Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Judah · 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.
Observe, therefore, my children, the (rights limit in wine; for there are in it four evil spirits--- of lust, of hot desire, of profligacy of filthy lucre. If ye drink wine in gladness, be ye modest in the fear of God.
For if in (your) gladness the fear of God departeth, then drunkenness ariseth and shamelessness stealeth in.
But if ye would live soberly do not touch wine at all, lest ye sin in words of outrage, and in fightings and slanders, and transgressions of the commandments of God, and ye perish before your time.
Moreover, wine revealeth the mysteries of God and men, even as I also revealed the commandments of God and the mysteries of Jacob my father to the Canaanitish woman Bathshua, which God bade me not to reveal. And wine is a cause both of war and confusion.