Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is a Hellenistic‑Jewish moral anthology masquerading as the deathbed speeches of Jacob’s sons, stitched together sometime in the 2nd century BCE and later embroidered with Christian glosses. Its Jewish core, fragments of which were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, preaches repentance, virtue, and messianic hope, while the Greek version overlays it with Christological prophecy, turning Judah’s royal line and Levi’s priesthood into foreshadows of Jesus. The result is a text that straddles worlds: Jewish ethics filtered through Greek rhetoric, then re‑edited by early Christians who saw in it a ready‑made gospel prototype. Judaism left it outside the canon because it was too hybrid; pseudonymous, philosophically Greek, and theologically hijacked, yet it remains a vivid window into the cross‑pollination of apocalyptic Judaism and early Christianity, a family sermon that wandered from Sinai to Athens to the Church Fathers.
The Testament of Reuben the First born Son of Jacob and Leah
- Chapter 1. Reuben’s testament thrives on ambiguity, and that’s what makes it so unsettling. He confesses to “defiling his father’s bed” with Bilhah, but the ambiguity is whether the act was a drunken sexual trespass or a calculated power grab. In clan terms, taking a patriarch’s concubine was shorthand for seizing his authority, and as firstborn, Reuben may have thought he was entitled to topple a father he saw as a drunkard, and unfit. The Testament’s seven‑month punishment motif then doubles as divine rejection of both lust and rebellion, branding him as unstable and stripping him of birthright inheritance. His confession to his sons is less about moral hygiene than about narrative control: by leaving the act hazy, he ensures they inherit a scar that warns against both unchecked desire and failed coups, a family cautionary tale carved into the politics of succession.
- Chapter 2. Reuben lays out his seven‑spirit hierarchy: life, sight, hearing, smell, speech, taste, and sexual desire; as if it were a moral staircase. In youth, he sprinted straight to the top rung, desire, mistaking it for the pinnacle. Only in repentance does he descend, realizing that the true summit was the first step all along: simple life itself. But the hypocrisy drips through the cracks. His audience isn’t fresh‑faced children; they’re already adults, already entangled in their own appetites. So the speech reads less like guidance and more like a deathbed footnote: “I probably should have told you this when you were young, but I didn’t. Consider this my retroactive parenting clause. You can’t say I never warned you (even if my timing makes it useless).”
- Chapter 3. Reuben, now the self‑styled neurologist of sin, decides seven spirits weren’t enough and adds an eighth, sleep, the deluxe suite where all his other vices check in for the night. Inside that dream hotel, he discovers seven more tenants: fornication, insatiableness, fighting, chicanery, pride, lying, and injustice – basically the full rabbinic DSM of bad behavior. Then, in a Freudian plot twist two millennia early, he blames his assault on Bilhah not on lust or power but on the “sleep sense,” as though unconsciousness were a moral alibi. His repentance speech turns into a lecture on avoiding women altogether, delivered with the zeal of a man who’s just realized celibacy is easier than accountability. In the end, Reuben’s taxonomy of temptation feels less like confession and more like a bureaucratic cover‑up – blame it all on unconscious forces.
- Chapter 4. Reuben, now the guilty compliance officer of libido, insists holiness means filing lust under “pending divine approval” and waiting for God to assign you a wife like office equipment; Joseph, meanwhile, turns abstinence into a spectacle, the pretty boy in Pharaoh’s court who declines every “female” advance with the poise of someone who knows his looks are currency (and perhaps his interests bent elsewhere than Egyptian women), whether the suitors were perfumed matrons or curious courtiers. One brother smothers desire in paperwork, the other rebrands it as power.
- Chapter 5. The continuation is basically Reuben’s attempt at moral laundering: he drags in the Christian concept of Hades (which, of course, he would not know about, since it didn’t yet exist) to add fire and brimstone to a Jewish framework that never had it, then paints women as succubi armed with rouge and jewelry, driven by lust they can’t and don’t want to control. Men, conveniently, are told they can resist; unless, of course, they’re poor Reuben, victim to Bilhah’s wiles, as he thinks about it (and despite the fact that she was unconscious at the time). The sermon reads less like universal ethics and more like a personal alibi: a sort of “she made it clear she wanted it”. In short, it’s puritan panic dressed up as penitence, a text that turns women into eternal seductresses and lets Reuben excuse his infamous dalliance as the inevitable result of feminine trickery rather than his own desire.
