The Women Your Bible Was Never Allowed to Mention

I almost didn’t write this, because the first time someone showed me the passage, I assumed it was a myth. A legend that got dressed up over the centuries. Then I learned it had never actually left the Bible — not all of them. It was still sitting inside one of the oldest complete Bibles on earth, exactly where it had always been. And once I read what it said about the women, I couldn’t unsee it.

Most of us grew up with 66 books. We were told that was the Bible — the whole thing, cover to cover. What almost nobody mentions is that the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible contains 81 books, and has for over a thousand years. Inside those extra pages is a text the early church openly quoted, that the Dead Sea Scrolls preserved in fragments, and that Jude — yes, the Jude in your New Testament — quotes directly.

It’s called the Book of Enoch. And according to its pages, something walked the earth before the Flood that the surviving Scriptures only hint at.

It starts with a sentence you’ve read a hundred times

Genesis 6 says it almost in passing: “the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took as wives whomever they chose.” Two verses. Then it moves on, as if nothing happened.

The Book of Enoch does not move on. It says those “sons of God” were the Watchers — and it names them. It says they taught humanity things they were never meant to know. And it describes what became of the women they took, and the curse that fell on the world because of it.

According to Enoch, the corruption grew so total that the Flood wasn’t punishment for the people only — it was a cleansing of what the Watchers had unleashed.

Here’s the detail that stopped me cold. The text describes voices on the water. Beautiful, luring, deadly. Long before Greek sailors ever feared sirens on the rocks, an older book had already described women whose curse turned them into something that sang men to their ruin.

So why was it cut?

The honest answer is: it’s complicated, and nobody hands it to you in Sunday school. Around the 4th century, as church leaders settled which books would be “canon” for the Western church, Enoch didn’t make the final list. Different regions, different councils, different decisions.

But here’s what almost no one tells you: Ethiopia never removed it. Cut off from those councils, the Ethiopian church kept the older, fuller collection — 81 books — intact. So while the West was left with 66, an entire ancient Christian tradition kept reading the very pages the rest of us were told to forget.

The problem: Enoch is almost impossible to read alone

I tried. I downloaded a free translation and lasted about four pages. It’s dense, it’s strange, the names blur together, and without context you have no idea what’s symbolic, what’s history, and what connects back to the Bible you already know. Most people quit by chapter three — not because they don’t care, but because no one ever built them a map.

That’s the gap. The story is gripping. The text is brutal to navigate. And there was never a guided way to actually study it — until a small team built one.

● This week’s restock is limited

The Complete Ethiopian Bible
52-Week Workbook for Adults

A full year of guided study through the books the West left out — Enoch, the Watchers, the Flood, and the texts Ethiopia kept for 1,600 years.

★★★★★

Rated 4.9 / 5 by 2,000+ readers

• One book, one week — never feel lost or behind
• Plain-English context for every strange passage
• Reflection prompts that tie it back to your Bible
• No theology degree required — built for everyday readers
• Faith-centered and reverent, never sensational

Start Week 1 Today →

Ships worldwide · 100% money-back guarantee

Why now

The questions you have about these pages aren’t going away. The Watchers, the cursed women, the books that were left out — they’re the kind of thing that, once you’ve heard it, you can’t quite put down. The only real choice is whether you keep wondering, or you finally sit down and study it for yourself, the right way, one week at a time.

The workbook does exactly that. It takes the most fascinating, most argued-about texts in Christian history and turns them into a calm, guided, year-long journey — so you don’t quit at chapter three, and you don’t have to take anyone’s word for what it says. You read it yourself.