Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

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The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is a set of pseudepigraphal deathbed speeches, complete only in Greek, in which each of the twelve sons of Jacob, on the point of death, gathers his children and speaks a final time. The form is borrowed from Genesis, where the dying Jacob blesses his sons; here the device is expanded so that each patriarch reviews his own life, confesses the sin that marked it, and turns the confession into instruction for those who will outlive him. Reuben warns against the lust that undid him; Simeon against envy; Joseph, predictably, is held up as the model of chastity and endurance under wrong.

Rembrandt, “Jacob Blessing the Children of Joseph” (1656), Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel — the Genesis deathbed-blessing scene whose form the Testaments expand into twelve speeches. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The dying father’s farewell

The scene each testament stages is the oldest authority a family knows: the bed of a dying elder, the children summoned, the last words spoken into the silence before they are spoken no more. Jacob himself supplies the template. In the closing chapters of Genesis he calls his sons together to tell them, in his phrase, what shall befall them in the last days, and assigns each a destiny in a single charged line — Reuben unstable as water, Judah a lion’s whelp, Joseph a fruitful bough. The Testaments take that compressed scene and let each son hold it in turn, no longer the recipient of a blessing but the speaker of his own, expanded from a verse into a discourse. The deathbed testament is a recognized form across the literature of the Second Temple period: a patriarch, at the edge of death, becomes a mouth through which both moral counsel and the shape of the future can be uttered with the weight that only a founder’s last breath can carry. The same device animates the Assumption of Moses, where Moses delivers his charge to Joshua, and stands behind the farewell discourses of the canonical narratives.

What distinguishes this collection is its symmetry. Twelve sons, twelve speeches, each built to the same three-beat measure. First the patriarch narrates his life, lingering on the act that defined him. Then he names the vice to be shunned or the virtue to be pursued, drawing the lesson directly out of his own remembered conduct. Last he lifts his eyes from the household to the nation and its end, foretelling what will come upon his descendants. The pattern is relentless and deliberate, and it makes the work less an anthology than a single composition wearing twelve faces.

A taxonomy of the passions

Read across, the speeches assemble something close to a moral anatomy of the soul. Each brother carries one besetting condition, and the set is arranged so that the failings and excellences of human life are cataloged through the lives that exemplify them. Reuben, who lay with his father’s concubine Bilhah, speaks of fornication and the wandering of the eyes. Simeon, who plotted against the favored Joseph, dissects envy. Levi discourses on the priesthood and on the pride that shadows the priestly office. Judah, the kingly son, owns to courage but also to the love of money and to the fornication that wine loosens in a man, and warns his sons against drink with the unease of one who knows its work. Issachar praises singleness of heart, the undivided simplicity he made his life; Zebulun, compassion and mercy; Dan confesses anger and the lie that anger breeds; Naphtali teaches the order of nature and the goodness written into it; Gad anatomizes hatred; Asher sets out the two faces a person turns toward good and evil, the doubleness he calls a warning. Joseph, tempted by his master’s wife and wronged by his brothers, becomes the long exemplar of chastity and of patience under injury. Benjamin, the youngest, closes the series on the pure mind that sees all things rightly because it is itself unmixed.

Underlying the whole catalog is a dualism the work returns to again and again. Two inclinations contend for the human person: a spirit of truth against a spirit of deceit, the law of the Lord against the law of Beliar, a way of light against a way of darkness. The architecture is austere and total. Each disposition, virtue or passion, is an indwelling spirit, and the moral life is the long arbitration between two opposed companies of them. This ethical dualism — the doctrine of the two spirits set within each person — is among the features that bind the Testaments to the wider world of Second Temple Judaism, where the same two-ways scheme structures the Community Rule of the Dead Sea sect and surfaces across the apocrypha and the early Christian catechesis.

From ethics to the end

The moral counsel never stays domestic. In each testament the patriarch’s gaze travels outward and forward, and the household lesson opens into prophecy. The recurring forecast is of Israel’s coming apostasy, the exile that punishes it, and the restoration promised beyond it — the rhythm of the prophetic books drawn into the family chamber. This twinning of ethics and apocalypse is what gives the collection its character: the moral counsel is grounded not in abstract law but in a remembered failure, and the horizon is always the end toward which the whole history is held to be moving. The same forward pressure runs through the kindred literature of the age, from the Book of Enoch to the Book of Jubilees, and gives the Testaments their place among the texts in which eschatology and conduct are bound into a single argument.

At the center of the prophetic passages stands a striking double expectation. Several testaments look for a saviour to arise not from one line but from two: from Levi, the priestly tribe, and from Judah, the royal one. The hope of an anointed deliverer is split between altar and throne, priest and king, and the sons are charged to honor both Levi and Judah because from them the salvation of Israel is to come. This pairing of a priestly and a kingly figure is one of the work’s most discussed motifs, for the same double messianism appears among the Dead Sea writings, where the community awaited an anointed of Aaron alongside an anointed of Israel. Whether the Testaments inherited that expectation or contributed to it is part of the larger puzzle of where the book belongs.

Greek text, Latin afterlife

Where the work comes from is among the more stubborn questions in the study of this literature, and its transmission is bound up with the question. The text survives complete only in Greek, carried in a family of medieval manuscripts — one tenth-century copy preserved at Mount Athos contains two long insertions in the Testament of Levi that have proved central to the debate. Later Armenian and Slavonic versions descend from the Greek. The work’s career in the Latin West began with a single act of acquisition. The English bishop Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln learned of a Greek copy in the East through John of Basingstoke, who had seen it in Athens, and obtained the manuscript — now held at Cambridge — and completed a Latin translation in 1242 with the help of a Greek member of his household. Grosseteste took the book for exactly what it presented itself to be: the genuine last words of the sons of Jacob, and therefore a pre-Christian Jewish prophecy of Christ, hidden, he charged, by Jews unwilling to face the saviour foretold in their own fathers’ mouths. His Latin version spread quickly and was rendered into the vernaculars, read across the medieval West as authentic patriarchal prophecy. The reading would not survive scholarly scrutiny, but the book it carried into European hands did.

Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (c. 1175–1253), who obtained the Greek manuscript and completed his Latin translation in 1242 (1896 engraving). Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The authorship question

The Christian passages in the Testaments are unmistakable. The dispute is over what they sit upon. The modern argument was opened in the nineteenth century, when Friedrich Schnapp set out to disentangle the work’s layers, separating the plainly Christian material from what he took to be two underlying Jewish sources. The position was developed into its classic form by R. H. Charles, who held that the core is a Jewish composition of roughly the second century BCE — he read its shifting attitude toward the priestly line against the politics of the Hasmonean period — onto which Christian additions were later grafted. On this view the Testaments are at bottom a Jewish ethical and apocalyptic book, recoverable in outline once the Christian overlay is peeled away, and Charles’s edition and translation made that recoverable Jewish book the one most readers met.

The counter-case was argued by Marinus de Jonge, who contended that the Testaments as they stand are substantially a Christian work — composed, in their present form, in the second century of the common era — that drew freely on older Jewish material. His decisive observation was structural: the Christian passages cannot be lifted out without tearing the fabric they are woven into, so that no clean Jewish original lies recoverable beneath them. What the work inherited from Judaism is genuine, on this reading, but it has been taken up into a Christian composition rather than merely decorated with Christian glosses. The two positions have organized the field ever since, with scholars such as Jürgen Becker, Howard C. Kee, and Anders Hultgård developing the Jewish-core approach and others following de Jonge. The contest is not over whether Jewish material is present — both sides grant that — but over whether the book is a Jewish work Christians annotated or a Christian work that quarried Judaism for its substance.

The witnesses from the desert

The question gained new evidence in the twentieth century.

The Testimonia (4Q175) from Qumran Cave 4, a Dead Sea collection of messianic scriptural citations, now in the Jordan Museum, Amman — part of the desert evidence for pre-Christian Jewish testament and messianic literature. Photograph by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Among the Dead Sea materials, and earlier among the fragments recovered from the Cairo Genizah, came portions of an Aramaic Levi document — a priestly text closely related to the Greek Testament of Levi, sharing visions and instructions with it and paleographically older than the common era. A Hebrew text answering to the Testament of Naphtali turned up among the same desert finds. Around these stood a cluster of related priestly and patriarchal writings: a work on Levi’s descendant Kohath, the visions of Moses’s father Amram, and other compositions in the Levitical line. Together they confirmed what neither Charles’s nor de Jonge’s reconstruction had been able to demonstrate from the Greek alone — that patriarchal testament-literature was circulating in Jewish hands well before the Christian era, in Aramaic and Hebrew, and that the Greek collection did not invent its raw materials. What the fragments do not establish is how directly they stand behind the book we have: the Aramaic Levi is related to the Greek Testament of Levi, not identical to it, and the gap between a source and the finished collection is precisely the space the authorship debate occupies. The material belongs to the same world that produced the Dead Sea writings of Second Temple Judaism and the Book of Jubilees, without resolving the collection’s own genealogy.

Scholarship and editions

The critical foundation of all modern work is the Greek text established by Marinus de Jonge with H. W. Hollander, H. J. de Jonge, and Th. Korteweg, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text (Leiden: Brill, 1978), the standard reference for the manuscript tradition; the publisher’s record sets out its place in the Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece series. The companion volume by H. W. Hollander and M. de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1985), remains the fullest line-by-line treatment. For the older Jewish-core reading, R. H. Charles’s The Greek Versions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (1908) and his rendering in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913) — hosted in the Library — remain the most influential English presentation; an earlier English version had already appeared in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, the full text of which is available at Wikisource, where each testament still carries the subtitle naming its governing vice or virtue. The 1901 Jewish Encyclopedia article records the state of the question as Schnapp and Charles had left it, including Grosseteste’s transmission and the patriarch-by-patriarch outline of vices and virtues. The Aramaic Levi and Naphtali fragments are edited within the corpus of the Dead Sea and Genizah materials, where their relation to the Greek Testaments is the live scholarly contest.

What the book carried

For the tradition that received it, the work read as the considered last words of the founders of Israel, and its ethics were taken at face value: a sustained plea for single-mindedness, for the avoiding of the passions, for love of neighbour set against hatred and deceit. That moral seriousness, more than any particular doctrine, is what carried the book through centuries in which its authorship was never doubted. Its kinship to the other deathbed and penitential literature of the era — the Prayer of Manasseh, the Psalms of Solomon, the wisdom of Sirach and Tobit, and the later Clementine literature that drew on the same Jewish-Christian seam — places it at a crossing where the ethics of Judaism and the claims of the early church meet in a single text. Scholarship has since made the authorship the hardest thing about it, and the layered text — Jewish, Christian, or some worked-over union of the two — remains a case study in how a single document can belong to more than one history at once.

→ In the library: Charles (ed.) — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

→ Related: Psalms Of Solomon · Prayer Of Manasseh · Assumption Of Moses · Clementine Literature · Book Of Enoch · Book Of Jubilees · Book Of Tobit · Sirach · Apocrypha · Second Temple Judaism · Eschatology · Apocalypse