The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs as Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism: A Re-Assessment

1. Introduction

Our understanding of early Judaism is dependent almost entirely on our reading of those texts deemed to represent a voice of early Judaism. There is no doubt that Ben Sira, Tobit, and 1 Enoch represent such voices (rather than Christian voices) since manuscript discoveries place these writings in Judea centuries before Jesus. Locating the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, however, is far more problematic, since all extant manuscripts come from well into the Common Era, produced by Christian scribes. The problem is compounded insofar as there is clearly Christian material in the Testaments as preserved in these manuscripts. Are the Testaments a Jewish composition that has been edited by Christian copyists over the centuries? Or do they represent a Christian composition that makes extensive use of Jewish traditions and even Jewish sources? ¹

This study engages recent proposals by Robert Kraft and James Davila for introducing greater methodological rigor into the determination of whether a particular pseudepigraphon preserved primarily through Christian scribal activity should be treated as a Jewish or Christian document, arguing that Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs stands up admirably against their criteria. It also engages the debates concerning the origin of the Testaments from both text-critical and literary-critical grounds, also introducing a number of tradition-critical considerations into the discussion. While the ipsissima verba of a Jewish original may continue to elude us, particularly in a few eschatological passages, there remain solid grounds for reading the Testaments as a witness to the ethical, traditional, and even eschatological developments in Second Temple Judaism, and therefore also as a legitimate background to the emergence of early Christianity and its writings.

2. Recent Methodological Challenges

Scholars have typically moved from observing that a text lacks distinctively Christian content, or has a few lines of Christian content that can be easily excised, to concluding that the work is therefore of Jewish origin (lightly edited by Christians, in the latter case). ² Robert Kraft and James Davila have objected to this line of reasoning on numerous grounds, suggesting that it has led to the skewing of our understanding of early Judaism by allowing non-Jewish (i.e. later Christian) writings to slip into the corpus of witnesses to early Judaism through a lack of methodological rigor.

Robert Kraft has argued that when a text survives only in manuscripts transmitted by Christian scribes, dating from centuries into the Common Era, in languages used by the Christian churches (e.g. Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, etc., as opposed to Hebrew and Aramaic), the first task is to understand the texts as they functioned within Christian circles at the time of those manuscripts, and to work backwards from there only as the evidence of the text necessitates. ³ This burden of proof falls upon those who would argue for a Jewish origin, especially an origin in the pre-Christian era; the assumption of a Jewish origin unless the work is proven to have been composed by a Christian would no longer be allowed. In the case of the Testaments, our earliest manuscript evidence comes from the tenth century CE, a Greek manuscript written by Christian scribes. However, another kind of external evidence—quotation or reference by other known authors ⁴ —pushes this date back to the third century CE, as Origen refers to these Testaments in his Homilies on Joshua (15.6). Jerome appears to refer to T. Naph. 2.8 less than a century later (Tract. De Ps. 15.7). ⁵

These scholars raise a crucial question: Are the Testaments best treated solely as Christian texts functioning in the early-third century, or can they also be read as sources for investigating pre-Christian Judaism? Scholars turn to a number of methods in an attempt to answer this question, whether affirming the Christian origin of the Testaments or arguing in favor of Christian editing of the Jewish Testaments.

3. Manuscript Evidence

The Testaments survive largely in two families of Greek manuscripts, the oldest manuscript (b) dating from the tenth century CE, and several Armenian manuscripts. Other translations (the Slavonic, Serbian, and ‘New Greek’) do not play any important role in textual criticism. Distinctively Christian material pervades all the existing Greek manuscripts, but there is notably less of this material in the principal Armenian manuscripts. This raises two salient questions: Was the Armenian version translated from a Greek text of the Testaments that predates the extant Greek manuscripts, bearing witness to a less Christianized form of these texts? To what extent can we rely on the Armenian version for help in the restoration of the original text of the Testaments?

R.H. Charles regarded the Armenian version as an important witness to the original wording, relying heavily upon it in his reconstruction of the pre-Christian Testaments. More recent research by Michael Stone confirmed that the Armenian version may well depend ultimately upon a Greek manuscript from the fifth or sixth century CE. ⁶ Stone also observed, however, that, while the Armenian translation seems to follow the Greek text tradition closely in the opening testaments, it provides increasingly abbreviated readings as the testaments progress, especially in the ethical sections. ⁷ Confidence in the Armenian version has been eroded by such studies showing the overall tendency of the Armenian version to omit material. ⁸ Hollander and de Jonge have found little value in it for their own text-critical work. ⁹

Nevertheless, the Armenian manuscripts may still provide important evidence for the incremental Christianization of the Testaments in the history of its transmission at the hands of Christian scribes. Granted that the Armenian translator appears to have wearied of the task of translating this lengthy document, and therefore introduces omissions that appear to result more from indolence than the wording of his or her Greek text, I find it implausible that the translator would elect to omit precisely those verses or passages that would have been of most immediate relevance to the Christian readers for which he or she was preparing the translation. Christianizing passages would have perked up his or her attention as he or she went about the task. Stone had, moreover, observed that the omissions were most glaring in the lengthy sections of ethical instruction—that is, those parts that neither spun out the tale of the patriarch nor spoke of God's future interventions. The distinctively Christian material, to the extent that it is present, is almost wholly present in the eschatological sections—a part that should therefore tend to show less in the way of careless or disinterested omission in the Armenian, with the result that omissions in these sections may in fact be due to the absence of this Christianizing material in its underlying Greek text. (Nor can it be said that the Armenian translator sought intentionally to de-Christianize the Testaments, for some distinctively Christian material remains.)

On balance, then, while the Armenian versions overall may not have the value for reconstructing the exact wording of the pre-Christian Testaments with which Charles had invested them, they still bear witness to a stage in the development of the Testaments that contained fewer Christian interpolations. The most logical explanation for the absence of explicitly Christian material is the absence of such material in the Greek manuscript he or she used. Decisive in this regard is the Armenian Testament of Joseph, which actually includes substantially more pre-Christian Jewish material than our extant Greek texts (we are entirely reliant on the Armenian for T. Jos. 19.3–7) while also including substantially less distinctively Christian material (notably in the very next paragraph, T. Jos. 19.10–12). The shorter text found throughout the Armenian version may be explained in part by the translator's waning degree of enthusiasm for the task and in part by his Greek exemplar's lack of some of the Christian material known from the later Greek manuscripts.

