The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds the broadest biblical canon in Christianity, commonly counted at eighty one books. Alongside the books familiar to other churches it includes works that circulated widely in the ancient Mediterranean world but were excluded from every other church's canon, among them the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, both preserved in full only in Ge'ez translation. Their survival here, when the Aramaic and Hebrew originals were largely lost, has made the Ethiopian textual tradition a primary source for scholars of Second Temple Jewish literature.
Worship follows the Divine Liturgy of Saint Mark in its Ge'ez recension, chanted rather than spoken. The chant tradition, called zema, is credited by the church to Saint Yared, a sixth century composer who is said to have devised its three musical modes and its notation of prosodic signs written above the liturgical text.
Zema is taught orally over years at church schools called qene bet, alongside qene, an improvised and deliberately riddling form of Ge'ez poetry composed for the liturgy. Services are accompanied by the sistrum, drum and prayer staff, and by the characteristic swaying dance step of the debtera, the church's cantors and scholars.
Ethiopian church architecture is equally distinct, built traditionally in round or octagonal plan with a threefold division into outer ambulatory, nave and an innermost sanctuary, the qidist qidusan, that only clergy may enter. The eleven or so churches at Lalibela, cut downward into volcanic rock in the twelfth or thirteenth century, are the most famous examples and remain active pilgrimage sites, alongside Aksum's Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, which the church holds to house the Ark of the Covenant.