Ge'ez 1st Maccabees

Ge'ez 1ˢᵗ Maccabees

SCRIPTURAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Published by Digital Ink Productions, 2024

COPYRIGHT

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

Ge'ez 1st Maccabees

Digital edition. November 18, 2024

Copyright © 2024 Scriptural Research Institute

ISBN: 978-1-998636-03-7

The Ge'ez of 1ˢᵗ Maccabees was likely translated into Ge'ez between the 5ᵗʰ and 10ᵗʰ centuries. This English translation was created by the Scriptural Research Institute in 2024.

The image used for the cover is an artistic reinterpretation of Saint Philip Baptising the Ethiopian Eunuch by Aelbert Cuyp, painted in 1655. The original painting is in the Anglesey Abbey, in Cambridgeshire (England).

Note: The notes for this book include multiple ancient scripts. For your convenience, fonts correctly depicting these scripts are embedded in the ebook. If your reader does not support embedded fonts, you will need to install Unicode fonts that cover the ranges for Arabic, Cuneiform, Ethiopic, Greek, Hebrew, Imperial Aramaic, Mandaic, Old Persian, Phoenician, Syriac, and Ugaritic on your reader manually, or you may see blank areas, question marks, or squares where the scripts are used. The Noto fonts from Google cover most of the scripts used, however, will not depict Demotic Egyptian, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Neo-Assyrian cuneiform, or Neo-Babylonian cuneiform correctly due to current limitations in Unicode.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Forward

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Also Available

FORWARD

The Orthodox Tewahedo Churches of Ethiopian and Eritrean have maintained many deuterocanonical books that are not included in the Bibles of various other Christian churches. Some of these books are shared with the Beta Israel community, the ancient Israelites of the Ethiopian highlands who are also sometimes referred to as Ethiopian Jews. Most of these texts were translated into Ge'ez, the classical language of Axum, sometime between the 5ᵗʰ and 10ᵗʰ centuries AD. Axum was the kingdom that ruled Eritrea and northern Ethiopia in the 1ˢᵗ through 9ᵗʰ centuries AD. At its peak in the 3ʳᵈ through 6ᵗʰ centuries, Axum also controlled Yemen and was considered by some to be one of the four great powers in the world, alongside Rome, Persia, and China.

Some of these Axumite books were original works written for the first time in Ge'ez, however, many were translations made from Arabic, Coptic, Greek, and Syriac texts. Most of the original works are easily identifiable as they focus on stories set in Axum. Over 200 are known that focus on the lives of saints living within the Kingdom of Axum.

Western biblical scholars have been studying the unique Ge'ez literature since the Scottish journalist James Bruce returned to Europe with some of them in the 18ᵗʰ century, after tracing the source of the Blue Nile. Most of the older literature is accepted as being translations of Coptic and Arabic translations of older Greek and Syriac texts, however, some may have been translated into the older South Arabian script before being translated into Ge'ez.

The Ge'ez script developed out of the older South Arabian script during the 1ˢᵗ and 4ᵗʰ century AD, before being standardized in the 5ᵗʰ century. The older South Arabian script had already been in use in the region for a thousand years by that point. South Arabian was the script used by the Kingdom of Dômt, which ruled the same region of Ethiopia and Eritrea between the 10ᵗʰ and 5ᵗʰ centuries BC. According to Ethiopic tradition, the old script was introduced to East Africa by King Zegdur of Sabea, who ruled the region in the 1300s BC.

During the 1ˢᵗ through 4ᵗʰ centuries AD, as Ge'ez was developing, a distinctive form of translating other languages was used, which shifted once Ge'ez was standardized in the 5ᵗʰ century. Some of the texts, such as the Enochian literature is accepted as having been translated earlier than the the standardization of the 5ᵗʰ century because they include words using the older transliteration methodology.

One of the unique collections of texts found in the Orthodox Tewahedo Churches and Beta Israel community is the Ge'ez books of the Maccabees. These books are different from the books of the Maccabees used by the Orthodox churches across Eurasia. Within Greek biblical manuscripts, there are four books named Maccabees, all of which were translated into Syriac, and are part of the Syriac churches’ bible. The Syriac bible also includes a fifth book of Maccabees, which is a translation of part of Josephus's writing from the 1ˢᵗ century AD, and the Syriac tradition churches have maintained additional Maccabean literature, but none of it parallels the Ge'ez Maccabean literature. Medieval Hebrew and Arabic books of Maccabees also exist, however, they do not include any of the same content as the Ge'ez literature.

To further confuse the issue, the Orthodox Tewahedo Church has never used the books of the Maccabees found in other Orthodox bibles, even though the church has had access to them since its inception. The Ge'ez books are read as part of the liturgically of the Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, and not just some forgotten relics discovered in a library. They have always been important to the church, however, they are not Christian texts. The books are clearly Old Testament texts, that are still predicting the coming of a messiah.

Western scholarship regarding the texts is sparse, and they are generally dismissed as Axumite in origin. There are a number of reasons for this, the biggest one being that if they are ancient, they challenge a lot of common assumptions about the origin of Christianity. This bias against the Ge'ez books runs so deep that many Christian scholars refuse to recognize them as Maccabean literature, and simply refer to them as Meqabyan books, a direct transliteration of Maccabean from the Ge'ez script to the Latin script. Nevertheless, the books contain many linguistic relics that support an ancient origin.