The entire Testament of Zebulon has but a single phrase that would not be at home in a non-Christian Jewish composition. In the midst of a passage describing the future deliverance that God would bring following upon the repentance of Israel in exile, the author predicts:

The promise that God shall ‘convert all the Gentiles’ could more neutrally be translated ‘turn all the nations around’, and fits very well within the Jewish eschatological expectation that all nations will come to acknowledge the one God, the God of Israel, at the last. It is only the phrase ‘in human form’ that would be out of place in a Jewish composition. The text as it stands does not make the best of sense, as de Jonge implicitly acknowledges by inserting the phrase ‘in the house’ along with the note ‘some such addition is needed’. ¹²

The phrase in question is only present in three Greek manuscripts (b, d, and g). The remaining Greek manuscripts, together with the Armenian translation, render this entire paragraph quite differently and much more simply: ‘The Lord himself shall arise, the light of righteousness, and you will return to your land, and you will see him (or, you will see the Lord) in Jerusalem on account of his holy (or, all-holy) name’. While the textual witnesses for this reading cannot claim to be the oldest (save for the Greek Vorlage of the Armenian), this variant has much to commend it as the original reading. The longer reading in mss. b, d, and g can be explained as the result of scribal expansion, harmonizing the statement of the promised future here with statements in the other Testaments and explaining the promised theophany in terms of the incarnation. It is much harder to explain why Christian scribes responsible for the shorter reading would have abridged the longer reading, stripping this testament of its only distinctively Christian note, and thus its point of greatest relevance to their own social location. ‘In human form’, then, is probably an instance of the kind of explanatory gloss that a Christian scribe might add in the margin of a manuscript, and which would later be copied as if it were part of the text at that point—a common enough phenomenon in textual transmission.

For a second example, we may consider a passage in Gad's testament, where he instructs his descendants to ‘honor Judah and Levi; for from them will the Lord raise up a savior for Israel’ (T. Gad 8.1). This passage might seem to promote a Christian agenda, suggesting that God's anointed savior was born from the two tribes of Judah and Levi, even as Hippolytus and others sought to demonstrate Jesus’ descent not only from Judah (which is well attested and unanimously affirmed in the New Testament) but also from Levi (which is nowhere affirmed in the New Testament). However, it is noteworthy that only one Greek manuscript—the one regarded by Hollander and de Jonge as a foremost witness (ms. b)—gives this reading. Six Greek manuscripts (mss. l, d, m, e, a, f) read ‘out of them will the Lord arise as a savior’, while five other Greek manuscripts (k, g, c, h, i), along with the Armenian version, read ‘out of them will the Lord raise up salvation’, notably using the more typical idiom of the Testaments (see T. Sim. 7.1; T. Dan 5.10; T. Naph. 8.2). Both of these readings are quite susceptible to a thoroughly theocentric (as opposed to Christocentric) interpretation, the latter unambiguously so. ¹³

Hollander and de Jonge argue in favor of the reading ‘savior’ as the ‘more difficult reading’, over against ‘salvation’ which, they argue, was introduced to harmonize this passage with the many other passages throughout the Testaments that favor speaking of the Lord's ‘salvation’ rather than a ‘savior’. ¹⁴ The fact that the verb ‘raise up’ (ἀνατἑλλειν) is used only here transitively, against every other use of this verb throughout the Testaments, also suggests to them that this reading be accepted as the lectio difficilior. At this point, however, I find the lectio difficilior, requiring even a completely uncharacteristic use of a verb, to have become an implausible reading. Moreover, ‘raising up a savior’ could be equally well explained as a Christian scribal harmonization not to other texts in the Testaments, but to general Christian discourse about God's raising up Jesus as Messiah, and thus a corrupted reading. Far from suggesting Christian composition, the evidence barely suggests Christian tampering in only one stream of the textual tradition.

The Testament of Benjamin is probably the most heavily Christianized text within the collection, though, once again, these editorial expansions are limited to the ‘prophetic’ sections of the text (essentially 3.8; 9.2–5; 10.7–9; 11.1–5). Recovery of the wording of a pre-Christian original is, consequently, very difficult in these sections of this testament. ¹⁵ That there was a pre-Christian original, however, remains probable on several counts, not least of which is the witness of the Armenian translation, which preserves no distinctively Christian material save for 9.3–5. ¹⁶ A minor Christian interpolation appears in T. Benj. 3.8. After Joseph asked Jacob to pray for his brothers, that God would not hold their sin against them, Jacob is so moved that he embraces Joseph and exclaims: ‘In you shall be fulfilled the prophecy of heaven about the Lamb of God and the Savior of the world—that one without blemish shall be offered up on behalf of sinners, and one without sin shall die on behalf of the ungodly, in the blood of the covenant, for the salvation of the Gentiles and of Israel, and he shall destroy Beliar and those who serve him’ (T. Benj. 3.8). This passage is admittedly well-suited to its literary context. The question still needs to be raised whether all of it is original to that context, or if a pre-Christian (or at least non-Christian) Jewish statement about vicarious death has been glossed and modified by Christian copyists in the Greek manuscript tradition. The Armenian version is much more subdued: ‘In you will be fulfilled the heavenly prophecy which says, “the blameless person will be defiled on behalf of the lawless, and the sinless person will be killed on behalf of the impious”‘. Such a reading does not necessitate a Christian interpretation, but may draw on traditional exegesis of Isaiah 53, particularly under the influence of Jewish martyrology in the Maccabean period. If the Armenian here fairly represents its Greek Vorlage, this would indicate that the passage has been Christianized in keeping with reading Joseph as a type for Jesus.

4. Literary-critical Observations

The differences in the manuscript tradition support the theory of the progressive Christianization of the Testaments, perhaps starting with a pre-Christian original, but they do not account for all of the Christian material in these texts. Scholars have therefore turned to literary criticism to advance this conversation. ¹⁷ This involves, first and foremost, the detection of literary seams and signs of redaction, particularly around the distinctively Christian material. How well is this material integrated into its literary contexts? Are there internal contradictions between the Christian material and the surrounding text, such that the former appears to interrupt, intrude upon, or even contradict the latter? ¹⁸ Does the distinctively Christian material, especially the briefer instances thereof, have the appearance of explanatory glosses that can be easily separated, or is it more fully integrated into the literary fabric of the text? The questions here concern the extent to which the text of the Testaments changed over time as various scribes introduced new material to ‘help’ readers better understand the text, or to ‘solve’ problems posed by the text with respect to the belief system of the scribe and his or her projected readers.

