Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Joseph · Chapter 20
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.
or I know that after my death the Egyptians will afflict you, but God will avenge you, and will bring you into that which He promised to your fathers.
But ye shall carry up my bones with you; for when my bones are being taken up thither, the Lord shall be with you in light, and Beliar shall be in darkness with the Egyptians.
And carry ye up Asenath your mother to the Hippodrome, and near Rachel your mother bury her.
And when he had said these things he stretched out his feet, and died at a good old age.
And all Israel mourned for him, and all Egypt, with a great mourning.
And when the children of Israel went out of Egypt, they took with them the bones of Joseph, and they buried him in Hebron with his fathers, and the years of his life were one hundred and ten years.