I Spent a Year Looking for an Honest Ethiopian Bible. Here Is What Nobody Told Me.

By Ann Larsen
May 28, 2025

I am fifty-two years old, and I have been reading my Bible every morning since I was nineteen.

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For most of those years I never questioned what was in it. Sixty-six books, Genesis through Revelation, the same canon my mother read and her mother before her. It never occurred to me that there might be more.

Then, about eighteen months ago, something changed. Someone at women's group mentioned the Book of Enoch. I had never heard of it. I went home that evening, sat at my kitchen table, and started looking it up on my phone. One link led to another. By midnight I had read things I could not believe had been sitting just outside my Bible my entire life.

There was a whole tradition I had never been told about. An older, larger collection of scripture, preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in an unbroken line since the fourth century, containing more than twenty books that my own Bible did not.

Not commentaries. Not footnotes. Books. Ancient, scriptural books that the early church read and that the writers of the New Testament quoted directly.

I wanted to read them. All of them. The way they were meant to be read.

What I did not know was that this would turn into a year-long search, and that the hardest part would not be understanding the texts — it would be finding an edition I could actually trust.

What Is Actually in the Ethiopian Bible

Before I tell you about the search, let me tell you what is in these books, because this is what kept me going.

The most well-known is the Book of Enoch. It is over a hundred chapters long. It tells the story of the angels who came down from heaven before the flood, names the ones who taught humanity forbidden knowledge, and describes the giants their unions produced. It picks up exactly where Genesis chapter six leaves off — those few strange verses about the Nephilim that I had read my whole life without anyone explaining. The early church read Enoch. The Book of Jude quotes it directly. And yet it sits in almost no Western Bible.

Then there is Jubilees, sometimes called the Little Genesis, which retells the earliest stories of scripture through sacred calendars and angelic revelations.

There is Meqabyan, the three Ethiopian books of the Maccabees, which are entirely different from the Greek versions in the Catholic Bible.

There is a second book of Enoch, an epistle of Clement that the early church passed around for two centuries, and longer versions of texts I thought I already knew.

The deeper I read, the more I felt I had spent thirty years reading half of something. And the half I had been missing was extraordinary.

 
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Why This Was So Hard to Find

Once I knew what I wanted, I assumed it would be simple to buy. It was not.

I spent months looking. I read product listings late at night. I read reviews. And one by one, every edition I found turned out to have a problem.

Some had print so small I could not have read them even with my reading glasses on. Page after page of microscopic text crammed edge to edge, no margins, nowhere for the eye to rest.

Some were single volumes that claimed to be complete but came in at three hundred pages — which I knew was not nearly enough room for everything that was supposed to be inside.

Some were beautifully photographed and heavily marketed, with no way to see what was actually printed inside until after the package arrived at my door.

I started to wonder if an honest edition even existed. I read one-star review after one-star review from people who had been burned exactly the way I was afraid of being burned. People who had waited, paid, and opened a box to find a book they could not use.

It took me a long time to understand why this kept happening. And when I finally understood it, everything made sense.

 

The One Thing Nobody Told Me

Here is what I wish someone had explained at the very beginning.

A Bible with sixty-six books is already an enormous manuscript. The reason your regular Bible has thin paper and small print is that publishers have spent four hundred years figuring out how to physically fit sixty-six books between two covers without producing something you cannot lift.

The Ethiopian tradition is significantly larger than that. Enoch alone adds over a hundred chapters. Jubilees adds fifty more. Meqabyan is three full books. Add everything else, and the manuscript becomes far too large to fit into a single binding at any size a normal person can comfortably read.

So when a publisher tries to cram all of it into one volume, the math forces them into one of two choices.

The first choice is to shrink the print until it is microscopic. The text is technically all there — but the font is so small you would need a magnifying glass to follow a single line. This is the edition that gives you a headache after five minutes.

The second choice is to quietly leave books out. The cover still says complete. The title page still promises the full set. But somewhere inside, entire sections have been removed to save space. The buyer does not find out until the package is already open.

There is no third option in a single volume. The physical size of the manuscript simply does not allow it.

Which means the single most important thing you can check — before you read a single review, before you compare a single price — is whether the edition comes in one volume or two.

A single-volume Ethiopian Bible is breaking one of those two rules. It has to be. The honest answer to the math is two volumes, because two volumes is the only way these books fit at a size you can actually read.

 
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What I Finally Found

After three weeks of searching specifically for a two-volume edition, I found one that did everything I had been looking for.

It came in two physical volumes, so the text had room to breathe. It posted the complete table of contents for both volumes right on the page, before I paid, so I could check exactly which books were included. And it had a flip-through video showing the actual print size, so I knew precisely what would arrive before I ordered.

That last part mattered more than anything. After a year of being unable to see what I was buying until it was too late, here was a seller showing me everything up front.

The set is called the Calixor Ethiopian Bible, and I want to be honest about something, because honesty is exactly what was missing everywhere else I looked.

This edition does not claim to contain "all 88 books." A few of the most obscure texts — including the Book of Giants — have never been commercially translated into English. No honest English edition contains them, because they do not exist in English to print. Instead, Calixor offers a comprehensive, faithfully translated collection of over 80 books, listed openly so you can see exactly what you are getting.

When the package finally arrived, I did not open it on the porch. I carried it upstairs to my reading chair and sat down, because I had a feeling about what I was about to do.

I opened the first volume to the chapter of Enoch I had read about a dozen times online. It was there. On the page. In print I could read without leaning forward or reaching for anything to magnify with. The verses ran in clean columns. The paper felt thick enough to last.

I sat in that chair and read for almost two hours, for the first time in my life, from a Bible I owned.

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    "I sat in that chair and read for almost two hours, for the first time in my life, from a Bible I owned."

      Verified Purchase - Ann Larsen

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    What to Look For Before You Buy

    If you have been on the same search I was on, here is what I learned to check. You can apply this to any edition, anywhere, whether you buy mine or not.

    Be suspicious of "all 88 books" claims. Some of those books have never been translated into English. An honest seller will tell you what is actually included rather than promising a number that sounds impressive.

    A real edition has nothing to hide. It shows you everything before you commit a single dollar.

    verified Two volumes, not one — the clearest sign of an honest edition

    verified A visible table of contents posted before you pay

    verified A flip-through video showing the actual print size

    verified A specific book list, not just a count — a number alone is a red flag

     

    Where I Found Mine

    The two-volume set I am reading from every morning now is the Calixor Ethiopian Bible. You can see the full table of contents for both volumes, watch the flip-through video of the actual print size, and read exactly which books are included — all before you decide anything.

    After a year of searching, that transparency was what finally made me trust it. I am sharing it here because I know there are people reading this who have been on the same long search, who have ordered the wrong version more than once, or who have held off because they did not know who to trust.

    If that is you, I want you to see what I found.

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    Try it risk-free for a full month. If the print, the margins, or the readability do not meet your standards, return it for a full refund.

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