Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Levi · Chapter 7
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 I said to my father Jacob: By thee will the Lord despoil the Canaanites, and will give their land to thee and to thy seed after thee.
For from this day forward shall Shechem be called a city of imbeciles; for as a man mocketh a fool, so did we mock them.
Because also they had wrought folly in Israel by defiling my sister.
And we departed and came to Bethel.