BibleVoice carries the full Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo broader canon. Some of these books have circulated in English for centuries; others have almost never been translated. We believe a Scripture site owes you the truth about its sources, so here is exactly where each book's English text comes from — and where it is a careful working rendering rather than a received translation.
Three honest principles guide every text here: we never present invented text as Scripture; we never reproduce a translation we have no right to use; and where a book is a working rendering, we say so plainly and invite you to compare it with scholarly editions.
The Old and New Testaments are the Berean Standard Bible — a modern, freely-usable translation — with per-chapter audio.
Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the additions to Esther and Daniel, 1–2 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh and the rest come from the King James Apocrypha (public domain).
The classic R. H. Charles translations (1913–1917), long in the public domain.
No clean public-domain English of this book exists (the 1889 Harris edition is a Greek critical text). So this is a faithful working English rendering prepared for BibleVoice from the well-attested narrative, then checked against scholarly editions for accuracy. A study text, not a critical translation.
J. M. Harden's 1920 translation (public domain), cleaned of its scholarly footnote apparatus and segmented into verses for reading. Some OCR artifacts from the 1920 print may remain.
These survive only in Ge'ez and were never translated into English until recent decades. 1 Meqabyan is a working rendering prepared for BibleVoice, cross-checked against the public-domain Curtin chapter 1 and the freely-licensed Wikisource translation. 2 & 3 Meqabyan are the Wikisource community translation from the Ge'ez, released under CC BY-SA, lightly cleaned for reading and used here with attribution.
These church-order books are drawn from public-domain English translations (for the Books of the Covenant, the Cooper & Maclean Testament of Our Lord, 1902), assembled from public-domain sources, cross-checked, and segmented for reading. They are working transcriptions; some retain artifacts of their old printed editions, and the Syriac and Ge'ez traditions diverge in detail.
These working renderings will improve over time. If you spot a mistake, please tell us — use the feedback button on the home page.