- Chapters 6-7. Reuben’s final words are less a new sermon than a remix album: again he warns against mingling with women, as if casual conversation were the gateway drug to fornication. Then, in a move that feels like outsourcing morality, he tells his sons to just follow Levi’s descendants; the Levites are the official interpreters, so why bother thinking for yourself? Finally, curtain call: Reuben dies, gets carted off to Hebron, and buried in the patriarchs’ cave. The whole finale reads like dad trying to lock the doors on desire, hand the keys to his brother, and then slip quietly into the family tomb.
The Testament of Simeon the Second of Jacob and Leah
- Chapters 1-2. Simeon’s deathbed memoir kicks off like the world’s grimmest LinkedIn bio: “Hard‑hearted, non‑compassionate, practical.” He admits to plotting Joseph’s murder, only to be thwarted by Judah and Reuben, who opted for the more entrepreneurial route of human trafficking. Simeon, incensed, sulked in silence for five months; the biblical equivalent of rage‑quitting the family WhatsApp group. What’s deliciously absurd is his self‑awareness: he knows jealousy is driving him, but he treats it like a fuel source rather than a flaw, as if homicidal envy were just another productivity hack. The psychodrama here isn’t repentance but branding, Simeon as the patriarch who can name his demons, wear them like a badge, and still insist that practicality excuses plotting fratricide.
- Chapters 3-4. Simeon’s recounting of his two-year “fast” reads less like repentance and more like a PR cleanse. Self‑denial that apparently involved regular meals, the ancient Near Eastern version of intermittent fasting, and not a shred of moral progress. He treats jealousy as a dietary issue, not a spiritual one: starve the body, maybe the envy will shrink. It doesn’t. When Jacob finally asks what all the brooding’s about, Simeon confesses to the sale of Joseph but edits out the assassination plot, as if omission were repentance. Later, Joseph forgives him for the sale, blissfully unaware that he was meant to be a corpse, not a commodity. The result is a sociopathic confessional masquerading as ascetic virtue; guilt managed through optics, not transformation.
- Chapters 5-7. Simeon closes his testament like a man who’s learned nothing but insists he’s learned everything. He pivots from jealousy to lust, railing against fornication with the same recycled rhetoric Reuben used, and sleep as the gateway drug to sin, unconsciousness as moral negligence. He peers into the eyes of his sons and grandsons and claims he can see their transgressions, as if clairvoyance could substitute for parenting. The logic curdles into theological narcissism: if his descendants renounce sex and jealousy, his own sins will be absolved. Redemption by proxy, or perhaps spiritual outsourcing. Simeon’s version of “if you all behave, I’ll get into heaven.”
The Testament of Levi the Third Son of Jacob and Leah
- Chapters 1-2. Levi, not coughing up his last breath, decides to give his testament while still spry enough to swing a staff. He’s not dying and he knows exactly when he will, it’s already on his to-do calendar. Troubled by the moral sludge around him, he dreams himself into heaven, where an angel gives him the grand tour: Heaven 1.0, all gold and choir music, and off in the distance, Heaven 2.0, sleeker, shinier, maybe with better cloud storage. The angel assures him that he and his brother Judah are beta‑testers for the upgrade, destined to lead the righteous migration. Levi wakes inspired, realizing that holiness isn’t static, it’s a subscription model with upgrades.
- Chapter 3-4. Levi’s dream tour of Heaven as a multi‑tiered system, has each level staffed with angels running different “purification programs” for Earth. The angel explains: Level 1 is the basic maintenance crew, dropping in now and then to fix moral messes; higher levels handle deeper cleansing; and at the top, Heaven 3.0, the cosmic bosses wait for the so‑called end times: sun burning out, seas drying up, humanity shipped off to Hades. That’s the giveaway: this whole apocalyptic script is a Christian insert into Jewish theology, since Judaism doesn’t imagine creation with a built‑in expiration date. God made the sun and earth to endure, not to run out of warranty. Yet Levi is told he’s being given insider knowledge and a job description: interpret Heaven’s rules for humans. So he wakes as Heaven’s first compliance officer, tasked with explaining Christian software to a pre-Jesus population.
