Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Benjamin · Chapter 12
About this work
A collection of farewell discourses attributed to the twelve sons of Jacob, combining ethical exhortation, autobiographical retelling, and eschatological material. The transmitted text preserves Jewish traditions alongside Christian material or interpolation, and its compositional history remains debated.
- Author
- Anonymous
- Date
- Second Temple Jewish material; transmitted form includes later Christian elements.
- Origin
- Unknown
- Genre
- Testamentary Literature / Pseudepigrapha
- Textual language
- Greek textual tradition; earlier sources and layers are debated.
- Translator
- R. H. Charles
- Translation / Edition
- R. H. Charles translation, first published 1908.
And when he finished his words, he said: I command you, my children, carry up my bones out of Egypt, and bury me at Hebron, near my fathers.
So Benjamin died a hundred and twenty-five years old, at a good old age,
and they placed him in a coffin.
And in the ninety-first year from the entrance of the children of Israel into Egypt, they and their brethren brought up the bones of their fathers secretly during the Canaanitish war; and they buried them in Hebron, by the feet of their fathers.
And they returned from the land of Canaan and dwelt in Egypt until the day of their departure from the land of Egypt.