The Ethiopian Bible: how many books, and which ones
The Ethiopian Bible is counted as 81 books. Every book in the church's order, the two ways it reaches 81, where Enoch and Jubilees fit, and the 88 claim.
The short answer
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts 81 books in its Bible, the largest canon in traditional Christianity. It reaches 81 in two ways, as 54 Old Testament books and the usual 27 New Testament ones, or as 46 and 35, with eight further books, mostly on church order, in the New Testament. Its Old Testament includes Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch and three books of Meqabyan, which no other church's Bible has apart from the Eritrean church's. No church or scholarly list we found gives 88.
In this guide
- How many books are in the Ethiopian Bible?
- The Ethiopian Bible books, in order
- Two ways to count 81: the narrower and broader canon
- Does the Ethiopian Bible have 88 books?
- The books only the Ethiopian Bible has
- How long does it take to read the Ethiopian Bible?
- Why the Ethiopian Bible has more books than Catholic and Protestant Bibles
- Can you read the Ethiopian Bible in English?
- Questions people ask
- Sources
Search for the books of the Ethiopian Bible and you meet two numbers, 81 and 88. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church speaks of “the 81 books”, but there is more than one way of arriving at that total, and the lists in its manuscripts and printed books do not all agree. The 88 is harder to place.
- 81books, as the Ethiopian church counts them
- 54 + 27the narrower canon, Old and New Testament
- 46 + 35the broader count, on the church’s own website
- 1,564chapters in the 80 books BibleRing tracks
How many books are in the Ethiopian Bible?
The Ethiopian Bible has 81 books by the count of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which shares its canon with the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. It is the largest canon in traditional Christianity. The total stays the same from one list to the next, but the way to it does not:
| Way of counting | Old Testament | New Testament | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| The narrower canon | 54 | 27 | 81 |
| The broader canon, as on the church’s website | 46 | 35 | 81 |
| BibleRing’s Ethiopian canon | 53 | 27 | 80 |
R. W. Cowley, writing on the canon in 1974, put it simply: the corpus “is generally called ‘the 81 books’”, but “this total is reached in various ways.” The two ways differ both in how they divide books and in what they include: whether 1 and 2 Samuel, or Ezra and Nehemiah, count as one book or two, whether Baruch and Lamentations stand on their own, and whether a history of the Jews and eight books mostly about church order are part of the 81. BibleRing’s 80 is the narrower canon grouped slightly differently, which is explained further down. For how the Ethiopian count sits beside every other tradition’s, see how many books are in the Bible.
The Ethiopian Bible books, in order
The narrower canon has 54 Old Testament books. Here they are in the church’s order, as Wikipedia lists them from Eugen Pentiuc’s Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity (2022) and the church’s 1995 book Faith, Order of Worship and Ecumenical Relations:
| # | Books | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| 1–5 | Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy | The five books of Moses |
| 6–8 | Joshua, Judges, Ruth | |
| 9–14 | 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles | The Prayer of Manasseh is part of 2 Chronicles |
| 15–16 | Jubilees, Enoch | Found in no other church’s canon but the Eritrean |
| 17–20 | Ezra, Nehemiah, 3 Ezra (Greek Esdras), Ezra Sutuel (4 Ezra) | In this tradition 3 Ezra is called Second Ezra |
| 21–23 | Tobit, Judith, Esther | |
| 24–26 | 1, 2 and 3 Meqabyan | Not the Greek books of Maccabees |
| 27–28 | Job, Psalms | |
| 29–34 | Messale (Proverbs 1–24), Tagsas (Proverbs 25–31), Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Sirach | Proverbs counts as two books |
| 35–42 | Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, Letter of Jeremiah, 4 Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel | 4 Baruch is also called the Paralipomena of Jeremiah |
| 43–54 | Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi | The twelve minor prophets, with Joel after Micah |
The New Testament has the same 27 books as every other Christian Bible. The church lists them in the familiar order but for James, which comes after the letters of Peter and John, just before Jude: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, James, Jude and Revelation.
Lists differ in the details. Cowley’s account of the narrower canon also reaches 54, but counts Susanna and “the rest of Daniel” as books of their own, and describes Lamentations, the letter to the captives and 4 Baruch as parts of a single book, Säqoqawä Eremyas. Two careful lists can both come to 54 and still not match line for line. For the order of the 66 books most English Bibles share, see the books of the Bible in order.