- Chapters 5-7. Levi’s angelic mentor gives him a sneak peek at Heaven 2.0, the deluxe upgrade with cleaner code and better cloud storage, but then winks and says, “First prove yourself on Earth.” The assignment? Go back and avenge Dinah, raped by Shechem and his brothers, the sons of Hamor. Levi wakes, grabs Reuben, and they dutifully carry out the slaughter. The trick? Their brothers had already conned the Shechemites into circumcising themselves, promising covenantal inclusion as the price of intermarriage. So when Levi and Reuben strike, they’re not just killing enemies, they’re butchering freshly circumcised “converts.” Jacob fumes: his sons have turned potential Israelites into corpses, blurring the line between covenant and carnage. Levi, meanwhile, has learned the first lesson of priesthood: divine promotion might not come with clean hands.
- Chapters 8-9. Levi’s second major dream reads like divine HR orientation: seven white-robed attendants scrub him down, spritz him with perfume, and dress him in robes and jewels like he’s checking into the world’s holiest spa. Out pops a three‑branch org chart with one “great” line (undefined, like a startup still in stealth), one priestly division, and one priest‑king hybrid that smells suspiciously like future exarch bureaucracy. Judah plays the supportive sibling, Jacob signs off like an HR manager, and Levi gets shipped to Isaac for executive training. In short: zealot turned golden boy, bloodstains laundered into incense, and holiness franchised with all the snappy branding of a celestial Fortune 500.
- Chapters 10-12. Having recounted his dreams, Levi now stares down his sons, grandsons, great‑grandsons, and instead of a warm fireside blessing, he delivers a generational roast. Everyone, he declares, has strayed, is straying, or will stray, and none of it is his fault. He’s the righteous patriarch, they’re the wayward brood. Having declared himself absolved of their misdeeds, he pivots to a family scrapbook: his visions, his marriage, his children, their births annotated with his prophetic footnotes. It’s less a tender reminiscence than a reminder to them that he’s the gold‑standard ancestor, while they are little more than knock‑off wannabees.
- Chapters 13-16. Levi, having worked himself into a righteous froth, suddenly pivots to pedagogy: teach your children to read, he insists, so they can learn Torah and live rightly. One wonders if this is advice born of regret; did he neglect his own brood’s literacy, now scrambling to patch the hole? But before the ink dries, he’s back in high dudgeon, prophesying seventy weeks of debauchery, his sons and grandsons cavorting with prostitutes of Jerusalem, Israelite and foreign alike. The Temple’s destruction, he warns, will be their fault, the enemies rejoicing at Israel’s downfall. It’s less vision than guilt trip, a proto‑Catholic sermon: confess your sins, because we know you’ve already thought them, and remember, your sexual lapses will doom us all. Levi’s prophetic mantle slips, revealing a parish priest wagging his finger.
- Chapters 17- Levi’s finale, before entering his golden years and dying at age 137, read like a priestly apocalypse calendar: every jubilee cycle (forty‑nine years) a new high priest arises, each one sliding further into corruption until the priesthood itself becomes a scandal machine that drags Israel down. The kicker is the Christian overlay: Levi declares that the Gentiles will become the wise ones, multiply, and dominate the world, leaving Israel sidelined until a messianic high priest finally appears to reset the order. That infusion of Christian eschatology, with Gentile ascendancy and messianic restoration, is precisely why the Testaments sit in the Apocrypha: it’s less a Jewish text than a theological crossover, scripting Christianity as the inevitable successor to Judaism.
