Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Levi · Chapter 11
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.
Therefore when I took a wife I was twenty-eight years old, and her name was Melcha.
And she conceived and bare a son, and I called his name Gersam, for we were sojourners in our land,
And I saw concerning him, that he would not be in the first rank,
And Kohath was born in the thirty-fifth year of my life, towards sunrise.
And I saw in a vision that he was standing on high in the midst of all the congregation,
Therefore I called his name Kohath [which is, beginning of majesty and instruction].
And she bare me a third son, in the fortieth year of my life; and since his mother bare him with difficulty, I called him Merari, that is, 'my bitterness,' because he also was like to die.