Two ways to count 81: the narrower and broader canon
The narrower canon counts 54 Old Testament books and 27 New Testament books; the broader canon counts 46 and 35. Both come to 81. The narrower canon is the list of books printed in the large Ge’ez and Amharic Bibles issued at Emperor Haile Selassie’s command, and Cowley judged the canonicity of its books undisputed in the church. The further books of the broader canon are, from a traditional point of view, just as canonical, though he thought they might come to be read more as commentary. He also noted that the church’s authorities “have never said of an edition of the Geez or Amharic Bible that it was complete.”
The narrower canon: 54 and 27
The narrower canon starts from the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament and counts them as 40, because Proverbs is split in two: Messale for chapters 1 to 24 and Tagsas for chapters 25 to 31. Fourteen more books bring the Old Testament to 54, and the 27 books of the New Testament make 81.
In Wikipedia’s summary, this Old Testament holds the whole Hebrew Bible and, apart from 1 and 2 Maccabees, every deuterocanonical book of the Catholic Bible, with the Prayer of Manasseh, 3 Ezra and 4 Ezra besides. The Prayer of Manasseh has no number of its own, because it is printed inside 2 Chronicles: Cowley describes it as 13 numbered verses following 2 Chronicles 33:12.
The broader canon: 46 and 35
The church’s own website gives the broader count: “The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has 46 books of the Old Testament and 35 books of the New Testament”, for 81 in all. Its Old Testament list counts together several books the narrower canon keeps apart (1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Ezra and Nehemiah, Second Ezra and Ezra Sutuel, and 2 and 3 Meqabyan), gives no entry of their own to Baruch, Lamentations, the Letter of Jeremiah or 4 Baruch, and adds “the Book of Josephas the Son of Bengorion”, which Cowley identifies with Josippon, a history of the Jews based on the writings of Josephus.
Its New Testament has the 27 books and eight more. The church’s list names them Sirate Tsion, Tizaz, Gitsew and Abtilis (the four parts of the Sinodos, a collection of church order attributed to the apostles and early councils), two books of Dominos, the book of Clement and the Didascalia, a church order in 43 chapters. Scholars give the same eight as the Sinodos (four), the Book of the Covenant (two), Clement and the Didascalia.
Some of the broader count’s history is known. The Fetha Negest law code says the canon has 81 books but lists only 73, and the broader canon seems to have been put together by Ethiopian scholars commenting on it, with the eight further books taken to be the ones missing from its list.
Does the Ethiopian Bible have 88 books?
Not by any count we could find. The church’s website gives 81, the scholarly accounts we checked give 81, and H. E. Negash, an Ethiopian Orthodox writer at the Aksum Review of Books, is direct about it: “there are not 88 books in the Ethiopian Bible.” We could not trace where the figure of 88 began, so we will not guess.
What makes any number slippery is the counting itself. Much the same writings can be counted as 46 Old Testament books or as 54, and splitting Proverbs, Lamentations or the additions to Daniel into books of their own raises a total without adding a page. If an edition prints a number on its cover, its contents page tells you more:
- Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch and the three Meqabyan. These are what set the Ethiopian Old Testament apart.
- What its “Maccabees” are. In the Ethiopian Bible they are the Meqabyan; the Greek 1 and 2 Maccabees of Catholic and Orthodox Bibles are not part of its canon.
- Where the New Testament stops. At the 27 books, or with the Sinodos, the Book of the Covenant, Clement and the Didascalia after them.
- How books are divided. Proverbs as one book or two; Lamentations, the Letter of Jeremiah and 4 Baruch on their own or together.
