Listen — The Ethiopian Bible in English

These are the books that make the Ethiopian canon distinct — the ones that survive nowhere else in this form, and the ones readers most often come looking for. The Book of Enoch — quoted by name in the New Testament Epistle of Jude, and preserved complete only in Ge’ez — is the doorway; behind it stand the Book of Jubilees, which retells the story from creation to Sinai; the three Books of Meqabyan, indigenous Ethiopian scriptures unrelated to the Greek books of Maccabees; and the Ethiopic Clement, a book of apostolic order that exists in no other Christian tradition.

This is not the whole canon. The complete edition — all the books, with the related texts and commentary, more than one hundred and forty hours of audio — will be published here in stages, beginning with the books below. The full text of every book is in the printed and Kindle editions now.

How this recording was made — read first This audiobook is narrated by a synthetic voice — an artificial-intelligence text-to-speech system — not by a human reader. We tell you this plainly, because the purpose of this edition is to be honest about how it was made. We do not claim the synthetic voice is the equal of a human narrator, or that it reads these scriptures as they deserve to be read. It does not. It is a bridge, not a destination. Two of the books below — the Books of Meqabyan and the Ethiopic Clement — are themselves AI-assisted translations from public-domain sources in other languages, marked where they begin, here as in print. The full account of every source and method is in the methodology.

The Books

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Audio: 48 kHz / 192 kbps MP3, playable in any modern browser. Each book can also be downloaded as a single file from its heading. Your place is remembered on this device.