The Short Version
- Narrator: Steve Cook draws the only unqualified praise on the page, and even the one-star complaints call the reading fine before turning to the file structure.
- Subjects: the deuterocanonical books, First Enoch, Jubilees, second temple Jewish literature
- Tone: Steady, liturgical, best taken in short sittings
- Bottom line: An enormous amount of scripture for the money, hobbled by a navigation problem the publisher openly admits.
Twenty-six hours of apocryphal scripture in a single file is either the bargain of the religion category or an act of organizational cruelty, and this audiobook manages to be both at once. Five Talents Audio has bundled The Apocrypha, The Book of I Enoch and The Book of Jubilees into one download read by Steve Cook, and the value proposition is obvious before you press play. What is less obvious, and what the reviews spend nearly all their energy on, is that finding any particular book inside those twenty-six hours is close to impossible. The publisher knows. The description says so.
First, the Big Picture
Consider what is actually here. The deuterocanonical books, which most Protestant Bibles leave out and Catholic and Orthodox canons keep, sit alongside two works that circulated widely in the same period and then fell outside every major canon. These are the writings that occupy the gap between the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, and hearing them read straight through gives you something no commentary can: the texture of a religious literature that was ordinary reading for a very long time and then quietly disappeared from most pews.
Specificity is what makes the worst response here stick. A one-star from February 2019 goes beyond the missing chapter titles and reports a content error: the segment labeled Chapter 172 is supposed to be the eleventh chapter of Second Maccabees and instead repeats the eleventh chapter of First Maccabees. That response also found the translation occasionally strange, and promised to revise the rating if the file were corrected. Nothing on the record indicates it ever was. For a listener using this for study rather than devotion, a duplicated chapter is a serious defect.
Why Apocrypha Audio Series: All-in-One Audiobook Works as an Audiobook
The voice is the reason this record has any defenders at all. A five-star from July 2018 called it an absolutely incredible voice, said it was better than watching television, and credited the reading with making the material come alive. That is real praise for a text that can easily flatten into recitation, and the description leans on the same asset, billing Cook as a best-selling narrator brought in to carry manuscripts that have been read for millennia. On a project this long, a reader who can hold a listener through genealogies and calendar arithmetic is doing the hardest work in the building.
Economics also favor it. Twenty-six hours for a single credit is unusual, and the description promises an accompanying PDF delivered into your library alongside the audio, which for a text collection of this kind is more than a courtesy. Anyone who has tried to assemble the same material from separate recordings knows how quickly the cost and the translation inconsistencies mount. Bundled this way, the three collections share one voice and one register, and that consistency is worth something when you are moving from one collection into the next in a single sitting. I would rather have one reader I can settle into for twenty-six hours than three I have to keep readjusting to.
A Few Reservations
Navigation is the defining problem, and it is not a matter of taste. A four-star from July 2018 reduced its entire review to one line about the difficulty of navigating with only numbers instead of titles and book names, and that four stars is the highest grade any of the complaints carries. Twenty-six hours of undifferentiated numbered chapters means that locating any individual book, or any given chapter within one, requires either memorizing timestamps or scrubbing blindly through the file.
Five Talents Audio does not dispute it. The description carries an explicit disclaimer acknowledging that chapter headings do not match, attributes the cause to circumstances beyond its control, and directs buyers to a landing page where they can follow along. That is an unusually candid admission, and it is also a workaround rather than a fix, since consulting a web page while listening defeats much of the point of the format. A one-star from August 2020 put the balance exactly right, describing a fine narrator alongside a file that is impossibly difficult to navigate without a table of contents.
The star badge needs interpreting too. The average shown is 3.7 across eight ratings, and eight whole-star votes cannot produce that figure: the nearest reachable averages are 3.6 and 3.8. More usefully, the five written responses on the page run five, four, three-way down to a pair of single stars, and their own average sits well under three. Anyone reading 3.7 as a mild endorsement is reading it more generously than the visible evidence supports.
Should You Listen to Apocrypha Audio Series: All-in-One Audiobook?
Buyers should be certain which edition they want before committing. A two-star from February 2026 reported acquiring this one by accident, already owning the same texts in a different edition, and disliking the reading enough to be rationing further attempts in order to justify the purchase. Since these are ancient works available in multiple translations and multiple recordings, checking whose rendering you are buying matters more here than with a modern book, and the record credits a modern name in the author field over texts written two millennia earlier.
Choose this if you want continuous devotional or background listening across a large body of early Jewish literature and are content to let it play in order. Avoid it if you need to find passages, cross-reference chapters, or teach from the recording, because the file structure will fight you the entire time. The reading is not the risk here. The packaging is.
Which texts are included in this all-in-one audiobook?
Three collections: The Apocrypha, meaning the deuterocanonical books retained in Catholic and Orthodox canons, plus First Enoch and Jubilees. Together these run twenty-six hours under a single credit, all read by one narrator, which gives the set a consistency separately purchased recordings rarely have.
Does a supporting document ship with the audiobook?
The description states that an accompanying PDF becomes available in your library alongside the audio when you buy the title. Given how the chapters are labeled, that document is closer to a necessity than a bonus, and it is worth confirming that it downloaded before you start working through the collection.