The books only the Ethiopian Bible has
Six books in the Ethiopian Old Testament appear in no other church’s Bible but the Eritrean: Enoch, Jubilees, the three books of Meqabyan and 4 Baruch. Together they come to 234 chapters by our count, about 15 percent of the 1,564 in the whole canon.
| Book | Chapters | What it’s known for |
|---|---|---|
| Jubilees | 50 | Genesis retold, and the calendar behind it |
| 1 Meqabyan | 36 | Three brothers who would not bow |
| 2 Meqabyan | 21 | A king's downfall, told for Ethiopia |
| 3 Meqabyan | 10 | Ten chapters on judgment and mercy |
| 4 Baruch | 9 | Sixty-six years asleep, and a changed city |
| Enoch | 108 | Watchers, giants, and a tour of heaven |
Enoch
Enoch, often called 1 Enoch, has 108 chapters as it is usually numbered. It is a collection in five parts: the Book of the Watchers (chapters 1 to 36), the Book of Parables (37 to 71), the Astronomical Book (72 to 82), the Book of Dream Visions (83 to 90) and the Epistle of Enoch (91 to 108). Its oldest parts are usually dated to the third century BC. Aramaic fragments of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, but the whole book survives only in Ge’ez. Beta Israel, the Jewish community of Ethiopia, also holds it as scripture.
The Letter of Jude, in every Christian Bible, quotes a prophecy it attributes to Enoch:
About these also Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord came with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their works of ungodliness which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
Jude 14–15, World English Bible
Our guide to whether the Book of Enoch is in the Bible sets out which Bibles include it, and why others do not.
Jubilees
Jubilees, 50 chapters long in the usual numbering, retells the story from creation to the Exodus as a history revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai by angels; R. H. Charles’s 1902 English translation calls it the Little Genesis. It divides that history into jubilees, periods of 49 years, and argues for a year of 364 days in four quarters of 13 weeks. It is usually dated to around 160 to 150 BC. About fifteen Hebrew scrolls of it were found in the caves at Qumran, yet no complete Hebrew, Greek or Latin text survives: the whole book is known from Ge’ez.
1, 2 and 3 Meqabyan
The three books of Meqabyan have 36, 21 and 10 chapters, and were written in Ge’ez. Despite the name, they do not tell the story of the revolt that gave rise to the Hasmonean kings, which is what the Greek books of Maccabees are about.
- 1 Meqabyan tells of resistance to an idol-worshipping king of Media and Midian, beginning with three brothers who refuse to bow to his idols, and then turns to God’s sovereignty, the resurrection and judgment.
- 2 Meqabyan tells of Maccabeus, a king of Moab, who makes war on Israel as a punishment for its sins, then repents and is taught by the prophet Rei.
- 3 Meqabyan, the shortest, is a wide-ranging account of salvation and punishment, drawing on Adam, Job and David.
In the church’s practice, 2 and 3 Meqabyan are sometimes joined into a single text, and the church’s own list gives them as one entry.
Meqabyan is not Maccabees
The church’s own English list calls these books “I Maccabees” and “II and III Maccabees”, which is one reason they are confused with the Greek 1 and 2 Maccabees found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. They are different books, and the Greek ones are not in the Ethiopian canon.
4 Baruch
4 Baruch is also called the Paralipomena of Jeremiah, “things left out of Jeremiah”, and in Ge’ez the Rest of the Words of Baruch. It opens with Jeremiah learning that Jerusalem will fall. Abimelech (Ebed-melech, called “the Ethiopian” in Jeremiah 38) sleeps for 66 years and wakes beside figs that have not spoiled, and Baruch sends an eagle to Jeremiah in Babylon. It is usually dated to the first half of the second century AD.
How long does it take to read the Ethiopian Bible?
Reading the Ethiopian Bible in a year comes to about 4.3 chapters a day, or around 14 minutes at the app’s working figure of 3.3 minutes a chapter. That spreads the 1,564 chapters of BibleRing’s Ethiopian canon (1,304 in the Old Testament and 260 in the New, the most of the five canons it tracks) over 365 days; the Protestant Bible’s 1,189 chapters take 3.3 a day.
| To finish in | Chapters a day | About |
|---|---|---|
| 6 months | 8.6 | 28 min a day |
| 9 months | 5.7 | 19 min a day |
| 1 year | 4.3 | 14 min a day |
| 18 months | 2.9 | 9 min a day |
| 2 years | 2.1 | 7 min a day |
| 3 years | 1.4 | 5 min a day |
1,564 chapters in the Ethiopian Bible, divided by the days. Minutes assume about 3.3 minutes a chapter, a relaxed reading pace; chapters vary from a few verses to 176.
