The Orit as Scripture and the Absence of a Talmudic Corpus

Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia, hold as scripture the Orit, an Octateuch of eight books in the classical liturgical language Ge'ez rather than Hebrew, comprising the five books of the Torah together with Joshua, Judges and Ruth. Steven Kaplan's history of the community traces how this scriptural core defines Beta Israel practice on its own terms rather than as an abbreviated version of the wider Jewish canon: no Mishnah, no Talmud and no medieval halachic literature ever reached the Ethiopian highlands, so a legal and interpretive tradition built on that later rabbinic corpus never developed there either. James Quirin's history of the community describes the resulting religious life as its own coherent system rather than as Judaism missing pieces, built instead on the Orit itself, on monastic teaching passed down across generations, and on practices, dietary law, Sabbath observance and ritual purity, that a reader of the Hebrew Bible would recognise even where the specific development differs sharply from rabbinic practice elsewhere. The community's own understanding, as Kaplan records it, treats this absence as a fact of the tradition's isolation rather than as a rejection of the Oral Torah, a claim it never had reason to make, since a body of teaching cannot be rejected by a community that never encountered it in the first place.