Woe to her on the Day of Judgment, and to her gods whom she loves and embraces! With them she shall go down into Sheol, to the lowest depth, where the worm does not sleep and the fire is not quenched.
1 Meqabyan (also known as 1 Ethiopian Maccabees and 1 Ethiopic Maccabees) is canonical scripture for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. While “Meqabyan” is the Ge’ez equivalent of “Maccabees,” the content is completely different from 1 Maccabees. The only complete copies of 1 Meqabyan are available in Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic), here used with permission by the Bible Society of Ethiopia.
The translation into English was provided by Haileyesus Woldemariam (UBS).
The Greek, Hebrew, and Ge’ez that is translated as “fire is never quenched” in English is translated in Shor as “wildfire is never quenched.” Andrei S. Desnitsky explains (in: The Bible Translator 2018, p. 233ff. ): “Hell is described as a place where ‘the fire is never quenched.’ This is easy to render in probably any language but the translators into Shor (a Turkic language spoken in south-western Siberia) noticed that the direct rendering creates a rather positive image: what a nice place it must be, warm and full of light! This connotation disappeared as soon as they replaced the word ot (fire, light) with ört (wildfire).”
The Hebrew, Latin, Ge’ez and Greek that is often translated in English as “Hades” or “Sheol” is translated in the German Luther Bible 2017 (and pre-1912) as Totenreich or “realm (or: kingdom) of the dead” in these verses. (Source: Jost Zetzsche)
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