Singing the Psalms is a beloved activity in all Christian worship—so much so that, in many traditions, the canonical one hundred fifty seem insufficient and have to be supplemented with other biblical texts, known as odes or canticles. Some canticles are taken straight from the Bible: the Song of Moses (Exodus 15) and the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) are especially popular. But some canticles have a more complex relationship to the canon, like the songs of the Three Hebrew Children, which are from chapter 3 of the Greek versions of the Book of Daniel, or the “Glory to God in the Highest,” which is an expansion of Luke 2:14. Before printing was invented in the fifteenth century, it was common for handwritten copies of the Psalter to include an appendix of canticles. The number of canticles varies, however, in different manuscripts and in different liturgical traditions: from only four in the East Syrian rite to over seventy in the Mozarabic rite. Encyclopedic lists were published by James Mearns in The Canticles of the Christian Church (Cambridge University Press, 1914).

Ethiopian manuscripts, whether biblical or liturgical, typically have fifteen canticles. These are the canticles mentioned in the subtitle, and the putative subject of this book. Yet nowhere in the book is there a straightforward list of all fifteen, in order, with the corresponding chapter and verse numbers. Readers who know only the modern Bible, therefore, are sure to be confused. But the thirteen chapters of this book, written by an assortment of American, European, and Ethiopian authors, are not tightly focused on the canticles anyway. They also vary quite a bit in quality, subject matter, and presumed audience. It would be more accurate to say that this book is about the Ethiopian traditions associated with the Psalms, broadly considered, including the textual transmission, theology, liturgical usage, musical performance, and the supplementary material that is usually found in Ethiopian Psalm manuscripts: the fifteen canticles, an interpolated recension of the Song of Songs, and several collections of hymns about the Virgin Mary.

Most informative is chapter 2, written by Steve Delamarter: a detailed explanation of the codicology of Psalm manuscripts, with pictures, definitions, and explanations. Anyone interested in how historians study manuscripts could learn a lot here. Chapter 4, by Delamarter and some of his students, is about variant readings in biblical and liturgical manuscripts; Loren T. Stuckenbruck's chapter 10 is on Psalm quotations in the Book of Enoch. Both will be most useful to professional Bible scholars. Most of the other chapters offer a lot of hard-to-find information that would be appreciated by anyone interested in learning about Ethiopian Christianity. Five chapters focus on theological topics: Ralph Lee introduces the hymn repertoire, traditionally ascribed to an elusive Saint Yared in chapter 1 and a little-known commentary on the canticles in chapter 5. Chapters 6, 7, and 8, by Verena Böll, Ralph Lee, and Desta Heliso respectively, discuss the extensive (but little known outside Ethiopia) Marian hymnody. The theology of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is little understood in western countries. Springing from the one-nature Christology endorsed by the ecumenical council of Ephesus (431), it stands on a different branch of the Christian vine than the Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox theologies rooted in the two-nature Christology that was defined at the ecumenical council of Chalcedon (451). And though the Bible and other foundational texts were translated from Greek, Ethiopian theology and liturgy found expression in Geʿez, a South Semitic language related to Arabic.

Three more chapters by Ethiopian authors present viewpoints from within the Ethiopian church. In chapter 9, Baye Yimam describes some of the ways that the fifteen canticles are used in private prayer, liturgical song, and “Magical Practice,” such as for healing, divination, and protection from evil. Chapter 11, written by Mersha Alehegne, is a basic introduction to the liturgical chant tradition. Chapter 12, also by Mersha, tells how the fifteen canticles are distributed among the hours of the liturgical day and the seasons of the liturgical year.

The weakest sections, unfortunately, are those written by the editor, the late Thomas C. Oden, to whom the book is dedicated. It may be true that the broad repertory of Ethiopian hymnody (not just the fifteen canticles) constitutes, as in the title of his introduction, “The Earliest Written Songs of Sub-Saharan Africa.” But there are Sufi hymns in the Arabic manuscripts in Timbuktu that are comparable in age to the Ethiopian chant manuscripts. The introduction gets off to an interesting start by naming “Five Vectors of Active Interest in the Ancient Songs of Africa,” namely (1) the “growing accessibility” of the manuscripts, (2) the “rare antiquity of written sources in sub-Saharan Africa,” (3) the “timeliness” (that is, recent growth) of academic “interdisciplinary scholarship” in Ethiopian Studies, (4) “the history of sub-Saharan music,” and (5) “the aversion of critical historians to liturgy as a plausible subject of inquiry.” But on this basis the book falls short of what it could have been, partly because it is not interdisciplinary enough: no experts in liturgiology or African music were involved.

No historian of Christian liturgy would write things like “Mark's Gospel became the parent liturgy from which the core of all other Egyptian and Ethiopian liturgies were derived” (192). Books like Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship (Oxford University Press: 2002) show that there is such a thing as critical historical study of liturgy. Particularly misleading are Oden's attempts to equate Ethiopian music with “the African prehistory of jazz,” which he thinks has seen “little scholarly inquiry” (57). But jazz is not African music. Although it is now performed on every continent, jazz is American in origin—a twentieth-century synthesis of (West) African, European, Caribbean, Hispanic, and even Jewish elements. Relationships between African and African-American music have been heavily investigated since the 1960s, and—since Africa is as diverse a continent as Europe or Asia—it is unhelpful to simply equate “Ethiopian” with “African” with jazz.

On the whole, though, the book can serve as an interesting introduction to Ethiopian Christianity for both academics and casual readers.