Which editions or manuscripts contain the Ethiopic Book of Enoch and Jubilees, and where can scholarly critical editions be accessed?
Executive summary
The Ethiopic (Geʽez) textual tradition is the chief locus for the surviving complete Book of Enoch and for many witnesses of Jubilees, preserved in multiple manuscript families and edited in a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical editions such as Dillmann (1851/1859) and R. H. Charles ; modern scholarship continues to incorporate newly discovered Ethiopian witnesses and Qumran fragments into critical apparatuses [1] [2] [3] [4]. Several of these foundational editions are available in major research libraries and some—most notably Charles’s 1906 Ethiopic edition—are accessible online via digitized repositories [1] [5] [2].
1. The manuscript landscape: Kebran (K-9), British Museum Orient 485, EMML and other Geʽez witnesses
The most cited complete medieval witnesses to 1 (Ethiopic) Enoch include Kebran 9 (often abbreviated K‑9), dated to the late 14th–15th century, British Museum/Orient 485 (a 16th‑century manuscript which also contains Jubilees), Abbadianus 55, and Ethiopian Monastic Microfilm Library copies such as EMML 2080; scholarship reports roughly 80 Ethiopian manuscripts for Enoch and a living corpus of further copies in Ethiopian monasteries and churches [2] [6] [3]. Ted Erho and Loren Stuckenbruck emphasize that many important manuscripts remain in Ethiopia and call for further digitization, underlining that Western collections represent only a portion of the textual tradition [3].
2. How editors grouped and used those manuscripts: Dillmann, Laurence, Fleming, Charles
The editio princeps and subsequent critical editions were built on progressively larger corpora: Richard Laurence produced an early English translation based on the Bodleian/Ethiopic manuscript in the 1820s, August Dillmann issued the first critical edition for Enoch and for Jubilees (Dillmann’s Liber Jubilaeorum, 1859), Fleming and others extended manuscript sampling, and Robert Henry Charles’s landmark critical edition collated more than twenty Geʽez manuscripts and organized them into familial groupings—Charles even proposed two Geʽez manuscript families (α and β) to account for textual variation [1] [2] [7]. These nineteenth‑century editors remain the textual bedrock for later scholars even as more witnesses surface [2] [8].
3. Jubilees: Ethiopic transmission and critical work
Jubilees is likewise preserved primarily in Ethiopic copies for its complete form, with Dillmann’s 1859 edition marking the editio princeps for the Geʽez text and modern treatments tracing its manuscript tradition in Ethiopia and its echoes in Qumran finds; recent overviews (and VanderKam’s manuscript lists) document multiple Ethiopian witnesses and ongoing textual fluidity as newly identified exemplars are published [8] [7] [4]. The Bulletin of SOAS special studies note that despite noteworthy critical editions in recent decades, the textual state remains in flux because new Ethiopic exemplars continue to be identified and integrated [8].
4. Ancient antecedents and Qumran fragments that inform critical editions
While the full books survive in Geʽez, important earlier fragments—Aramaic and Hebrew pieces of Enoch and Jubilees—were recovered at Qumran and have been folded into modern critical scholarship to reconstruct earlier stages of the texts; this synergy between Dead Sea Scroll fragments and Ethiopic manuscripts is a recurrent theme in modern critical studies [4] [9]. Editions that claim critical status thus rely on both the Geʽez manuscript tradition and these older language witnesses where available [9] [4].
5. Where to access scholarly critical editions and recent scholarship
Foundational printed critical editions are held in major research libraries and many are digitized: R. H. Charles’s 1906 Ethiopic edition is freely viewable via Internet Archive (and cited by multiple manuscript catalogues) while nineteenth‑century editions by Dillmann and Laurence are available in academic collections; contemporary scholarly discussion and new manuscript reports appear in journals (e.g., Bulletin of SOAS, Cambridge Core) and specialist monographs such as the Hermeneia commentary on 1 Enoch [5] [2] [8] [4]. Recent bibliographic and manuscript surveys urge researchers to consult Ethiopian repositories and digitized microfilm collections (EMML) as well as curated Western holdings, because significant witnesses remain in Ethiopian churches and monasteries and are only gradually entering modern critical editions [3] [8].