Even those who are most adamant about reading the Testaments as a Christian composition are prepared to allow for such changes in the course of transmission. Harm Hollander and Marinus de Jonge, for example, affirm the likelihood of development in the text between the time of Origen and the time in which our extant manuscripts were produced, as the nature of the texts encourages ‘marginal notes and small embellishments from readers and scribes’ as well as the omission of obsolete material. ¹⁹ They affirm on literary-critical grounds that T. Dan 7.3 ‘reads like a gloss of a later scribe’ and that T. Levi 2.10 is a clearly Christian line that is ‘slightly out of place in context’. ²⁰ They differ from R.H. Charles, in effect, only in the degree to which they would allow such ‘marginal notes and small embellishments’. These scholars consider it possible that ‘especially the christological and eschatological passages were subjected to later additions and revisions’ during this period, ‘however difficult it is for us to detect them’. ²¹ It is precisely the difficulty of performing this literary-critical task with certainty that, in the end, dissuades Hollander and de Jonge from the endeavor altogether in favor of interpreting the Testaments only as Christian texts. Theoretically, however, Hollander and de Jonge must also allow for the possibility of such development in the period prior to Origen, and that such development may account for all the distinctively Christian material.

The problem of disentangling Christian material from its literary context is only acute in one or two of the testaments. In many instances, it is rather straightforward. For example, near the close of the Testament of Simeon, the author looks forward to God's future interventions thus:

The phrases in bold italics isolate the material that takes this passage in a distinctively Christian direction. Both R.H. Charles and H.C. Kee bracket these brief phrases as Christian interpolations into an otherwise straightforward Jewish description of a theophany—God's self-manifestation to bring deliverance. ²² The first two phrases have the character of brief glosses, quite plausibly added by a Christian copyist to ‘help’ future readers to connect the text's prophecies with the Christian conviction about the fulfillment of Israel's hope in Jesus. Delete them, and the passage coheres with the expressions elsewhere in the Testaments about God ‘appearing’ and bringing salvation (cf. T. Naph. 8.2–4). The longer clause in T. Sim. 6.7 has the character of a secondary addition, since a complete rationale for Simeon's declaration of intention to bless God has already provided in the previous phrase (‘because of his marvelous works’), an obvious reference back to the litany of God's future acts on behalf of God's people Israel begun in T. Sim. 6.3. A Christian copyist has now taken the passage in a new direction, for which the previous material has not prepared the reader, focusing on the incarnation and, in particular, on the proof of the incarnation (in the assertion of this God-in-the-flesh actually ‘eating’, thus having a real body) in refutation of Docetist or other early Christian heretical claims.

Similarly, in the Testament of Dan, the author speaks of the eschatological deliverer who will renew Eden and establish ‘new Jerusalem’:

The testament looks forward to the fulfillment of God's promise in the Jewish Scriptures that God himself would be Israel's monarch and make his dwelling among the people in Jerusalem. A Christian scribe attempted to adapt this vision of the ‘kingdom of God’ to the Christian understanding of Jesus as the reigning king and of the heavenly locus of the kingdom of God. The first addition describes the reign of the ‘Holy One’ as manifesting itself ‘in humility and poverty’, thus recalling Jesus’ first coming ‘in humility’ and embedding this in God's rule. The second addition speaks of those who have faith sharing in this reign ‘in the heavens’, which is at sharp odds with its literary context: the opening lines of T. Dan 5.13 had clearly depicted God coming to establish God's reign on earth, centered in Jerusalem, not inviting human souls into a heaven-centered kingdom. In such instances literary-critical observations provide sufficient methodological rigor for identifying and bracketing later Christian interpolations.

In a number of cases, Christian signature features intrude upon the Deuteronomistic pattern of sin–exile–return or upon the text's formulation of the roles of Levi and Judah in God's future interventions in ways that strongly suggest Christian redaction of an originally Jewish text rather than Christian invention de novo. ²³ The Testament of Benjamin 9.2b–5 provides such an example. Based on ‘the words of the righteous Enoch’, Benjamin predicts the destruction of the first Temple and the construction of an even more glorious one. Benjamin speaks of the twelve tribes being gathered together around that last temple, and all the nations as well, ‘until the Most High sends his salvation by the visitation of an only-begotten prophet’, who will be ‘treated with contempt and lifted up on a tree’, with the result that the curtain of the temple will be torn apart and God's spirit pass over to the nations ‘like a fire poured out’, after which the prophet will ascend from Hades into heaven (T. Benj. 9.2b–5).

The material regarding the ‘an only-begotten prophet’ and his fate (to be disgraced and crucified), and the events that follow, is clearly Christian, but it intrudes upon the eschatological scheme otherwise invoked here. The gathering of the twelve tribes and the nations to the restored Temple prior to the appearance, death, and resurrection of this ‘only-begotten prophet’ signals the secondary insertion of the latter. Jewish eschatology might look to the regathering of the twelve tribes and even the ingathering of the non-Jewish nations before the appearing of the Lord (i.e. God), but Christian eschatology consistently considers this eschatological gathering of Israel and the nations to happen as a result of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the mission of the apostles, to be perfected at the second coming of the Lord—but certainly not before the completion of his earthly course. ²⁴ The Christian material is thus clearly an intrusion, and an imperfect one at that.

5. Distinctively Jewish Content?

Scholars have typically assumed that works grounded in the thought- and story-world of the Jewish Scriptures, but lacking distinctively Christian features, were of Jewish origin. ²⁵ If distinctively Christian features were few and fitted loosely into the context, these could be read as Christian interpolations into an originally Jewish text. The argument that the Testaments cannot be of Christian origin because there is too little distinctively Christian material in them is, however, fallacious. Christians who embraced the Jewish Scriptures and preserved the writings of non-Christian Jews like Philo of Alexandria, for example, were clearly not obsessed only with distinctively Christian questions and interests. ²⁶ James Davila analyzed extended passages from sermons by John Chrysostom and Ephraim the Syrian, showing that Christians could write extensive amounts of material that lacked distinctively Christian signature features. ²⁷ Much of the material within the Testaments would be equally at home in Jewish and Christian circles, since the shared heritage of Judaism and Christianity is so extensive.

Davila, therefore, formulates a more rigorous method for ‘determining whether an ancient literary work (especially an Old Testament pseudepigraphon) is of Jewish, Christian, or other origin’. ²⁸ Beyond general ‘Jewish’ content, he looks for some combination of the following: (1) strong internal evidence that the text was written in the pre-Christian era; (2) compelling evidence that the text was originally composed in Hebrew; (3) evidence of ‘sympathetic concern with the Jewish ritual cult’; (4) evidence of ‘sympathetic concern with Jewish law/Torah and halakha’; and (5) evidence of ‘concern with Jewish ethnic and national interests, particularly self-identification as a Jew, polemics against gentile persecution of Jews, and internal Jewish polemics’. ²⁹

While testing texts against these criteria adds methodological rigor, to be sure, they have an unfortunate side effect of which Davila is himself quite aware. These ‘signature features’ of Jewish literature tend to be features that also more sharply distinguish Jews from non-Jews, or one group of Jews from others. In other words, Davila's methodology makes it difficult to establish that a text is of Jewish origin unless it represents a Judaism of a boundary-maintaining type (and, more specifically, a piece of literature in which these boundary-markers are topical, or at least explicitly mentioned at some point). Texts representing a Judaism that is more open to the Greco-Roman environment, or simply less concerned with boundary-maintaining issues and with the distinctive, external markers of such boundaries, will tend to be excluded. ³⁰ If the Testaments do, in fact, attest to ‘the openness of one of several segments of Judaism during the period of the second Temple to non-Jewish cultural insights and influences, as well as to the inadequacy of the neat division of Jews into the “three philosophies” that historians have inherited from Josephus in his Antiquities (13.171–73)’, ³¹ that evidence will be lost if we accept Davila's criteria to the full extent that he has developed them, and our picture of the varieties of early Judaism will be correspondingly diminished.

