Readers of our Ethiopian Bible may recognise Gabe Stanek's name from its acknowledgments page. He has read the edition more closely than anyone outside the project, against the Ethiopian Church's own sources, and he keeps telling us what he finds. Many of the corrections we have already made came from him: the order of the Books of Church Order, the Enoch and Jubilees doxologies, a run of stray quotation marks, the reading of Luke 1:28.
This week he wrote to us again, about the most debated passage in the Book of Enoch. He was right again, so this post is first of all a thank-you. It is also an account of what we got wrong and what we are doing about it.
Near the end of the Book of Parables, Enoch is taken up into heaven and an angel speaks to him. In our edition that passage is Ethiopian chapter 20. In R.H. Charles's numbering it is chapter 71. Our current text of verse 14 reads:
"This is the Son of Man, born to righteousness. Righteousness abides over him, and the righteousness of the Head of Days never forsakes him."
Gabe pointed out that the Ge'ez does not say that. It reads አንተ ውእቱ: "You are." The angel is speaking to Enoch, and the second person runs on through the lines that follow, "your ways," "with you," "from you."
We should say plainly that we do not read Ge'ez. We did not check this against a manuscript ourselves. What we did was compare a published Ge'ez transcription of the passage against the English, using machine assistance, and then read the two older English translations made directly from the Ethiopic, both of which we hold. They agree with Gabe. Richard Laurence has "Thou art the offspring of man," and George Schodde (1882) "Thou art a son of man." Both are in the second person.
The third person comes from Charles. When he translated Enoch in 1912 he believed a passage had dropped out of the text, one that would have introduced a separate figure, and he rewrote "you" as "this" and "him" to fit the passage he thought was missing. He was open about it. But it was his reconstruction, and the translators who followed him did not keep it.
Our Enoch is Charles's English, modernized and set out in the chapters and verses the Ethiopian Church uses. We use Charles because he gives us a sound public-domain English base. That never meant we were bound to keep every editorial decision he made, and here his decision overrode the very text we are trying to present.
Gabe points out that our standalone Enoch carries the second-person wording, and that the full Bible has gone back to Charles's. Whichever way that happened, the remedy is the same: the Ethiopian text is the target, and Charles's English is how we get there. When the two disagree, the Ethiopian text wins.
Gabe also took the question to a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and the answer is worth passing on. In English, two different Ge'ez phrases both come out as "Son of Man":
The difference is real and well worth knowing, and an English translation erases it entirely. There is one complication that we want to be honest about. Scholars of the Parables have long noted that the book uses more than one Ge'ez expression for the figure. In the published Ge'ez text we compared, verse 17, just three verses on, has the longer phrase, ወልደ ዕጓለ እመሕያው. So the wording on its own does not settle who the Son of Man is in this book. Scholars and believers have argued that question for a century, and a translation should not decide it by quietly choosing capital letters.
We have asked Gabe how his contact reads verse 17 in that light, and we would be glad to hear more from anyone in the tradition who knows the Ge'ez.
These changes are on our Enoch change list now and will go into the book editions.
Three verses go back to the second person, as the Ethiopic text and the later translations have them:
| Verse | Now | Corrected |
|---|---|---|
| 20:48 [Charles 71:14] | "This is the Son of Man, born to righteousness. Righteousness abides over him, and the righteousness of the Head of Days never forsakes him." | "You are a son of man, born to righteousness. Righteousness abides over you, and the righteousness of the Head of Days never forsakes you." |
| 20:50 [71:15–16] | "All will walk in his ways, since righteousness never abandons him." | "All will walk in your ways, since righteousness never abandons you." |
| 20:51 [71:16] | "With him will be their homes, with him their heritage; they will never be separated from him for all eternity." | "With you will be their homes, with you their heritage; they will never be separated from you for all eternity." |
A short editorial note goes in after the passage. It will say that the Ge'ez addresses Enoch directly, that Charles's third person was his own conjecture, and that the two phrases differ, without claiming that the difference resolves the debate.
The introduction to Enoch will be revised. It currently says that no Ge'ez was consulted in making the text, and that will no longer be the whole story once we restore an Ethiopic reading over Charles's. We will not claim more than we did, either. The new wording will say what actually happens: Charles is the starting point, and where a reader, a published Ge'ez text or a later translation from the Ethiopic shows that he departed from it, we follow the Ethiopic and mark the change. It is not a new translation from the Ge'ez, and nobody on our side reads the language.
A careless fix here would do as much damage as the original error, so some of the text stays exactly as it is.
The first version of this post said verse 14 would read "You are that Son of Man," and that we would keep the capitals. Gabe wrote back the same night. He pointed out that the Ge'ez his contact sent reads "You are a son of man," with nothing in it for "that," and Schodde's 1882 translation, made from the Ethiopic, reads exactly that way, lowercase. He was right. The "that" was ours, and it made the verse say more than the text does. The table above now shows the corrected wording, and the corrected book files carry it.
An edition like this cannot be made by one person at a desk. The English sources most readers rely on hide distinctions that are plain to anyone who reads the Ge'ez. We don't read it, so the people best placed to catch them are readers who know the tradition and take the trouble to write.
Gabe has done that again and again, and the book is better every time. Thank you.
If you read the Ethiopian Bible and something looks wrong to you, write to us. We check every report against the sources, and when a reader is right we fix the text and say so in public.