippon, called Zena Ayhud ("History of the Jews"), is a 14th-century Ge'ez text. It was translated from Arabic, which was itself translated from the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon, a 10th-century Jewish chronicle. The Hebrew original covers Jewish history from Adam through the fall of Masada.
No complete English translation of the Ethiopian Zena Ayhud has ever been published. The principal critical edition of the Ethiopic text is Murad Kamil's, collated in 1937 from twelve manuscripts and published in 1938 under a German title. It is an edition of the Ge'ez text, not a translation of it, and it is neither readily accessible nor available as a practical public-domain basis for a commercial English edition. The few English-language scholars who have worked on this text have produced fragments, chapter analyses, and comparative studies. None of them produced a readable English version of the full text.
The Ethiopian Bibles we reviewed on Amazon solve this problem by ignoring it. They leave the Josippon out entirely, and most do not mention that it exists.
We took a different approach.
What follows is a documented English reconstruction of the Ethiopian Josippon's scope and structure. It is not a direct translation from the Ge'ez. It is built from the text's known transmission chain and the best available public-domain witnesses, filtered through current comparative scholarship, and every step of that process is disclosed below and on our Sources page.
If you cannot translate a text directly, you can reconstruct it from the texts it was built from. The Ethiopian Josippon has a documented transmission chain: Hebrew to Arabic to Ge'ez. The Hebrew original is available in multiple public-domain Latin translations. The key question is: which parts of the Hebrew survived into the Ethiopian version, and which were dropped?
That question was answered in 2017.
Yonatan Binyam's doctoral dissertation, Studies in Sefer Yosippon: The Reception of Josephus in Medieval Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic Literature (Florida State University, 2017), includes a complete comparative mapping of the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon and the Ethiopian Zena Ayhud. Chapter by chapter, it documents which Hebrew sections have a corresponding Ethiopic section and which do not. It identifies where the Ethiopian text condenses, expands, or diverges from its Hebrew parent. This chart became our roadmap.
The sources we assembled:
| Source | Date | What It Provides |
|---|---|---|
| Sebastian Munster's Latin translation of Sefer Yosippon | Basel, 1541 | Core text for chapters 3-58. Public domain. |
| J.F. Breithaupt's Latin translation of Sefer Yosippon | Gotha, 1710 | Table of Nations, Antiquities (chapters 1-2) and Jewish War (chapters 59-87). Public domain. |
| E.A.W. Budge's translation of the Ethiopic Alexander legends | London, 1896 | Direct Ge'ez-to-English translation. The Alexander material (chapter 10) is the one section translated from the actual Ethiopic. Public domain. |
| Yonatan Binyam, Studies in Sefer Yosippon | FSU, 2017 | Chapter-by-chapter mapping of Hebrew to Ethiopic correspondences. Open-access dissertation. |
Using Binyam's comparative chart, we identified every Hebrew chapter that has a documented Ethiopic equivalent. We translated those chapters from the Latin editions into modern English. We dropped the chapters the Ethiopic tradition does not include. We followed the Ethiopian text's ordering and structure, not the Hebrew original's.
For the Alexander material, corresponding to chapter 10 of the Hebrew, we replaced the Latin entirely with Budge's 1896 translation. Budge worked directly from a Ge'ez manuscript. This is the strongest section of the reconstruction because it is not a proxy: it is actual Ethiopic content in English, translated by a named scholar from a named manuscript.
Nothing in our edition is a straight copy-paste of a 19th-century translation. Every archaic source was rephrased into clear, modern prose. The 1541 Latin reads like a 1541 Latin text. R.H. Charles reads like a Victorian academic paper. Our edition reads like a book written in this century, because every sentence was rewritten to be one.
116 chapters. Approximately 41,000 words. A documented English reconstruction approximating the Ethiopian Josippon's scope and ordering, built from the Hebrew parent text using the best available public-domain scholarship, filtered through the most current comparative research.
It is not a direct translation of the Ge'ez. We say so in the introduction, and we explain exactly why: nobody in the project reads Ge'ez fluently enough to do it, the critical edition of the Ge'ez text is not available to us as a public-domain basis, and a printed Ge'ez Bible is only now becoming accessible through the Bible Society edition. When a direct translation becomes possible, this reconstruction will be replaced with it. Until then, this is the best available version in English.
This method is not unusual in biblical scholarship. Scholars regularly reconstruct texts from their transmission chains when the primary source is unavailable. Reconstructions of Q from Matthew and Luke, of the Diatessaron from its translations, of lost Greek works from Syriac and Arabic transmissions all follow the same logic: use the documented parent text, filtered by the best available scholarly understanding of how the derivative text relates to it.
The same principle applies across our entire edition. We use Brenton's Septuagint as the principal public-domain English foundation for the Old Testament because the early Ge'ez Old Testament was translated primarily from Greek textual traditions rather than the Hebrew Masoretic Text, while acknowledging that the Ethiopic text has a longer history of later revision and influence. We use Charles for Enoch and Jubilees because his translations come from the Ge'ez. We use Horner for Sinodos, Schodde for the Apostolic Canons, Guerrier and Grebaut for Mashafa Kidan and Qalementos. In every case: the best available public-domain text for that book, regardless of language, with honest framing about what it is and where it came from.
Josippon is the most dramatic example, but the same editorial rigor applies to every book in our edition. For Enoch and Jubilees, R.H. Charles' 1913 translations are the foundational public-domain scholarly translations of the underlying text. But Charles wrote in dense Victorian academic prose, and his chapter divisions do not match how the Ethiopian church actually organizes these books. We rephrased Charles' text entirely into modern English, then consulted the Aramaic source scholarship to determine the correct Ethiopic chapter and verse divisions and restructured accordingly. The result is the same underlying scholarship, but it reads like modern prose and is organized the way the Ethiopian tradition actually uses it. Not a single sentence of Charles' original phrasing survives in our edition. The scholarship is his. The voice is ours.
For books like Mashafa Kidan and Qalementos, the only public-domain translations are in French, published in the Patrologia Orientalis and Revue de l'Orient Chretien between 1911 and 1920. We translated those into English and rephrased them into modern language. For the Apostolic Canons, we worked from Schodde's 1885 English translation of the Ge'ez. In every case: find the best available source, do the work required to turn it into a readable modern English text, and document exactly what we did.
In our review of the page-one Amazon listings marketed as complete Ethiopian Bibles in August 2026, we found none that printed the eight Books of Church Order, the Josippon, Mashafa Kidan, or Qalementos. Several supplemented a conventional biblical collection with public-domain pseudepigrapha, and several promised additional material through a QR code or an external download rather than in the printed volume.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Text you are promised through a QR code is not text in the book you bought.
Our Josippon reconstruction alone required sourcing three Latin editions spanning three centuries, locating a 2017 doctoral dissertation, building a chapter-by-chapter structural map, and translating and rephrasing 116 chapters into modern English. That is the work required for one book out of eighty-one.
Every work listed in our table of contents is physically printed in the volume, and every source is named in our Sources & Methodology documentation. Readers can check both claims against the book itself. We would encourage anyone comparing editions to check ours the same way.
The Josippon is one of eighty-one books in our edition. Every book received the same treatment: identify the best available public-domain source, translate or rephrase it into modern English, document every editorial decision, and present it in a format that is actually readable. Nothing is copy-and-paste. Our Sources & Methodology page documents every source for every book. Our print edition is available now.