Davila believes that ‘a false negative is less harmful than a false positive’ for the reconstruction of early Judaism, ³² but I disagree for many of the same reasons that I find the negative use of the criterion of dissimilarity ultimately unhelpful as a guide to finding material for the reconstruction of the historical Jesus. Skewing in any direction is equally distorting. Nevertheless, taking to heart the criticism of the assumption that texts that are not distinctively Christian can be assumed to be Jewish in origin, I also find that the Testaments meet most of Davila's criteria.

(1) An important piece of internal evidence for dating the Testaments points to an origin in the Hasmonean period, before Roman domination began to be felt in Judea. Naphtali sees a ‘holy writing’ that says: ‘Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Elamites, Galachians, Chaldaeans, Syrians, shall in turn take captive the twelve tribes of Israel’ (T. Naph. 5.1–8). ³³ The appearance of ‘Syrians’ in the final position in this list, and the absence of mention of the Romans, points strongly to a pre-Roman-period date. When Jewish and Christian authors writing after the turn of the era mention the succession of empires, particularly with the oppression of God's people in view, Rome stands prominently in the climactic position. When Josephus or the author of 4 Ezra (11.1–12.39; see especially 12.10–12) give their political interpretations of Daniel's beasts, Rome is the fourth (displacing the Greco-Syrian kings, in fact). When John the Seer does the same, all of Daniel's beasts come together in Rome as the climax of the series (Rev. 13.1–2). The absence of the mention of Rome here suggests composition at a time when Rome was still only barely visible on the horizon. ³⁴

An important traditional-historical question pertinent to the Testaments ‘origin concerns the messianism of these texts. In their present state, this messianism is far from uniform—which, in itself, is a fair reflection of early Judaism. Some of the Testaments articulate an expectation of two messianic figures, a priestly one emerging from the line of Levi and a kingly one coming from the line of Judah, a messianic view also well attested among the Dead Sea Scrolls. ³⁵ This is rooted in the Testaments ‘vision for the division of power, as it were, between the priesthood and the secular arm. In the Testament of Judah, Judah affirms that ‘the Lord gave me the kingdom and [Levi] the priesthood; and he made the kingdom inferior to the priesthood’ (T. Jud. 21.2), with the result that Levi has primacy even over Judah and the monarchical powers in Israel. Issachar echoes this elevation of these two tribes and the differentiation of their roles: ‘Levi and Judah were honored by the Lord among Jacob's sons; for the Lord gave them each their share, and to the one he gave the priesthood and to the other the kingdom’ (T. Iss. 5.8).

Looking ahead to God's future acts on behalf of God's people, the Testaments often distinguish the roles that the future leaders from Levi and Judah will play. Naphtali urged his descendants to ‘keep united with Levi and Judah; for through Judah will salvation come to Israel, and in him will Jacob be blessed’ (T. Naph. 8.2–3). Military deliverance and political leadership are here predicated upon a figure that will arise from Judah (in keeping with Jub. 31.19, in the context of Isaac's blessing Levi and Judah). Simeon also clearly distinguished between the roles of Levi's descendant and Judah's descendant in Israel's future deliverance: ‘And now, my children, obey Levi, and through Judah you will be redeemed. And do not exalt yourselves against these two tribes, because from them the salvation of God will arise for you.’ This deliverance is led by two figures: ‘For the Lord will raise up from Levi someone as a high priest and from Judah someone as king…This one will save…the race of Israel’ (T. Sim. 7.1–2). ³⁶ The final clause, which has its own textual issues, refers to the king from Judah through whom physical deliverance is expected (as in T. Naph. 8.2–3; Jub. 31.19). The future role of the descendant of Levi is given due attention in T. Levi 18, where his duties will be complementary to those of his counterpart from Judah. ³⁷

In one passage, secular power is ascribed to Levi alone. Reuben predicts that his descendants

The elevation of Levi as ‘king’ here stands in tension with most of the other Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, where Levi, though still the superior head of state, is strictly a priest, while Judah is given the role of king and begetter of kings (T. Sim. 7.1–2; T. Jud. 21.2–6; T. Iss. 5.7). The kingship may be inferior to the priesthood in T. Jud. 21.2, but the two offices are still given to different people, quite opposed to the vision of T. Reub. 6.11–12, in which the priest who interprets the law and offers sacrifice also functions as the ruling power among the tribes of Israel, even as ‘an eternal king’. When we read here that the Lord gave sovereignty also ‘to Judah (and with them also to me and Dan and Joseph, that we should be rulers)’, the claim clearly has the character of an afterthought, ³⁸ and quite likely a later Jewish addition intended to bring this passage more in line with the dual focus on Levi and Judah that otherwise pervades the Testaments. ³⁹

The lines are more blurred in some Testaments, where God's future deliverance is expected to emerge from both tribes (T. Levi 2.11; T. Dan 5.4; T. Gad 8.1; T. Jos. 19.7). No doubt, Christian scribes also sought, over the centuries, to shape the text in ways that would suggest that Jesus fulfilled the expectations of both, since there was no room for ‘double messianism’ in their context, ⁴⁰ contributing to the textual and conceptual confusion.

The ‘eschatology’ and historical reminiscences in the Testaments point most clearly to concerns relevant to the Hasmonean period. The Testament of Reuben may reflect a pro-Hasmonean stage in the development of the Testaments. In this testament, the Hasmonean high priest is greeted as the ‘priest of the order of Melchizedek’, an association made not to justify non-Levitical lineage (as in Christian discourse), but to justify the combination of the roles of ‘priest of the Most High God’ and ‘King of Jerusalem’ in one person. ⁴¹ Several are more critical of the Hasmonean line. The balance between Levi and Judah in the Testaments, specifically assigning the priesthood to the latter line and the ‘secular authority’ and military power to the former, resembles the anticipation of a ‘messiah of Aaron’ alongside a ‘messiah of Israel’ at Qumran, rejecting the consolidation of the priesthood and kingship in one person during the Hasmonean dynasty. The linking of Judah specifically with ‘salvation’ may particularly point to disaffection with the Hasmonean ‘solution’ to the problem of Gentile domination. These considerations suggest that the Testaments were originally composed during the Hasmonean period, and that their eschatological hopes took shape under the shadow of increasing discontent with that dynasty. ⁴²

(2) Though Hebrew and Aramaic precursors to the Testaments do exist, and though there are clear connections between the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and these earlier testaments, current scholarship weighs against the thesis that the Testaments were composed in Hebrew. ⁴³ Of course, neither was most Jewish literature surviving from the Second Temple period (considering just the expansive corpus of Philo, Josephus, and the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha that were composed in Greek), which makes this criterion especially problematic.

