Why Ethiopia, of All Places, Preserved the Book of Enoch

A book written in the Land of Israel vanished from every library in the world, and survived complete only in faraway mountains, in a translation into a language nobody speaks anymore. It sounds like the plot of an adventure novel, and yet that is exactly what happened to the Book of Enoch.

The book was written in Aramaic in the Land of Israel, translated into Greek, and read throughout the ancient world. Then it disappeared from almost everywhere. Its complete text survived in only one language, Ge’ez, in only one country, Ethiopia. Why there?

The short answer

The Book of Enoch survived in Ethiopia because the Ethiopian church never removed it from its scriptures. A book considered holy is copied again and again, read in public and studied, and so it does not get lost. In the rest of the world the book lost its standing in the fourth and fifth centuries, and the copyists moved on to other books.

That is the short answer. The long answer is more interesting, and it begins with a kingdom most readers have never heard of.

A Christian kingdom in the Horn of Africa

In the fourth century CE, what is now northern Ethiopia was ruled by the kingdom of Aksum, a trading power whose coins reached as far as India. In the middle of that century its king, Ezana, adopted Christianity. Ethiopia was therefore one of the first countries in the world to embrace the new religion, before most of Europe.

A new religion needs books, and the books were written in Greek. Between the fourth and the sixth centuries the scriptures were translated into Ge’ez, the language of the kingdom. The translators worked from the Greek text in front of them, and that text still included the Book of Enoch. In those years many Christians regarded it as a respected book, one that even the New Testament quotes. The Ethiopian translators did not know that within a generation or two the leaders of the church in Rome and in the East would change their minds.

What the center abandons, the margins keep

This is where geography comes in. Ethiopia sits on a high plateau, surrounded by deserts and sea. From the seventh century on, after the Muslim conquests, it was almost cut off from the rest of the Christian world. The debates that stirred the churches of Europe and the Middle East reached it late, if at all.

The isolation had a price, and it also had an unexpected advantage. When other churches narrowed their lists of holy books, the Ethiopian church kept the broad list it had received. Its scriptures still comprise eighty-one books, more than in any other church, among them the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees.

It is a pattern that recurs in history. The center renews itself, argues and throws things away. The margins, which take no part in the argument, keep what they were given. Whoever is looking for the old version of something is wise to look for it far from the capital.

Ge’ez: a Semitic language in the mountains

A word about the language itself. Ge’ez is a Semitic language, a relative of Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. The Ge’ez word for “book” is mashaf, close cousin of the Arabic mushaf. The Book of Enoch is called there Mashafa Henok.

Ge’ez ceased to be a spoken language many centuries ago, and its place was taken by Amharic and Tigrinya. But it remained the language of prayer and study, as Latin remained in the Catholic Church. Ethiopian monks went on copying books in it by hand on parchment right into modern times. For the Book of Enoch alone, more than a hundred manuscripts in Ge’ez are known today. The oldest of them date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The manuscripts themselves are impressive objects: thick parchment leaves, bound between wooden boards, sometimes kept in a leather case that can be carried over the shoulder. A book like this took months to write, and was kept in a monastery for many generations. There is no way of knowing how many copies were lost along the way. We only know that the chain was never broken.

There is a small irony in the fact that a Jewish book, written in one Semitic language, survived thanks to a translation into another Semitic language, after passing through Greek on the way.

A living book, not a museum piece

It is important to understand that in Ethiopia the Book of Enoch was not preserved the way an antique is preserved. It was, and still is, a living book. Church scholars quoted it in their writings. In the fifteenth century the emperor Zara Yaqob, one of the greatest of Ethiopia’s rulers, relied on it in his theological works. Its descriptions of angels and of the heavens influenced prayer, art and the way the upper world is imagined there.

The Jews of Ethiopia, Beta Israel, also kept the Book of Enoch in Ge’ez among their sacred books, alongside the Book of Jubilees. So it happened that a Jewish work from the Second Temple period, forgotten by most of the Jewish people, went on being read in one Jewish community at the other end of the world.

The way back

Europe heard rumors of the Ethiopian book as early as the seventeenth century, but it was only in 1773 that the Scottish traveler James Bruce brought back three copies of it. In the nineteenth century many more Ethiopian manuscripts reached the libraries of Europe, some by purchase and some as plunder. After the British military expedition of 1868 alone, hundreds of manuscripts were carried off to England.

Within Ethiopia, too, a project to photograph manuscripts in the monasteries has continued in recent decades, making accessible copies that nobody outside the monastery had seen before.

From the manuscripts that reached Europe, August Dillmann prepared the scholarly edition of the book, and from his edition Lazarus Goldschmidt translated the book into Hebrew. Everyone who reads the Book of Enoch today, in any language, owes that reading to the monks who copied it in the mountains of Ethiopia. The first words they copied were these:

These are the words of blessing with which Enoch blessed the chosen and the righteous, who will be alive on the day of distress, when all the evil and the wicked are wiped away.

1 Enoch 1:1

Who decides what remains

We tend to imagine the preservation of culture as a task for great institutions: national libraries, universities, archives. The story of the Book of Enoch offers a different picture. The great libraries of the ancient world burned or were scattered. What survived, survived thanks to people who sat in a monastery on a mountainside and copied, letter by letter, a book that nobody in the wider world was asking for anymore.

They did not do it to save the book for the scholars of the future. They did it because they believed in it. It turns out that this is the most effective method of preservation yet invented.