In the seventh year of this week [1687] of the jubilee Noah's children began to fight one another, to take captives, and to kill one another, to shed human blood on the earth, to consume blood; to build fortified cities, walls, and towers; men to elevate themselves over peoples, to set up the first kingdoms; to go to war -- people against people, nations against nations, city against city; and everyone to do evil, to acquire weapons, and to teach warfare to their sons. City began to capture city and to sell male and female slaves.
Jubilees (also known as Lesser Genesis, Leptogenesis, or the Book of Division) is canonical scripture for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The only complete copies of Jubilees are available in Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic), here used with permission by the Bible Society of Ethiopia.
The following is a stained glass window depicting Noah by Endre Odon Hevezi and Gyula Bajo from 1965 for the Debre Libanos Monastery, Oromia, Ethiopia:
Photo by Timothy A. Gonsalves, hosted by Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Stained glass is not just highly decorative, it’s a medium which has been used to express important religious messages for centuries. Literacy was not widespread in the medieval and Renaissance periods and the Church used stained glass and other artworks to teach the central beliefs of Christianity. In Gothic churches, the windows were filled with extensive narrative scenes in stained glass — like huge and colorful picture storybooks — in which worshipers could ‘read’ the stories of Christ and the saints and learn what was required for their religious salvation. (Source: Victoria and Albert Museum )
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