The Complete Apocrypha of the Ethiopian Bible E-book

You have read about angels your whole life. You have never read this.

In the New Testament, the Book of Jude quotes a prophecy of Enoch by name (Jude 1:14-15, citing 1 Enoch 1:9). It is right there in most Bibles. The book it quotes is not. For centuries, the standard Protestant 66-book canon left the Book of Enoch out, while one of the oldest Christian traditions on earth, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, never stopped reading it.

This volume brings it back, in full. The complete Book of Enoch unfolds across all five of its parts: the Book of the Watchers, where two hundred angels descend and corrupt mankind; the Book of Parables; the Astronomical Book, charting the luminaries of heaven; the Book of Dream Visions; and the Epistle of Enoch. The Watchers, their forbidden teachings, the giants born from them, and the judgment that follows are all here.

Alongside Enoch you get the Book of Jubilees, sometimes called "Little Genesis," which retells the events of Genesis and early Exodus with details the canon condensed. And you get the three Meqabyan, the Ethiopian books of Maccabees, a distinct corpus found in no other Bible in the world.

The collection rounds out with deuterocanonical books many Catholic and Orthodox readers already know, including Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Susanna, Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh, and the Prayer of Azariah. Twenty books in all, brought together in a single volume so you do not have to hunt them down one at a time.

Every text has been translated and reorganized from the original Ge'ez, with Hebrew and Greek sources, into fluent modern English you can actually read. No archaic thee-and-thou. No wall of footnotes you need a seminary to decode.

A plain-language introduction sets every book in its place. It explains what "apocrypha" really means (from the Greek for "hidden things," writings set apart, not writings dismissed as false) and how the Ethiopian canon, one of the broadest in Christianity at around 81 books, came to keep what other traditions set aside.

If you are a Christian who has wondered what is missing from your Bible, a reader drawn to Enoch, the Watchers, the Nephilim, and the mysteries behind the early chapters of Genesis, or a student of church history and the Septuagint, this is the one volume that puts it all in your hands.

The Bible the Ethiopian Church has carried for sixteen centuries was always larger than most of us were handed. This is your invitation to read the rest of it.

It is less a story of removal than of different choices. As the Christian canon took shape, traditions drew the line in different places. The standard Protestant Bible settled on 66 books and set these writings aside, while the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles kept many of them as deuterocanonical, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserved one of the broadest canons in Christianity, often counted at around 81 books. The word "apocrypha" comes from the Greek for "hidden things," meaning writings set apart, not writings judged false. So these books were never universally banned or erased. They were simply kept in some Bibles and not in others, and this volume brings the Ethiopian collection back into view.

No. These texts have been freshly translated and reorganized from the original Ge'ez, along with Hebrew and Greek sources, into clear, modern English. There is no archaic phrasing to wade through and no theology degree required. A plain-language introduction explains what each book is and where it came from before you begin, so you can pick it up and start reading with context already in hand.