Jewish Practices in the Ethiopian Church

This led him to study the Ethiopian Church, and he found that it also practised features of the Mosaic Law - food laws and laws of cleanliness and purification, for example. He could see also resemblances between their calendar of feasts and the Jewish feasts, and between the robes of their priests and the high priest's robes described in Exodus. He quotes one authority as describing "the whole cast of religious expression in Ethiopia as antique and ceremonial and imbued with an undercurrent of Judaic practice";4 and another as saying that the Abyssinian (Ethiopian) churches, unlike those of any other part of Christianity, contain the threefold division of the temple of Solomon.5

In that January of 1990 Hancock attended the Timkat ceremony in another ancient Ethiopian city, Gondar. He describes the ceremony as having significant Biblical elements: priests playing primitive musical instruments, the people crying ellel (cp. the Hebrew haliel, 'praise'), the priests dandng as did David, the bringing of an ark out of the third, or holiest, compartment of the church, separated from the rest of the church by a veil behind which only priests could go.

Again he quotes Ullendorf, whose words we too quote:

"It is clear that these and other traditions, in particular that of the Ark of the Covenant at Axum, must have been an integral part of the Abyssinian national heritage long before the introduction of Christianity in the fourth century; for it would be inconceivable that a people recently converted from paganism to Christianity (not by a Christian Jew but by the Syrian missionary Frumentius) should thereafter have begun to boast of Jewish descent and to insist on Israelite connections, customs and institutions".6

Each Ethiopian church carries out the same ceremonies with a replica of the ark on Timkat, and this convinced Hancock that the original ark was somewhere in Ethiopia. His conclusion, after consulting various authorities, was that it was at Axum, as described earlier in the article.

This conclusion, that the practices of Judaism in their original Old Testament form are preserved in Ethiopia, is a very interesting one. It must be remembered that modern Judaism originates with rabbis after the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70. The removal of their central place of worship, and banishment from Judea (though not initially from Galilee), led to considerable changes in the practices of worship by way of adaptation to the new situation. Does this mean, however, that the ark of the covenant was actually taken to Ethiopia? This is the question we must now consider.

Next section: Jews in Egypt