The Testament of Judah the Fourth Son of Jacob and Leah
- Chapters 1-2. The longest of the testaments, coming in at 26 chapters. Judah opens, while on his deathbed, with recalling his youthful years as the fastest of Jacob’s children, and a swift, strong, and deadly hunter. He honored his parents, he was blessed and told he would be a king. And then he offers up a litany of the various beasts he bested – running them down on foot and killing them, often with his bare hands; sometimes for food, sometimes for defense, and sometimes for sport.
- Chapters 3-7. These chapters read like the memoir of a mythic warlord who moonlights as a saint. He’s not just recounting battles; he’s curating a divine résumé. Each fight escalates in spectacle with kings toppled, generals crushed, giants felled; until the narrative feels less like scripture and more like a heroic saga with heavenly sponsorship. The angel hovering over him is the clincher: Jacob’s serene confidence that his son can’t die because he’s got celestial insurance. It turns Judah’s blood‑soaked campaign into a mystic ballet of violence choreographed under divine protection. The tone is half Iliad, half Book of Revelation, with Judah as the prototype of the warrior‑king whose brutality is sanctified by the glow of an angelic bodyguard.
- Chapters 8-9. This section reads like the patriarchal version of a soap opera written by someone who’s already over it. Judah, now a cattle mogul, charms a local king into handing over his daughter, because nothing says romance like livestock envy, and promptly sires three sons, two of whom God kills off without Judah breaking stride. He shrugs, tells his surviving kid’s descendants they’re lucky to be here, and moves on to recount how Uncle Esau, apparently still estranged in this telling, tried to stage a hostile takeover of Jacob’s holdings. Cue Judah riding in as family muscle, besieging Esau until the old man coughs up tribute. It’s Genesis reimagined as a dynastic crime drama: divine hit jobs, arranged marriages, and a protection racket masquerading as covenantal justice.
- Chapters 10-12. Today we have the patriarchal soap opera finally hitting its moral paradox season. Judah’s eldest, Er, marries Tamar, a foreigner, and God kills him for crossing tribal lines. Cue brother Onan, who refuses to consummate the marriage because, well, same issue. Judah orders him to do it anyway, and Onan famously “spills his seed,” earning divine execution for non‑compliance. So God kills one son for sleeping with Tamar and another for not sleeping with her. The theology of fertility here is less consistent than a bad sitcom’s plot arc.Then Judah commands his youngest, Shelah, to marry Tamar, but his wife secretly marries Shelah off to another foreigner. This time, God kills Judah’s wife instead, for disobeying him. Judah barely blinks, then recounts how Tamar later seduced him while he was drunk. He wants to kill her until she drops God’s secret password, which spares her life but ends their relationship.
- Chapters 13-15. These read like the hangover section of his memoir. After twelve chapters of self‑aggrandizing confession, he pivots to lecture mode “listen up kids, and listen well,” only to relapse into more tales of drunken lapses and dubious liaisons with prostitutes and forbidden family members. The tone is penitential but oddly performative: he’s both preacher and exhibit A. The repetition of “I strayed, I drank, I regretted” feels like a man trying to canonize his own bad decisions as moral instruction. It’s less testament than tavern talk dressed in prophecy; with himself as the patron saint of self‑inflicted irony.
- Chapters 16-19. Judah warns his descendants about lust, drunkenness, and idolatry; but then insists that all of them sprout from the same poisoned root: greed. Money, he says, is the engine behind every fall, even though his examples mostly involve losing it through bad behavior. The irony is delicious: Judah preaches that wealth corrupts, while his own narrative shows how vice drains it away. It’s a sermon that turns moral failure into an economic parable: sin as bad investment strategy.
- Chapters 20-22. Judah continues his memoir with a cosmic HR chart: every man, he says, hosts a “spirit of understanding” perpetually pinged by the inboxes of Truth and Deceit. He, of course, claims to have clicked “Reply All – Truth,” and the rest of us are left to wrestle with spam. Then comes the self‑promotion: God runs Heaven, Levi manages mankind’s spirituality, and Judah himself gets the franchise rights to Earth Inc. as CEO of the mundane, lord of livestock, and sovereign of spreadsheets. The tone is half sermon, half victory lap, as if he’s standing on the bow of the theological Titanic, arms outstretched, shouting, “I’m king of the world!”
