The complete Book of Enoch exists today because it was preserved in Ge'ez — the ancient Semitic language of the Ethiopian highlands, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church for nearly two thousand years.
Ge'ez (also called Ethiopic) is a South Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew but distinct from both. It developed a unique alphabet — the Ethiopic script — that runs left to right and represents syllables rather than individual consonants. The script is still used today for Amharic and Tigrinya, the modern languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The ancient manuscripts written in Ge'ez are among the most extraordinary documents in the world. Ethiopian monasteries, particularly those on islands in Lake Tana and in the highlands of Tigray, preserved manuscripts dating back a thousand years and more. These monasteries were the libraries of an entire civilization — the repositories of theology, history, science, and sacred text going back to the earliest centuries of the church.
When James Bruce arrived in Ethiopia in 1773 and brought three copies of the Book of Enoch back to Europe, he was carrying texts that had been preserved for more than a millennium in these monasteries. When Richard Laurence made the first modern translation of Enoch into English in 1821, he was working from those same manuscripts.
The survival of the Book of Enoch is a story about the guardianship of the Ethiopian church — a community that understood what they had and kept it safe while the rest of the world forgot.