Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Judah · Chapter 1
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.
The copy of the words of Judah, what things he spake to his sons before he died.
They gathered themselves together, therefore, and came to him, and he said to them: Hearken, my children, to Judah your father.
I was the fourth son born to my father Jacob; and Leah my mother named me Judah, saying, I give thanks to the Lord, because He hath given me a fourth son also.
I was swift in my youth, and obedient to my father in everything.
And I honoured my mother and my mother's sister.
And it came to pass, when I became a man, that my father blessed me, saying, Thou shalt be a king, prospering in all things.