Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Simeon · Chapter 2
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.
Hearken, my children, to Simeon your father, And I will declare unto you what things I have in my heart.
I was born of Jacob as my father's second son; And my mother Leah called me Simeon, Because the Lord had heard her prayer.
Moreover, I became strong exceedingly; I shrank from no achievement, Nor was I afraid of ought.
For my heart was hard, And my liver was immovable, And my bowels without compassion.
Because valour also has been given from the Most High to men in soul and body.
For in the time of my youth I was jealous in many things of Joseph, because my father loved him beyond all.
And I set my mind against him to destroy him, because the prince of deceit sent forth the spirit of jealousy and blinded my mind, so that I regarded him not as a brother, nor did I spare even Jacob my father.