Egziabher, Orit, and a Canon of Eighty-One Books

Egziabher, the Ge'ez name for God, begins with this letter in its sixth order, and so does Orit, the name of the opening books of the Ethiopian Old Testament. The first is a compound whose leading element is the ordinary word for lord. The second is a borrowing that has travelled a long way, going back through Greek to the Hebrew torah, and in Ethiopian use it names not the five books of Moses alone but the eight, the Pentateuch together with Joshua, Judges and Ruth, which the tradition treats as one unit.

That is a small clear example of how the Ethiopian canon differs from the canons around it. It counts eighty-one books, it groups them differently, and it includes works no other church received, Enoch and Jubilees among them. Lists of the eighty-one differ from one another in detail, which is itself worth recording: the number is traditional and stable while the contents behind it are not entirely fixed, and an account that gives one list as the list is smoothing over a real variation.

None of this is a variant reading of a familiar canon. It is a separate line of transmission running through Ge'ez, out of a Greek text into a language and a script that then went on working for fifteen centuries without much reference to what Europe was doing. The letter that opens the name of God also opens the name of the first thing in the book.