The Ethiopian church kept what everyone else lost
The Ethiopian Orthodox church has preserved 1 Enoch and Jubilees in continuous canonical use for over fifteen hundred years. As Scripture, sitting in the same canon as Genesis, as Isaiah, as the Psalms.
This is the oldest surviving canonical witness to the most complete version of the story. And Ethiopia was outside both consolidations. Outside the post-Temple rabbinic closure. Outside the Roman narrowing that followed. The geographic isolation that Western scholarship sometimes treats as a mark of primitive provinciality is the precise reason the preservation happened. The archive that got sealed out of the metropolitan centers survived in the place the metropolitan centers couldn’t reach.
In passages where the canonical traditions diverge, the Ge’ez readings align with the DSS and the LXX against the MT. In some cases, with 1 Enoch most clearly, the Ge’ez is not a translation of a surviving original. It is the most complete surviving witness, period. There is no more original version to compare it against. The Ethiopian church kept what everyone else lost.

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