Wengel, and a Bible Translated From Greek

Wengel, the Ge'ez word for a gospel, begins with this letter, and it is a borrowing: it comes from the Greek euangelion, and it arrived with the text it names. The Ge'ez Bible was translated from Greek, not from Hebrew or Syriac, and the translation belongs to the Aksumite period, beginning in the fourth or fifth century, in the generations after the kingdom adopted Christianity.

Ethiopian tradition credits a large part of that work to the Nine Saints, a group of monks who arrived from the Roman east in the late fifth century and who are also credited with the founding of monasteries that still exist. Scholarship treats the tradition with care: the translation was plainly the work of more than one hand and more than one generation, and the evidence for who did what is thin. The atlas records the tradition as tradition and the Greek source of the text as the better established fact.

A stratum of Greek Christian vocabulary entered Ge'ez at the same time and stayed. Wengel is one item of it, and the names of the church's offices and books carry more. That layer sits on top of an inherited Semitic vocabulary, so a Ge'ez sentence about the liturgy can draw on two quite different histories in the same clause.