The Ge'ez corpus preserves books the rest of the world lost. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon, the largest of any Christian church, includes the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees complete only in Ge'ez, works quoted in antiquity and otherwise surviving in fragments. When European scholarship recovered Enoch from Ethiopian manuscripts in the eighteenth century, an entire stratum of Second Temple Jewish literature reopened. Beside the biblical books stand the liturgical treasures, above all the Deggua, the vast antiphonary of chant attributed to the sixth century St Yared, whose three modes still order the church's singing, together with anaphoras, homiliaries and the Miracles of Mary. Ge'ez remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches and of the Ethiopian Catholic Church, chanted daily by debteras, the trained cantors who carry the musical tradition.
The Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia, likewise kept their scriptures and prayers in Ge'ez rather than Hebrew, a unique case of a Jewish community with an entirely non Hebrew liturgical language. Manuscript production in Ge'ez continued into the twentieth century, and church schools still teach boys and girls to read it, keeping a classical language alive as a living register of prayer.