Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Judah · Chapter 23
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 I have much grief, my children, because of your lewdness and witchcrafts, and idolatries which ye shall practise against the kingdom, following them that have familiar spirits, diviners, and demons of error.
Ye shall make your daughters singing girls and harlots, and ye shall mingle in the abominations of the Gentiles.
For which things' sake the Lord shall bring upon you famine and pestilence, death and the sword, beleaguering by enemies, and revilings of friends, the slaughter of children, the rape of wives, the plundering of possessions, the burning of the temple of God,] the laying waste of the land, the enslavement of yourselves among the Gentiles.
And they shall make some of you eunuchs for their wives.
Until the Lord visit you, when with perfect heart ye repent and walk in all His commandments; and He bring you up from captivity among the Gentiles.