The Letter that Kills

Hidden in the rugged highlands of Ethiopia is a nearly two-thousand-year-old expression of an indigenous Afro-Semitic Christianity, the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahǝdo1 Church. Surrounded by Islam on all sides, the medieval Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and its Täwahǝdo faith were effectively cut off from the rest of the known world for more than 1200 years. Despite this, it is known for preserving a strikingly vivid manifestation of biblical Christianity, a stark Afro-Asiatic spirituality that one might imagine when reading the Scriptures. The Letter that Kills takes its cue from an 18th-century Ethiopian scholar who, when aspiring to correct the Ethiopian biblical commentary, exclaimed, ＂the text is defective!＂ This research addresses the seemingly gray area of Biblical hermeneutics found between the Scriptural text and its interpretation. Its scope pertains to the field of biblical studies, focusing on the details of both the text and interpretation of one of the most important ancient witnesses to the Bible, broadly the Gǝ’ǝz version and specifically the Gǝ’ǝz text of Genesis.