We have given chapters rather than hours here, because our word counts come from the World English Bible, which has no text of Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch or the Meqabyan to count.
BibleRing’s Ethiopian canon is the narrower canon above, with three books grouped differently. Proverbs is one book of 31 chapters rather than Messale and Tagsas. The Letter of Jeremiah is the sixth chapter of Baruch, as Catholic Bibles print it, rather than a book of its own. And the Prayer of Manasseh is a one-chapter book of its own, where the Ethiopian Bible prints it within 2 Chronicles. Two books fewer and one more makes 53 in the Old Testament and 80 in all. The app also files the books by kind of writing, with Jubilees beside the books of Moses and Enoch among the prophets after Malachi, so its order is not the church’s. The 80 is how the app groups the same books; the church’s count is 81.
Its chapters are numbered as in English Bibles and translations, which the Ethiopian printed Bibles do not always follow. Cowley noted that those Bibles divide Enoch and Jubilees into chapters differently, and that their Ezra Sutuel has 13 chapters, covering what English Bibles print as chapters 3 to 14 of 2 Esdras, where the app counts all 16. The 1,564 is a working total for keeping track, not a figure the church gives.
Why the Ethiopian Bible has more books than Catholic and Protestant Bibles
The Ethiopian Old Testament is wider than the others for two reasons: it includes most of the books that Catholic and Orthodox Bibles carry beyond the Protestant 39, and it keeps books that survive complete only in its own language.
Christianity became the established faith of the Kingdom of Aksum under King Ezana in the fourth century, and the church describes its Old Testament as translated from the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. That puts it in the same family as the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments, which also include Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch: the books Catholics call deuterocanonical and many Protestants call the Apocrypha, which our guide to the deuterocanonical books and the Apocrypha goes through one by one. The church was administratively part of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria until 1959, when it was given its own patriarch, and it belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family of churches.
Enoch and Jubilees are the other part of the answer. Both are far older than the Ethiopian church, and copies of both were among the scrolls found at Qumran, but only the Ge’ez translation preserves either one complete, and the Ethiopian church reads both as scripture. They are not lost or forbidden books: they belong to the Bible of a living church with tens of millions of members.
Here is everything the Ethiopian canon in BibleRing has that the Protestant Bible does not, with the chapters each one adds:
| Book | In the Ethiopian Bible | Chapters added |
|---|---|---|
| Jubilees | A whole book. Genesis retold, and the calendar behind it. | 50 |
| 1 Esdras | A whole book. The return from exile, told a second way. | 9 |
| 2 Esdras | A whole book. Seven visions, and a question God does not dodge. | 16 |
| Tobit | A whole book. A journey with an angel in disguise. | 14 |
| Judith | A whole book. A widow walks into an enemy camp. | 16 |
| Esther | 6 more chapters: the Greek additions | 6 |
| 1 Meqabyan | A whole book. Three brothers who would not bow. | 36 |
| 2 Meqabyan | A whole book. A king's downfall, told for Ethiopia. | 21 |
| 3 Meqabyan | A whole book. Ten chapters on judgment and mercy. | 10 |
| Psalms | Psalm 151 | 1 |
| Wisdom | A whole book. Greek thought meets Hebrew faith. | 19 |
| Sirach | A whole book. A grandfather's practical advice. | 51 |
| Prayer of Manasseh | A whole book. The worst king in Judah, asking for mercy. | 1 |
| Baruch | A whole book. Jeremiah's secretary, writing from exile. | 6 |
| 4 Baruch | A whole book. Sixty-six years asleep, and a changed city. | 9 |
| Daniel | 2 more chapters: the Greek additions | 2 |
| Enoch | A whole book. Watchers, giants, and a tour of heaven. | 108 |
| From 1,189 chapters to 1,564 | +375 | |
And here is how the Ethiopian Bible compares with the Protestant and Catholic Bibles, book group by book group:
| Books | Protestant (66) | Catholic (73) | Ethiopian (81) |
|---|---|---|---|
| The 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch | No | Yes | Yes |
| The longer Esther and Daniel | No | Yes | Yes |
| 1 and 2 Maccabees | No | Yes | No |
| 3 and 4 Ezra (1 and 2 Esdras), the Prayer of Manasseh | No | No | Yes |
| Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch, 1 to 3 Meqabyan | No | No | Yes |
| New Testament | 27 books | 27 books | 27, or 35 in the broader count |
The seven books that separate Protestant and Catholic Bibles have a guide of their own, Catholic vs Protestant Bible. Orthodox Bibles share several more of the Ethiopian books, 1 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh among them; the Orthodox Bible sets out which.