- Chapters 23-26. Judah closes his testament with a full‑blown messianic coda; the Christian graft on this apocryphal text really flowers. He scolds his descendants for the usual catalogue of sins: lust, greed, idolatry, and fraternizing with gentiles. The tone is prophetic but tinged with self‑righteous despair, as if he’s watching his lineage tumble down a moral staircase he built himself. Then comes the pivot: out of that same corrupted line will arise a redeemer, a guide who will lead them from darkness to righteousness. It’s the apocryphal equivalent of a franchise reboot; Judah’s family saga gets retconned into a proto‑Christian prophecy.
The Testament of Issachar the Fifth Son of Jacob and Leah
- Chapter 1. Issachar opens with the story of his birth. Leah and Rachel, Jacob’s wives, sit at the kitchen table of history and barter over fertility and affection, but the economics are emotional, not rational. Leah has a couple of mandrakes, or “love-apples,” and Rachel, barren and desperate, wants them for herself as a symbol of children to come; Leah, fertile but unloved, wants Jacob’s company. The trade, Rachel keeps the two mandrakes for one night, while Leah gets to sleep with Jacob, yet again, is absurdly lopsided if you think in fruit, but perfectly logical if you think in longing. Issachar’s conception becomes a kind of divine audit of that transaction: Leah’s brief reunion with Jacob yields another son, while Rachel’s hoarded mandrakes yield nothing.
- Chapter 2. The saga of the Jacob, Leah, and Rachel thruple continues, as Issachar reveals that Rachel may not have been barren until God interceded, but actually refused to sleep with Jacob, despite her lamentations about not bearing any children. Perhaps she didn’t understand how these things work? In fact, he doubles down, she had no interest in Jacob “in that way”, but just wanted to get pregnant, give birth, and be a mom. Extending his admissions, maybe she finally figured things out after Leah had six kids, and both Leah’s maid and her own had kids with Jacob… after sleeping with him.
- Chapters 3-5. Issachar’s memoir reads like the quiet man’s manifesto; the brother who didn’t chase glory, scandal, or divine wrestling matches. He’s the Torah’s model citizen: no envy of the rich, no wandering eyes, no shortcuts. He worked, studied, married at thirty‑five, raised children, and kept his moral ledger balanced. In a family of dreamers, schemers, and penitents, Issachar is the one who simply did the job. His retrospective hums with modest satisfaction: not the fame and accolades of Judah or Joseph, but the respect and blessings of parents, kin, and neighbors.
- Chapters 6-7. Issachar finishes off his deathbed testament by telling his sons that he can foresee that their sons will stray from the path, intermarry with gentiles, and be lost. He then recounts that he has only slept with one woman in his life, and never considered another, has never lied, and never drunk alcohol. He cautions them to do the same, and their lives will be blessed – but somehow seems to miss the irony of his prediction for his grandkids. Perhaps, though he doesn’t say it, he foresees that his sons won’t pay any attention to his advice.
The Testament of Zebulun the Sixth Son of Jacob and Leah
- Chapters 1-2. “I do not recall,” sounds more like a congressional hearing testimony than a deathbed “confession”. Zebulun launches into his with a “to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never committed a sin.” He even harkens back to the whole plot against Joseph, claiming that he alone tried to protect Joseph, first from an assassination plot, soon backed up by Reuben, and then to prevent his sale into slavery, for which his older brothers gave him a choice – “shut up or die,” – a secret he has, supposedly, carried with him until the approach of his demise.
- Chapters 3-4. Zebulun’s deathbed deposition casts himself as the lone innocent while everyone else is guilty: Dan is the schemer who invents the slave‑sale plan, strips Joseph into servant’s garb, and dips the coat in goat’s blood; Simeon still wants to kill; Reuben tries to return the silver but fails to find the slavers; the rest pocket the payout while Zebulun insists he never touched a coin. He then embellishes the Egyptian encounter, describing the brothers bowing, being “spit upon,” by Joseph and/or his Egyptian companions, having already told them the whole backstory so that the palace audience knew the drama while the brothers remained clueless. The scene reads less like confession than congressional testimony, with Zebulun solemnly declaring “not me” while narrating every sordid detail.
