Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Judah · 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 after these things, while Tamar was a widow, she heard after two years that I was going up to shear my sheep, and adorned herself in bridal array, and sat in the city Enaim by the gate.
For it was a law of the Amorites, that she who was about to marry should sit in fornication seven days by the gate.
Therefore being drunk with wine, I did not recognize her; and her beauty deceived me, through the fashion of her adorning.
And I turned aside to her, and said: Let me go in unto thee. And she said: What wilt thou give me? And I gave her my staff, and my girdle, and the diadem of my kingdom in pledge. And I went in unto her, and she conceived.
And not knowing what I had done, I wished to slay her; but she privily sent my pledges, and put me to shame.
And when I called her, I heard also the secret words which I spoke when lying with her in my drunkenness;