Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Reuben · Chapter 3
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.
Besides all these there is an eighth spirit of sleep, with which is brought about the trance of nature and the image of death.
With these spirits are mingled the spirits of error.
[First, the spirit of fornication is seated in the nature and in the senses; the second, the spirit of insatiableness, in the belly; the third, the spirit of fighting, in the liver and gall.
The fourth is the spirit of obsequiousness and chicanery, that through officious attention one may be fair in seeming.
The fifth is the spirit of pride, that one may be boastful and arrogant. The sixth is the spirit of lying, in perdition and jealousy to practise deceits, and concealments from kindred and friends.
The seventh is the spirit of injustice, with which are thefts and acts of rapacity, that a man may fulfill the desire of his heart; for injustice worketh together with the other spirits by the taking of gifts.