(3) The Testaments evidence ‘sympathetic concern with the Jewish ritual cult’. This comes to expression most clearly in Testament of Levi 9, where, in the tradition of Jubilees, ⁴⁴ Isaac teaches Levi ‘the law of the Lord’, which includes specifically ‘the law of the priesthood, of sacrifices, of whole-offerings, of first-fruits, of freewill-offerings, of peace-offerings’ (T. Levi 9.6–7), the requirements for ritual purification before and after offering sacrifices, the kinds of wood to use for the fire of offerings, the requirement of offering only ‘clean’ animals as opposed to ‘unclean’, and even the prescription that salt must be added to every sacrifice (T. Levi 9.9–14; Lev. 2.13). Issachar also speaks, in his testament, of his own care in offering the first fruits to the Lord through the priest throughout his life (T. Iss. 3.6). Moreover, there is no suggestion of the supersession of these sacrifices in the death of some Messiah, as figures so prominently in early Christian discourse about the Jewish sacrificial system (e.g. in the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Letter of Barnabas).

(4) The Testaments also show ‘sympathetic concern with Jewish law/Torah’, although perhaps not with halakha in the extreme detail evidenced, for example, in Qumran's 4QMMT (‘Some Works of the Law’). The author consistently points the audience to the doing of the law of the Lord as the path to enjoying a bright future.

Levi instructs his children to give priority to literacy and to prize knowing the law of the Lord and the wisdom that comes there from above all else (T. Levi 13.1–9). Torah and its wisdom are possessions that cannot be taken away. ⁴⁵ The law is a light entrusted to Israel, through whom it would come to enlighten all races of people (T. Levi 14.4). Levi calls Israel to choose Torah as the path of light in ways that cannot fail to recall Moses’ invitation at the close of Deuteronomy: ‘Choose for yourselves either darkness or light, either the law of the Lord of the ways of Beliar’ (T. Levi 19.1; cf. Deut. 30.19–20). The identification of the Torah as the way of ‘light’ throughout this testament (see also T. Levi 14.4), the way that stands opposed to the path of darkness and the devil, suggests an originally pre-Christian Jewish milieu for the composition of these texts.

Judah opens his exhortations with a summons ‘to perform the ordinances of the Lord and to obey the commandment of God’ (T. Jud. 13.1). The language of this thesis statement again recalls Deut. 30.15–20, especially Deut. 30.16, which combines ‘ordinance’ (ἐντoλή) and ‘commandment’ (δικαιὡμα). The final word of Judah's testament also points squarely to the keeping of the Torah—and the whole Torah—as the path to life and the experience God's blessings: ‘And so, my children, observe the whole of the law of the Lord, for there is hope for all who make straight their way’ (T. Jud. 26.1). There is nothing here, where it counts most, about faith in the messiah, joining the new Israel of God, or anything that might plausibly suggest Christian invention.

Although a Christian scribe has interjected a prediction about God's going to the Gentiles during Israel's period of disobedience and an explicit identification of a deliverer figure as ‘the Savior of the Gentiles’ (T. Dan 6.6–8, 9b), Dan's concluding instruction highlights inner-Jewish concerns: ‘turn from unrighteousness of every kind and hold fast to the righteousness of the law of the Lord; and your race will be kept safe for ever’ (T. Dan 6.10). This unqualified definition of righteousness in terms of Torah-observance and unqualified parting concern with preserving the race of Israel seem to locate the testament's original composition in Jewish circles with ethnic interests. ⁴⁶

Naphtali's concluding exhortation recommends the doing of the law of God, here as the means by which to remain in God's love: ‘Be wise in God, and prudent; and understand the order of his commandments and the laws of every action, so that the Lord may love you’ (T. Naph. 8.7–10, de Jonge's translation). The kind of meditation on the application of Torah commended by Naphtali, coupled with the conviction that God's love for the individual is linked somehow to that individual's devotion to the law (rather than, for example, trust in or fidelity toward God's Son), strongly suggest that this text arose in a pre-Christian (or, at least, non-Christian) Jewish setting.

Asher's exhortation turns his descendants’ focus entirely upon the law of God:

This was Asher's own orientation throughout his own life: ‘I have not strayed from the path of truth which the Lord marked out; and I have examined the commandments of the Most High and lived, so far as I could, with a single aspect directed to what is good’ (T. Ash. 5.4). Similarly, Asher urges his descendants to ‘keep the law of the Lord’ and ‘persevere in…all the Lord's commandments’ (T. Ash 6.3).

Benjamin similarly concludes his testament with the injunction to ‘keep the law of the Lord and his commands. For these things, I tell you, are of greater value than anything else I can bequeath to you: you too, then, must give them to your children as an eternal possession; for so did Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’ (T. Benj. 10.3–4). In keeping with the depiction of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Jubilees, we find Benjamin passing on his knowledge of God's law (which would not otherwise be revealed until the theophany on Mount Sinai), and commanding his descendants to continue to do the same as the most valuable inheritance they, in turn, can leave for their children. ⁴⁷

Given the pervasive emphasis on Jesus and the wisdom and Spirit poured out upon the church through the ‘Son’ throughout early Christian literature, and the limitations placed on the role of Torah particularly in Pauline Christianity, these absolute claims regarding Torah's value seem to reflect Jewish rather than Christian ideology. Indeed, it is truly surprising not to find Christian scribes adding qualifications at this point, which confirms the view that Christian scribal glosses were largely limited to the eschatological/prophetic sections of the Testaments.

It is true that important Jewish signature features are not explicitly promoted. Despite the focus throughout on the value of observing God's law, the Testaments ‘nowhere teach the observance of the sabbath, or of circumcision, or of the dietary laws’. ⁴⁸ If, however, we demand the presence of these ‘signature features’ in a document we will call Jewish, we prejudice our reconstruction of early Judaism toward boundary-maintaining Judaisms only, as Davila acknowledges. The commendation of the ritual law, without any typically Christian attempts to limit the applicability of value thereof, is perhaps a sufficient ‘signature feature’. ⁴⁹ Moreover, the patriarchs commend the keeping of the ‘whole’ law (see, e.g., T. Jud. 26.1), at no place suggesting that any parts of the Torah would cease to be valid and binding upon their descendants. The author may not feel the need especially to uphold and promote Jewish ‘signature features’ because they are not being specially called into question in his context.

