The Dead Sea Scrolls preserved fifteen copies of a book most Christians have never heard of. The Ethiopian church never stopped reading it.

The Book of Jubilees opens on Sinai — but not the Sinai you know. An angel arrives. Not to deliver the Ten Commandments. To dictate something older: the complete history of creation, organized according to a fifty-year jubilee cycle, grounded in a 364-day solar calendar written on heavenly tablets before the world began.

Fifteen Hebrew manuscripts were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls — more copies than most books of the Hebrew Bible. The Qumran community cited Jubilees by name as canonical authority and broke with the Jerusalem Temple over the calendar it mandates. Paul's most puzzling claim in Galatians — that the Law was given through angels — makes complete sense once you know this book. So does the Hebrews Melchizedek Christology. So does the jubilee announcement of Luke 4. And so does the Ethiopian church's solar calendar, its fifty-five-day Lent, and its twelve annual feasts for each archangel.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church never lost Jubilees. It reads it as the thirteenth book of its Old Testament — the eternal Law, the angelic governance of nations, the jubilee structure of history, the solar calendar as divine revelation. These are the foundations of the world that produced both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, preserved in Ge'ez because one church in the mountains of East Africa never broke the chain.

Jubilees and Sacred Time is Volume 3 of The Bible of the Ethiopians — the first comprehensive English-language series on the world's largest Christian Bible. Reading the New Testament without Jubilees is like reading Paul without understanding the Torah.

The angel told Moses to write from the beginning of creation. The Ethiopian church kept what Moses wrote. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed it was real.

It is time to read it.

Mitchell S. Nicholson

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