- Chapters 5-8. Zebulun’s farewell sermon shifts from courtroom defense to moral autobiography. He tells his sons to be kind, generous, and merciful, and then immediately cites himself as Exhibit A. He alone, he insists, escaped divine punishment for Joseph’s sale, spending five blissful years at sea, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. It’s philanthropy with a whiff of self‑promotion: the saint who never sinned, now narrating his own beatification. Yet the image of Zebulun bobbing alone on the waves, hauling fish for strangers, feels less like triumph than penance; five years of maritime self‑therapy disguised as virtue. His compassion reads sincere but manic, as if guilt found its outlet in endless acts of charity. The Christian apocryphal touch to the text – it’s a bit of a precursor to the “Feeding of the Multitude”.
- Chapters 9-10. Zebulun wraps up like a stained‑glass sales pitch: the patriarch who once prided himself on fish and charity now forecasts his descendants drifting into gentile culture, only for the gentiles to swing back and lead everyone to God. Cue the angelic descent, resurrection imagery, and a sudden pivot into Christian branding. Zebulun’s tribal memoir morphs into a press release for universal salvation. The covenant goes public, the gentiles buy majority shares, and Zebulun’s testament ends not with family lore but with a global outreach campaign.
The Testament of Dan the Seventh Son of Jacob and Bilhah
- Chapters 1-4. My namesake’s confession looks to be pretty straightforward, and skimming ahead, I could probably sum this all up as “always tell the truth, never lie” and “never act out of anger and/or envy”. As part of his confession, he admits to not only his part in the plot to kill Joseph, but that he actually went and got a sword and set out to find Joseph wandering by himself. He was convinced that if he killed Joseph, his father Jacob would then love him as much as he loved Joseph – cue the internecine fantasies of Joseph’s siblings, who saw that Jacob seemed to care more for the two children with his chosen wife Rachel, than those with either the sub, Leah, or the two handmaids. Dan notes that, even though he was disappointed not to kill Joseph, he ended up celebrating his sale into slavery, presumably never to return.
- Chapters 5-7. Dan’s closing act is a tidy moral wrapped in apocalyptic foil. He preaches truth as the ultimate virtue: no lies, no envy, no rage. Then he abruptly veers into The Book of Enoch, a 5th century Christian written or at least influenced fever dream scroll of fallen angels and end of times. It’s as if he’s read one too many apocalyptic pamphlets and decided his descendants are doomed to flirt with Satan until a messianic figure drags them back to righteousness. So far, Dan’s testament is the clearest evidence that the Testaments were written by Christian scholars, not Jewish ones, cementing its demotion to Judaic apocrypha.
The Testament of Naphtali the Eighth Son of Jacob and Bilhah
- Chapters 1-2. Naphtali’s opening chapters read like a blend of autobiography and moral allegory. He gathers his children for a farewell feast, not yet on his deathbed but already predicting his mortality, and recalls his youth as the clan’s fleet‑footed courier, dispatched by Jacob to carry messages across the estates. That image of speed, Naphtali as the runner, becomes the hinge for his meditation on light and darkness. Works of light, he insists, cannot be done under the shadow of darkness, a metaphor that turns his biography into a moral lesson: swiftness of foot must be matched by clarity of spirit. In contrast to Dan’s confession of envy and violence, Naphtali positions himself as the messenger of illumination in a dark world.
- Chapters 3-4. Naphtali’s still channeling Enoch’s visionary apocalypse, seeing his descendants wander from the true path “like the gentiles,” then crawl back, only to wander again; a moral pendulum swinging through generations. The tone is weary rather than wrathful; he knows admonition won’t stop the drift. The satire lies in the futility; the patriarch warning against straying while conceding that straying is inevitable. It’s faith as feedback loop, where divine law is less a straight path than a recurring detour.