The view of Torah in the Testaments also has more in common with Jubilees, a Jewish text from the second century BCE, than early Christian writings. Hollander and de Jonge attempt to argue otherwise on the basis of a comparison between the Testaments and the works of Justin Martyr:

But Justin Martyr's view, which is also very much Paul's view (Gal. 3.15–19), does not correlate with the view of the law in the Testaments. Like Jubilees, the Testaments assert the eternal validity of the Torah by portraying the pre-Mosaic patriarchs as people who already know and walk in line with Torah's distinctive commandments (and not merely those that might be described as universally ethical) long before the giving of the law on Sinai. In particular, the attention given to the ritual law in T. Levi 9.5–7 as something passed on from Isaac to Levi resonates with the view of Jubilees that the law in all its particulars—the sacrificial cult as well as any so-called natural precepts ⁵¹ —had been revealed to the patriarchs, and was thus not Moses’ innovation. This view of the law contradicts the view promoted by Paul and leading Christian theologians like Justin. In the Testaments, the essentials of Torah were known to the patriarchs, and were passed along by them. Knowledge of the law came with their knowledge of the one God. Therefore those who read the Testaments from this other side of the giving of the law at Sinai know that it is there, in the Mosaic law in its entirety, that they are to look to discover what the patriarchs were learning as they grew in their acquaintance with this same God.

The Testaments also adopt the Deuteronomistic interpretation of Israel's history that runs consistently throughout Second Temple-period Jewish literature, whereby following Torah leads to the experience of God's favor and protection while a general neglect of Torah leads to national disaster. Texts like 2 Maccabees, Judith, Baruch, and 4 Ezra promote observance of Torah by means of such an interpretation of Israel's history, and the sin–exile–return passages running throughout the ‘prophetic’ portions of the Testaments, which link the renewal of the experience of God's covenant promises with a return to covenant obedience, do likewise. Christian material often intrudes upon these passages, such that in our extant manuscripts ‘the repetition of the pattern serves to describe the history of the descendants of the patriarchs till the coming of Jesus Christ (T.N.), to emphasize the sins of the priests from the tribe of Levi (and others) against Jesus Christ (T.L.; T.Z.; T.A.), and to describe the history of Israel in the years between the first and the second advent (T.L.; T.Z.; T.A.)’. ⁵² But the Christian material often introduces anachronisms into an otherwise tight and recognizable pattern, giving strong evidence that they are secondary additions, distracting the reader from the original goal of the Testaments, namely the promotion of the Torah-observant way of life as a path to individual and national well-being. ⁵³

(5) The Testaments also show themselves concerned ‘with Jewish ethnic and national interests, particularly self-identification as a Jew, polemics against gentile persecution of Jews, and internal Jewish polemics’. ⁵⁴ The exhortation to cleave to Levi and Judah that runs throughout the Testaments would be read, first, as a warning against the division of the kingdom after the reign of Solomon and the departure from the ‘authorized’ cult located in the Southern Kingdom, in the Jerusalem Temple. Throughout the reviews of history, ample attention is given to internal Jewish affairs, particularly disaffection with the current state of the priesthood. The hope for future restoration for the whole people of Israel is cast in terms of ‘righting’ this historical wrong, with Levi and Judah emerging at the center of a restored, unified Israel. They give voice to the hope that God's future interventions will include the defeat of Israel's enemies (T. Sim. 6.3–4); where consideration is given to the conversion of the nations to the worship of the One God, it is always alongside and in relationship to ethnic Israel, whose identity and boundaries are never lost to view. The Testament of Judah closes with a vision of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and the patriarchs rising again to life to be chiefs over their tribes and of the reversal of all ills:

This vision of the future kingdom is strikingly lacking in peculiarly Christian details, and its climactic focus on the destiny of Jacob and Israel particularly highlights the ethnic/national concerns of the author. Finally, Levi's interest in endogamy reflected in his condemnation of marrying Gentile women and purifying them ‘with an unlawful purification’ (T. Levi 14.6) voices an inner-Jewish concern and strategy for the preservation of ethnic boundaries.

6. Tradition Criticism

Two further questions may help us determine whether or not a text developing Jewish scriptural material is, in fact, of Jewish or Christian origin when obvious ‘signature features’ are lacking or indeterminate. The first is: Does the text in question develop a topic or figure in ways that are consonant with other known, early Christian texts’ development of the same, or in ways that are contrary to and therefore problematic within early Christian discourse? If the latter, does Christian invention of the Testaments better explain the evidence than Christian redaction (‘domestication’, ‘coopting’) of the same? The second question pertains to the ‘conversations’ reflected within the particular text: Do the Testaments evidence interaction with identifiably Christian traditions, or do they show an awareness, rather, only of pre-Christian Jewish literature? In other words, how can an analysis of the Testaments ‘intertexture’ help us locate their origin?

To take up the latter question first, the Testaments betray no acquaintance with early Christian literature. Rather, they reverberate with Genesis, with other Jewish scriptural texts, and with extrabiblical Jewish literature such as Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and literature from Qumran. The expansion of Reuben's story has much in common with the version found in Jub. 33.1–8, where we also find Reuben catching sight of Bilhah bathing, entering her tent secretly and laying with her while she is asleep. Judah's story is developed in ways that recall Jubilees, particularly in regard to the ‘wars’ against foreign and rival tribes, including Esau and his sons (T. Jud. 2.1–7.11; 9.1–8; Jub. 34.1–9; 37.1–38.14). There are multiple references to books of Enoch (T. Dan 5.6; T. Jud. 18.1; T. Sim. 5.4; T. Naph. 4.1; T. Jos. 9.1; T. Levi 10.5; 14.1; 16.1; T. Benj. 9.1), which emerge as authoritative witnesses to the future rebellion or apostasy of the children of Israel, and the consequences thereof. ⁵⁵ Reuben blames women as a source of temptation, speaking of their alluring even the Watchers into fornication (T. Reub. 5.6). While 1 Enoch appears rather to put the full onus on the Watchers themselves, the author of the Testament is still looking to this story to make his point, rather than the story of the Fall (Gen. 3.1–17), as is more typical for Christian authors. Presenting women as active plotters against men's self-mastery and sexual virtue has more in common with the ethos of Ben Sira than that of the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers. In a manner reminiscent of 1 Enoch 1–5, Naphtali observes how ‘sun, moon, and stars do not change their order’, and his descendants should show the same constancy with regard to ordering their lives according to the law of God. The Gentiles ‘changed their order’ by turning from the worship of the living God to idols; the residents of Sodom ‘changed the order of its nature’; the Watchers ‘also changed the order of their nature’, resulting in the flood. ⁵⁶ Naphtali desires that his descendants not follow suit (T. Naph. 3.1–5).

