The Books of Meqabyan: Ethiopia’s Forgotten Heroes of Faith Three Ge’ez books, a different Maccabean tradition, and a fierce theology of faithfulness, repentance, and resurrection In the opening movement of 1 Meqabyan, an idol-worshiping king demands what no ruler has the right to claim. Three brothers – Abya, Sila, and Fentos – refuse to bow….
The Forged Seal and the Scribe Behind It In 1975, a small lump of clay surfaced on the antiquities market in Jerusalem. Someone had pressed a seal into it two and a half thousand years earlier, and the impression was still sharp enough to read: thirteen millimeters by eleven, a few lines of ancient Hebrew…
Somewhere on the northern border of ancient Israel stands Mount Hermon, its summit snow-capped even in the desert heat. Today it’s a hiking destination and a ski resort. In the Second Temple period, Jewish readers told a very different story about it: that this was the mountain where two hundred angels once stood in a…
Most of the world runs on a calendar that drifts. The Gregorian system adds leap days every four years to approximate the solar year, and still falls short of precision by 11 minutes and 14 seconds annually. But the Book of Jubilees describes an alternative: a perfect 364-day year of 52 weeks, divided into four…
It was quoted by the New Testament. It was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was scripture for the first five centuries of Christian history. And then, in most of the world, it disappeared. Here is the story of how that happened — and why Ethiopia kept the faith. Once Revered: The Book of…
The Books of Meqabyan are among the least-known scriptures in the world. Preserved for more than a millennium in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, they contain stories of martyrdom, royal perseverance, and fierce resistance to apostasy — and they have virtually no presence in English-language scholarship or popular religious literature. Most people who have never…
The Book of Jubilees is one of the most underread texts in biblical history. It retells the entire story of Genesis — and part of Exodus — in granular, unapologetic detail, filling gaps the Hebrew Bible leaves open and insisting on a calendar the rest of the world rejected. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has kept…
The Book of Enoch is one of the most read and most forgotten texts in history. For fifteen centuries it was scripture across much of the Christian world. Then it vanished from most churches entirely. If you’ve ever wondered what the fuss is about, this is where to start. What Is the Book of Enoch?…
Most Christians grew up with a 66-book Bible. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has used an 81-book canon for nearly two thousand years — and the fifteen extra books are extraordinary. What Is the Ethiopian Bible? The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the oldest Christian institutions on earth. Christianity arrived in Ethiopia in…