Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Anonymous
Book Testament of Zebulun · 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.
For in his price I had no share, my children.
But Simeon and Gad and six other of our brethren took the price of Joseph, and bought sandals for themselves, and their wives, and their children, saying: We will not eat of it, for it is the price of our brother's blood,
but we will assuredly tread it under foot, because he said that he would be king over us, and so let us see what will become of his dreams.
Therefore it is written in the writing of the law of Moses, that whosoever will not raise up seed to his brother, his sandal should be unloosed, and they should spit in his face.
And the brethren of Joseph wished not that their brother should live, and the Lord loosed from them the sandal which they wore against Joseph their brother.
For when they came into Egypt they were unloosed by the servants of Joseph outside the gate, and so they made obeisance to Joseph after the fashion of King Pharaoh.