Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Naphtali · Chapter 8
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 lo! my children, I have shown unto you the last times, how everything shall come to pass in Israel.
Do ye also, therefore, charge your children that they be united to Levi and to Judah; For through them shall salvation arise unto Israel, And in them shall Jacob be blessed.
For through their tribes shall God appear on earth, To save the race of Israel, And to gather together the righteous from amongst the Gentiles.
If ye work that which is good, my children, Both men and angels shall bless you; And God shall be glorified among the Gentiles through you, And the devil shall flee from you, And the wild beasts shall fear you, And the Lord shall love you, [And the angels shall cleave to you].
As a man who has trained a child well is kept in kindly remembrance: So also for a good work there is a good remembrance before God.
But him that doeth not that which is good, Both angels and men shall curse, And God shall be dishonoured among the Gentiles through him, And the devil shall make him as his own peculiar instrument, And every wild beast shall master him, And the Lord shall hate him.