Ge’ez 2nd Maccabees

The Orthodox Tewahedo Churches of Ethiopia and Eritrea 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 CE. Axum was the kingdom that ruled Eritrea and northern Ethiopia in the 1st through 9th centuries CE. 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.
One of the unique collections of texts found in the Orthodox Tewahedo Churches and Beta Israel community is the Ge’ez books of 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 CE, and the Syriac tradition churches have maintained additional Maccabean literature, but none of it parallels the Ge’ez Maccabees 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.
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.
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.
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 romos, Latin vermis, and Ge’ez t?l, do all mean “worm,” however, the original term was almost certainly fnt, 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.