Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Joseph · Chapter 16
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.
Now the Memphian woman said to her husband: Buy the youth; for I hear, said she, that they are selling him.
And straightway she sent a eunuch to the Ishmaelites, and asked them to sell me.
But since the eunuch would not agree to buy me (at their price) he returned, having made trial of them, and he made known to his mistress that they asked a large price for their slave.
And she sent another eunuch, saying: Even though they demand two minas, give them, do not spare the gold; only buy the boy, and bring him to me.
The eunuch therefore went and gave them eighty pieces of gold, and he received me; but to the Egyptian woman he said: I have given a hundred.
And though I knew (this) I held my peace, lest the eunuch should be put to shame.