Can you read the Ethiopian Bible in English?
Not as one authorized edition. The Ethiopian Bible’s language is Ge’ez, the language in which the church still celebrates its services, and according to H. E. Negash, “there is no authorized translation of the Ethiopian Bible into the English language.” He dates an abridged commercial Amharic edition to the mid-twentieth century, a full one to the 1980s, and an authorized commercial Ge’ez Bible to only a few years ago.
What English readers can find is most of the books, translated one at a time. The books the Ethiopian Bible shares with Catholic and Orthodox Bibles are in English Bibles printed with the deuterocanonical books or the Apocrypha, though translated from other ancient texts rather than the Ge’ez. R. H. Charles, who edited the Ethiopic texts of both, published English translations of Jubilees (1902) and Enoch (1912).
So a volume sold in English as the Ethiopian Bible is its editor’s compilation, not the church’s edition. That does not make it a poor book, but its contents are its own, and the questions in the section on 88 books above are the quickest way to see what it holds. We have not linked any of the PDFs that circulate online, because we could not tell what edition they reproduce.
If you would like the list on paper, there is a one-page checklist of the 80 books BibleRing counts, each with its chapters and a box to tick (Letter, A4). It sets the books out by kind of writing rather than in the church’s order.
Questions people ask
Is the Book of Enoch in the Ethiopian Bible?
Yes. Enoch is in the Old Testament of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, 108 chapters long as it is usually numbered, and Beta Israel, the Jewish community of Ethiopia, also holds it as scripture. Other churches do not include it. The complete text survives only in Ge'ez, though Aramaic fragments were found at Qumran, and the Letter of Jude quotes a short passage from it.
Does the Ethiopian Bible include 1 and 2 Maccabees?
No. The Greek books of 1 and 2 Maccabees that Catholic and Orthodox Bibles carry are not among the books the church lists. In their place stand 1, 2 and 3 Meqabyan, books of 36, 21 and 10 chapters written in Ge'ez that tell different stories. The church's own English list calls them Maccabees, one reason the two are easily confused.
What language is the Ethiopian Bible written in?
Ge'ez, the language in which the church still celebrates its services. The church describes its Old Testament as translated from the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. An Ethiopian Orthodox writer dates an abridged commercial Amharic edition to the mid-twentieth century, a full one to the 1980s, and an authorized commercial Ge'ez Bible to only a few years ago.
Is there an official Ethiopian Bible in English?
No. According to an Ethiopian Orthodox writer at the Aksum Review of Books, there is no authorized English translation of the Ethiopian Bible. English volumes sold under that name are compiled by their own editors, so their contents vary. Several of its books exist in English on their own, among them R. H. Charles's translations of Jubilees (1902) and Enoch (1912), made from Ethiopic texts he edited.
Why is the Ethiopian Bible different from the Catholic Bible?
Both Old Testaments include Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the longer Esther and Daniel. The Ethiopian one also has 3 and 4 Ezra, the Prayer of Manasseh, Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch and the three Meqabyan, and it does not include 1 and 2 Maccabees. Both have the same 27 New Testament books, though the Ethiopian church's broader count adds eight more.
Sources
- Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon, Wikipedia (citing Eugen J. Pentiuc, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity, 2022)
- Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church: the canonical books of the Bible
- R. W. Cowley, “The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today”, Ostkirchliche Studien 23 (1974), 318–323
- H. E. Negash, Aksum Review of Books (December 28, 2024): The Ethiopian Bible, FAQ
- Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Wikipedia
- Book of Enoch, Wikipedia
- Book of Jubilees, Wikipedia
- Meqabyan, Wikipedia
- 4 Baruch, Wikipedia
- R. H. Charles, Wikipedia
- World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
