Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Simeon · 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 when Simeon had made an end of commanding his sons, he slept with his fathers, being an hundred and twenty years old.
And they laid him in a wooden coffin, to take up his bones to Hebron.
And they took them up secretly during a war of the Egyptians.
For the bones of Joseph the Egyptians guarded in the tombs of the kings. For the sorcerers told them; that on the departure of the bones of Joseph there should be throughout all the land darkness and gloom, and an exceeding great plague to the Egyptians, so that even with a lamp a man should not recognize his brother.