Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

← Encyclopedia

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.

The pattern is consistent across the twelve. A life is recalled, a vice or virtue is named, and the speech opens out into prophecy — most often a forecast of Israel’s coming apostasy, exile, and restoration, and in several testaments the rise of a saviour figure from the tribes of Levi and Judah. 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.

Where the work comes from is among the more stubborn questions in the study of this literature. The text survives complete only in Greek, with later Armenian and Slavonic versions and a medieval Latin translation made by the English bishop Robert Grosseteste, who took it for a genuine pre-Christian prophecy of Christ. The Christian passages are unmistakable. The dispute is over what they sit upon. One reading, associated with R. H. Charles, holds that the core is a Jewish composition of roughly the second century BCE, later overlaid with Christian additions; another, argued by Marinus de Jonge and others, treats the Testaments as we have them as substantially a Christian work that drew on Jewish material. The discovery near the Dead Sea of Aramaic fragments of a Levi text, and a Hebrew Naphtali text, confirmed that related patriarchal writings were circulating in Jewish hands well before the Christian era — without settling how directly they stand behind the Greek collection.

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. 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