- Chapters 5-8. Naphtali’s testament is the odd duck of the bunch, less autobiography than anthology of visions. Where his brothers confess sins or recount deeds, Naphtali offers only dreams, as if his life were too uneventful to merit inclusion. The last chapters showcase this perfectly: Judah and Levi sprint across the earth, lasso moon and sun, and merge with them like cosmic mascots. Naphtali dutifully relays the spectacle to Jacob, who promptly translates it into a parenting PSA: raise your children to follow Judah and Levi, not the Gentiles. Naphtali’s testament is a dream journal masquerading as moral instruction. His visions are dazzling; brothers becoming one with the cosmos, but the takeaway is pedestrian: keep your kids in line. It’s a testament where biography evaporates, leaving only dream‑logic domesticated into family ethics.
The Testament of Gad the Ninth Son of Jacob and Zilpah
- Chapters 1-2. Gad, first of the kids of Jacob with Leah’s maidservant, Zilpah, was the shepherd of the family, ardently guarding the flocks of his clan. However, he admits in his confession, he despised Joseph, because, well, Joseph was a big tattletale, constantly telling stories (which we know from biblical references), but in Gad’s view, false ones, to get his brothers in trouble. In fact, he opines, this is pretty much the real reason that all the brothers except Reuven hated Joseph. Puts a different light, in some ways, on the family dynamic.
- Chapters 3-5. Gad gets a bit wordy, with a lot of -eth words thrown in (at least in the English translation, one wonders when it comes to the original Hebrew). It all comes down to “Hatred bad, hatred from envy worse”. Self discovery, decades late.
- Chapters 6-8. Gad sums it all up with what amounts to, “Just because someone else has more than you, or is better at things than you, or, like my weenie brother Joseph, ruins your life, doesn’t mean you should get angry or be jealous, and take revenge. Leave the vengeance to God (and feel free to pray for it).”
The Testament of Asher the Tenth Son of Jacob and Zilpah
- Chapters1-2. Asher’s testament feels almost algorithmic, a flowchart of moral psychology. Instead of the usual autobiographical preamble, he sketches a branching system: inclination → choice → action → consequence. It’s the closest thing in the Testaments to a behavioral feedback loop, where each node redirects the next. You can almost imagine him diagramming it on a wax tablet, arrows looping back when desire mutates into habit. It’s striking that he writes from full health at age 125, as if moral clarity comes not from decline but from sustained vitality. The series of binary choices reads like a manual for ethical engineering: how to debug one’s impulses before they compile into deeds.
- Chapters 3-6. Asher divides mankind into the single‑faced, who live with transparent righteousness, and the two‑faced, who deal in hypocrisy and evil. His unsettling twist is that if the straight‑shooters knock off the double‑dealers, while murder is technically wrong, at least it’s in the service of virtue, so basically, it’s “kind of okay.” In his moral math, duplicity is the ultimate corruption, consistency in the service of God the ultimate good, and homicide becomes a grimly acceptable side effect of integrity.
- Chapters 7-8. Asher finishes off his testament, as have most of his brothers, with an admonishment that he knows that his descendants are going to do bad things and stray from the path. And then we get our apocryphal Christian add-in, that one day, God himself will come down to earth, save both Israel and the Gentiles, and lead them all down the righteous path. Then, despite having started this testament in full health and not on his deathbed, he falls asleep and dies.
The Testament of Joseph the Eleventh Son of Jacob and Rachel
- Chapters 1-2. I can already see this is going to be an interesting take on Joseph’s life. He launches into his testament with a litany of the ten trials and tribulations that he was put through in life, by jealous brothers, and insincere friends, and bad actors, and all the rest, and each time, by the grace of God, he was saved. You can almost hear the tent revival preacher spouting this. It is, perhaps, worth noting, especially as we now have the testaments of his ten older brothers, that the common factor in everything in his life that didn’t work, is himself, but in interaction after interaction, it’s always the other person who is at fault.