The Testament of Levi shows clear connections with a pre-Christian, Jewish text, namely Aramaic Levi. ⁵⁷ Extant fragments of Aramaic Levi provide remarkable parallels with T. Levi 11–13, particularly in regard to the chronology of Levi's life and the births of his children, as well as to several of his instructions, for example the emphasis on teaching literacy to the descendants of Levi. While Hollander and de Jonge caution against assuming that the author of the Testament of Levi used the Aramaic traditions about Levi that we just happen to have discovered, since archaeological chance plays a huge part here, they are also prepared to regard the Aramaic Levi texts as kin to material that the author of the Testament of Levi used and incorporated, and to employ synoptic comparison where the material overlaps to inquire into the method and purpose of the author of the Greek Testament of Levi. ⁵⁸ Similarly, Naphtali's testament opens with an account of the genealogy of Bilhah and Zilpah that is found elsewhere, in extant literature, only among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q215 1.2–5). The Testaments ‘anthropology, which prominently features various ‘spirits’ that invade the person for good or for ill, most closely resembles the ‘two spirits’ of error and truth so prominent in Qumran literature (as, e.g., 1QS 3.13–4.26, though literary dependence is not hereby suggested).

The world of ‘textual conversations’ within the Testaments remains very much a pre-Christian Jewish world. The early Christian pseudepigraphon known as 5 Ezra (2 Esd. 1–2), dating from the mid-second century CE, provides an informative contrast. While it contains no explicitly Christian content, ⁵⁹ it nevertheless clearly echoes the language of specific passages in the Gospel of Matthew and in Revelation, showing that these texts were part of the thought-world of the author, thereby locating the author within the Christian community. The author of 5 Ezra saw no problem with ‘anticipating’ Christian texts (i.e. through intertextual resonances) in a text attributed to Ezra, the sixth-century BCE scribe. If Christians had composed the Testaments, especially after the first century and the broadening dissemination of authoritative Christian writings, would they fail to introduce (consciously or otherwise) echoes of their own formative literature and tradition? This absence, it seems to me, argues for Christian redacting (with the addition of Christian glosses or commentary), not composition, of the Testaments. ⁶⁰

It is not, however, merely the case that the Testaments fail to resonate with known early Christian texts. They also contradict early Christian discourse in surprising ways at a number of points. To consider a less weighty example, the Testaments persistently articulate a different vision for the leadership of the twelve tribes in God's eschatological future. The expectation throughout the Testaments is that the patriarchs themselves would rise to life to govern their tribes in God's future (T. Sim. 6.7; T. Levi 18.14; T. Jud. 25.1; T. Zeb. 10.1–4; T. Ben. 10.6–10). This contradicts the probably authentic saying of Jesus that his own disciples would sit enthroned governing the twelve tribes when God's kingdom comes (Mt. 19.28), ⁶¹ and stands also in tension with the place accorded to these same twelve apostles in the New Jerusalem in another stream of early Christian tradition (Rev. 21.14).

A weightier example is the elevation of Levi throughout the Testaments, and the genealogical connection between Levi and the future priest under whom, in conjunction with Judah, God's future for Israel would be realized. Given early Christian discourse about the priesthood of Jesus and the ways in which it is legitimated, it seems to me impossible to conceive of a Christian composing a collection of texts that would work so hard to redeem Levi (who, together with Simeon, stood under Jacob's curse and was passed over in favor of Judah; see Gen. 49.5–12), when other Christian leaders had already found perfectly sufficient grounds upon which to legitimate Jesus’ high priesthood other than the invention of a genetic link between Levi and Jesus (alongside the generally acknowledged link between Judah and Jesus). ⁶²

The genealogies of Jesus found in Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ lineage back to Judah (Mt. 1.2–3; Lk. 3.33). John the Seer speaks of Jesus under the guise of ‘the lion from the tribe of Judah’ (Rev. 5.5), betraying a complete lack of interest in Levi and any connection between a messiah and that tribe. Paul accepts this Judahite lineage by virtue of affirming Jesus’ descent from David (Rom. 1.3). The one author who indirectly introduces priestly branches into Jesus’ extended family tree (Lk. 1.5) makes no explicit claims about the degree of Mary's relationship to Elisabeth, and therefore Jesus’ connection to a priestly line. Most tellingly, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews explicitly affirms Jesus’ descent from Judah and acknowledges his lack of any genealogical pedigree for priesthood through Levi's line. Indeed, this author believes it to be ‘well known’ (πρὁδηλoν) ‘that our Lord sprang up from Judah, in reference to which tribe Moses said nothing about priests’ (Heb. 7.14).

The author of Hebrews solves the problem not by inventing a genealogical connection through Mary, but by appealing to an oracle of God that would legitimate a non-levitical priesthood, fixing upon Ps. 110.4: ‘The Lord has sworn, and will not change his mind: you are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek’. An appeal to Ps. 110.4 is contrary to an appeal to genealogical descent from Levi, at least in Christian discourse as represented by Hebrews, for the eternal priest must come, according to this text, from an entirely different line than the line of Levi. The rejection of Levi and elevation of Judah in Genesis 49 is much more conducive to early Christian discourse with its promotion of the priest after the order of Melchizedek, the priestly messiah and king from the line of Judah, as attested by every passage concerning Jesus’ genealogy in the New Testament. The concerted effort to elevate the priesthood (Levi) over any other line would be quite foreign to early Christian interests and strategies. Early Christians could co-opt this kind of material, but would scarcely have invented it. ⁶³

7. Hyper-Christian Readings of the Testaments

An important, and often overlooked, aspect of this discussion pertains to the careful identification of what truly constitutes Christian material in the Testaments. Scholars are often content to be more impressionistic in regard to this question: if a passage seems to resonate with something read in the New Testament or something that can be predicated of Jesus, then that passage must be Christian in origin. Lack of diligence here leads, in turn, to augmenting the impression that Christian material is pervasive and more integral to the Testaments than truly is the case.

The Testament of Judah, which is almost entirely at home within a non-Christian Jewish milieu, expresses this vision for God's eschatological agent:

The topic of the ‘sinlessness’ of God's agent automatically suggests that the passage contains distinctively Christian material since, from the earliest period, Christians stressed Jesus’ sinlessness (see, e.g., 2 Cor. 5.21; Heb. 4.15; 7.26–27; 1 Pet. 2.22). The Psalms of Solomon, however, already feature the sinlessness of God's anointed one within a Jewish messianic paradigm: ‘And he himself is pure from sin, so that he may rule a great people, that he may rebuke rulers, and remove sinners by the might of his word’ (Pss. Sol. 17.36). Christians spoke of the fulfillment of the prophecy of a ‘star’ coming forth from Jacob (Num. 24.17) in Jesus, but the images of ‘star’ and ‘scepter’ from that prophetic text figured prominently in numerous Jewish messianic texts. ⁶⁴ Later Christians finding this language in the Testaments would naturally have tried to read—and through their editorial work help others read—the Testaments as Christocentric prophecy, but this does not necessarily reflect the significance that the original author would have attached to this vision.