Based on linguistics, the content of Ge'ez 1ˢᵗ Maccabees must have existed in 4 forms before finally being translated into Ge'ez. The final translation would have been directly into Classical Ge'ez, not the older South Arabian script, and likely took place sometime between the 5ᵗʰ and 10ᵗʰ centuries. The Ge'ez translator added a curious scribal note in chapter 36 that explains that manna was similar to injera, a flatbread commonly eaten in East Africa. This suggests the book was translated by a Christian, and before the books of Moses were commonly used by the churches in the region. A member of the Beta Israelite community would have been familiar with manna and therefore would have not needed the explanation.

The Ge'ez translator was almost certainly working from a Coptic manuscript as the text is littered with Greek words used incorrectly. The mistakes are commonly found in Coptic translations of the Old Testament books, however, there are additional indicators of a Coptic text, including the worm in chapter 12, where the uncorrected translation would read:

...Gehenna beneath Sheol, where the worm doesn’t sleep and the fires aren’t extinguished.

The worm that does not sleep in the underworld was also recorded in the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra, which shares a common source with the Latin language Vision of Ezra, where it is described as an immortal worm, its size he was not able to reckon. The Greek term rhomos (ῥόμος), Latin vermis, and Ge'ez tɨl (ትል), do all mean worm, however, the original term was almost certainly fnt (ϥⲛⲧ), the Coptic word meaning worm or snake. The Vision of Ezra includes many traditional Egyptian references to the underworld that have been ported into a Christian setting, which strongly supports an Egyptian origin to the Vision.

The giant serpent in the underworld was Ôảpp (㎢𓆙) in ancient Egyptian beliefs, who lived in the far western region of the underworld, near the place the sun set each evening. During the early Iron Age, he became known as Ảpảp (אעבע), a demonic serpent of the underworld in Egyptian beliefs. The Greeks interpreted him as Apophis (Αποφις), an underworld serpent god. In the early Christian era, he was interpreted as Aphoph (Ⲁⲫⲱⲫ) by Coptic Christians, the worm / serpent (ϥⲛⲧ) from the Garden of Eden who was sent to live eternally in the underworld. In this translation, the word worm is corrected to serpent, as that is clearly what the text would have read before the Coptic translation.

The most likely Coptic dialect for this text to have been translated from is Sahidic, which was the common form in Southern Egypt between the 4ᵗʰ and 9ᵗʰ centuries AD. While the dialect cannot be proven conclusively from the Ge'ez translations, the errors found in the transliterated Greek words are more commonly found in the southern dialects of Coptic. Additionally, in chapter 11, there is an unusual spelling is used for Edom, where the translator transliterated the word as ảedomeyas (ኤዶሜያስ) instead of translating it as ảedom (ኤዶም). This cannot be a transliteration of the Bohairic th-udoumea (ϯϩⲩⲇⲟⲩⲙⲉⲁ) and appears to be a transliteration of the Sahidic th-idoumeas (ϯϩⲓⲇⲟⲩⲙⲉⲁⲥ). The term th- (ϯϩ) was Egyptian for land of and would not have been transliterated regardless of the Coptic dialect.

There were several other southern Egyptian dialects of Coptic, however, Sahidic is the most well-attested, as it was spoken in the region where Thebes and Karnak are located. Sahidic and Bohairic Bibles exist which allow for the comparison of the spelling of a rare word like Edom. There was a large Israelite community in southern Egypt at the time, mostly descendants of refugees from the Judean-Roman Wars.

The bulk of the Coptic text appears to have been translated from a Judeo-Aramaic text compiled shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem. This compilation incorporated two older texts, herein dubbed the Book of Meqabis, which spans chapters 1 through 5, and the Book of Mebikyu, which comprises chapter 15. The rest of the text, which spans chapters 6 through 14 and 16 through 36, appears to have originated in the Proto-Johannine community. It draws stories from the lost Oral Torah, called the spoken Orit in Aramaic, as well as the apocalyptic texts associated with Ezra and Daniel, and books later rejected by Rabbinical Jews, like Tobit.

The theology is typical of late second-temple era Judaism, focused on the imminent arrival of the Messiah, and the physical resurrection of the dead saints. The text also includes a series of attacks on the Israelite nobles, accusing them of consistently disappointing God, by abandoning his Orit, ignoring his voice, and not obeying the Nine Commandments. The mixture of old Judaic influences is also found in the Johannine texts adopted by Christians, however, this Proto-Johannine book would have been earlier, before the Proto-Johannine community converted to Christianity late in the 1ˢᵗ century. In Ge'ez 1ˢᵗ Maccabees, the Voice of God was still a feminine being, unlike the later Word of God in the Christian texts, which was masculine.

The text also includes a very specific reference to a false Messiah that the god had given powers to so he would mislead the Judeans. This messiah was also called the devil’s child, although God claims to have made him in his anger. The text claims that he would reveal his power in Capernaum, Samaria, Galilee, Damascus, Syria, Acre, and the villages in the Jordan, which are mostly places Jesus visited in the Gospels. The town of Kpr Nḥủm (כפר נחום), which means Nahum’s Village, was founded by the Hasmonean dynasty late in the 2ⁿᵈ century BC, meaning this could not be some ancient misunderstood reference. The village was significant in early Christianity as the home of Simon Peter, Andrew, and James, three of Jesus’ disciples, and the location of Jesus' earliest converts.

The anti-Israelite nobility sentiments suggest it was the work of John of Gischala, the leader of the Zealots during the First Judean-Roman War