- Chapters 3-9. I’m going to encapsulate a huge swath here. Seven chapters of Joseph carrying on about how attractive he is, and how much effort he puts into being attractive, and then how when one of the Pharaoh’s wives takes a fancy to him, he has to spend years fending off her advances – flattery, bribery, offers to leave her husband, offers to kill her husband, sending him enchanted food, and more. It reaches the point where she tears his clothes off, sending him running away naked, after which she declares to one and all that he tried to rape her, and has him imprisoned, and then let’s him know he will be released if he agrees to sleep with her. It’s not flat out in the text, but between this and other writings on Joseph, it’s pretty clear that he isn’t making himself pretty for the women around him, it’s either just pure narcissism, or he leans a different direction.
- Chapters 10-14. We head into backstory, as Joseph tries to explain his “chastity” in regard to the Egyptian woman who has been so relentlessly pursuing him. He sketches out his arrival in Egypt at the hands of the Ishmaelite slavers (interesting, harkening back to the whole lineage split between the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael, just a generation earlier). He chooses not to expose his brothers’ treachery, and just holds to a story line that he was a slave of the Ishmaelites, entrusted to an Egyptian merchant, who for some unknown reason gave him complete charge over his household (methinks more was going on between our handsome Joseph and said merchant). The Pharaoh hears of this, sends an officer to check it all out. The officer decides, despite hearing the same story from both Joseph and the merchant, that they are both to be imprisoned for “their sins” (more insinuation here), while meanwhile this infamous Egyptian woman witnesses the whole arrest and takes a liking to Joseph, offering him sex with her as a way out of his predicament.
- Chapters 15-18. “God made me more beautiful than all the flowers of Israel, and I got to stay this beautiful into old age”. “I’m not arrogant, and my worldly glory doesn’t define me, I’m just a humble guy”. Joseph wraps up his soliloquy about how he has protected his brothers from shame for having sold him into slavery, over decades. Even when the Ishmaelites figured out who he was and how important his father was, he just feigns ignorance of his past. Of course, when his brothers show up, he humiliates them to no end, because, as we all know, “hell hath no fury like a diva scorned”.
- Chapters 19-20. Joseph closes his testimony with a bizarre dream of a dozen deer, sheep, and cows, morphing back and forth into each others’ forms. He implies that this represents the constant interplay of the character of he and his brothers over time. In the end, all leads to Heaven (an apocryphal Christian insert there). Then he dies, and his kids cart his bones from Egypt back to Israel.
The Testament of Benjamin the Twelfth Son of Jacob and Rachel
- Chapters 1-2. Benjamin, the youngest, launches into what amounts to an ode to Joseph. He begins with when they first reconciled and Joseph told him who he was. Joseph asked him what tale his brothers had told their father, Jacob. Benjamin related the whole story of the cloak and wild animal’s blood that we’re all familiar with. Joseph invents a story of how he was capture by Canaanite slavers, who left his cloak, soaked in blood, as a way of throwing off the trail, and tells his brothers to tell that to Jacob, as the story of how he survived. Benjamin is clearly in awe of his brother.
- Chapters 3-6. Be of good mind, be of good spirit, be of good intentions. That’s pretty much the next four chapters of Benjamin’s testament. All of that as a way of keeping at bay the evil “Beliar”. Now, this is where we pretty much confirm the Christian influence on these testaments. In the Torah and Talmud, there are references to the “sons of Belial”, as a euphemism for wicked people, with a vague nod towards Belial being a generic demonic sort. Christianity renamed Belial as Beliar, dropped the sons part, and made the name an a.k.a. of Satan.
- Chapters 7-9. Benjamin goes all speaking in tongues, as he rails against the seven vengeances of the sword of Belial, and the fornications of Sodom – another Christian invention, that the sin of Sodom was about sexual acts, generally touted to be homosexuality, though the sin in the Hebrew Bible is the violation of hospitable protection, with the Gentiles attempting to force Lot to let them rape his guests. He rattles on a bit about Enoch, and Cain, and centuries of misery. It’s a prophetic vision, or at least purports to be.
- Chapters 10-12. Benjamin finishes off his testament with an ode to his brother Joseph, his father Jacob, and how they’ll all meet up in Heaven, basically. And that really puts the cap on the Christian reinterpretation of scripture and solidifies the Testaments as apocryphal for Judaism.