The Testament of Judah 24.2 is read as a Christian reminiscence of the baptism of Jesus, ⁶⁵ at which, according to Matthew, ‘the heavens were opened [to him], and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him’ (Mt. 3.16–17; cf. Lk. 3.21–22). But this is not the only plausible frame of reference. The prophet Malachi spoke of God's promise to open the heavens and pour down blessing upon Israel (Mal. 3.10). In the context of Malachi, this promise is preceded by God's purifying the descendants of Levi to function as holy, effective priests (Mal. 3.1–14), a major topic of the preceding Testament of Levi. It is also in this context that God promises to make ‘the sun of righteousness’ to rise upon all who revere God's name (Mal. 4.2; cf. T. Jud. 24.1). This passage in T. Jud. 24.1–6 plausibly represents a non-Christian Jewish messianic reading of Malachi's ‘sun of righteousness’ as a pure human agent under whom God would open the heavens and upon whom God would pour out God's blessing—now further specified as God's spirit (perhaps under the influence of Isa. 11.1–2)—for the benefit of the whole people, in whose time the promises that Israel would be God's sons and daughters and fulfill God's covenant law reliably, so as to experience its blessings consistently, would come to pass. It is only our own location on the recent side of the composition of Matthew and Luke that presses the comparison with Jesus’ baptism upon us, while other plausible frames of reference existed in the period before Jesus. ⁶⁶

Issachar promises his descendants that, if they follow his example of love for God and neighbor, ‘every spirit of Beliar will turn and run, and nothing that wicked people can do will prevail against you; and you will gain mastery over every wild beast, since you have with you the God of heaven, sharing human company [lit., “walking with people”], in simplicity of heart’ (T. Iss. 7.7). Charles suggested that the clause ‘walking with people’ was a Christian interpolation. ⁶⁷ However, the description of God ‘walking with people’ who do good and exhibit simplicity of heart is not distinctively incarnational language. It is a reminiscence—and therefore restoration—of the state of Eden, where God ‘walked’ to seek out the company of those first human beings God had created, who, in their simplicity, could ‘walk’ with God. Moses asks God to continue to ‘walk’ with the Hebrews despite their waywardness (Exod. 33.16; 34.9) and assures Joshua that God will be ‘the one who walks with you’ (σuμπoρεuὁμενoς μετά σοŭ, Deut. 31.8). The entirety of the Testament of Issachar, down to this particular phrase, can be fully understood within the framework of non-Christian Judaism. ⁶⁸

Zebulon urges his descendants ‘to keep the Lord's commands, and to show mercy to your neighbor and be compassionate towards all people’ (T. Zeb. 5.1), because ‘as a person treats his or her neighbor, so also will the Lord treat that person’ (T. Zeb. 5.3). He repeats this admonition toward the conclusion of his testament:

Hollander and de Jonge read this as explicitly incarnational, and therefore Christian, language: ‘The author clearly thinks of God coming upon the earth in the form of a man, sc. Jesus Christ’. ⁶⁹ The text speaks, however, of God visiting God's people with compassion, emphasizing an eschatological (compassionate) reversal of their state. That God will dwell wherever God finds a compassionate heart speaks against an incarnational reading, since Jesus was limited to one place at any one time. This is, rather, a statement about the omnipresent God dwelling with, and bringing God's eschatological manifestation of divine compassion to, people of compassion—an eschatological rationale, moreover, for heeding the exhortation to show compassion. Nothing in this context, then, supports a Christocentric reading of 8.2, let alone the assertion that the author of this line was Christian.

Naphtali's testament also speaks about the eschatological manifestation of God's ‘compassion’. After a second apostasy, Israel will suffer a second scattering ‘over the whole surface of the earth, until the Lord's compassion comes’ (T. Naph. 4.1–5). Unlike T. Zeb. 8.2, where the coming of the Lord's compassion is not linked to the appearance of any human agent, T. Naph. 4.5 appends an interpretation of the ‘Lord's compassion’ as indicating ‘a man that does righteousness and deals mercifully with all those who are far off and those who are near by’. Hollander and de Jonge read this as ‘clearly referring to the coming of Jesus Christ for the nations and Israel’, ⁷⁰ and, indeed, they are on much firmer ground here than in regard to the Testament of Zebulon. However, this secondary intrusion need not have been introduced by a Christian scribe, nor be taken to represent a Christian perspective. The prophet Isaiah, who lent this passage the idea of someone bringing the word of peace ‘to those who are far off and to those who are near’ (Isa. 57.19), had lauded Cyrus, king of Persia, as the righteous instrument of God's compassionate deliverance of God's people. The passage in the Testament of Naphtali could similarly refer to any human figure through whom God's deliverance would come.

The author of the Testament of Naphtali addresses not merely the scattering of Israel and Judah in 721 BCE (Israel) and 587 BCE (Judah), but names a second experience of the curses of Deuteronomy when, after their return from exile, the Jewish people again abandon the Torah. It is impossible to bypass the Hellenization crisis of 175–164 BCE and its disastrous consequences for Jerusalem in particular and Judea in general. Even though it did not involve widespread deportation, the oppression of Judea under Antiochus IV and his local representatives came to be spoken of as a new exile in Jewish memory. The author of this testament may have looked to a member of the Hasmonean house, which had led the nation to political and religious independence for the first time again since 587 BCE, as the ‘man that does righteousness and deals mercifully’, through whom God's compassion was poured out again upon Israel. This would comport well with the Hasmonean context generally associated with the origins of the Testaments and its early stages of editing (with the rise of disaffection toward this new dynasty).

Naphtali turns to predictions concerning the good future that God will bring about through Levi and Judah:

In T. Naph. 8.2, ‘salvation’ is said to spring up from the tribe of Judah alone (even though Levi is mentioned with Judah in the preceding verse). Scholars have taken this emphasis on Judah as a sign of Christian composition ⁷¹ or Christian editing, ⁷² given the connections between Jesus and Judah in the New Testament. However, this passage accurately reflects the pre-Christian thought of Jub. 31.12–20. Upon his deathbed, Isaac takes Levi with his right hand, indicating his superiority, and Judah with his left hand. Isaac establishes Levi in the priesthood with all of its duties, and then turns to Judah, however, and says, ‘In you shall be Jacob's help, and in you shall be found Israel's salvation’ (Jub. 31.19). With no prejudice against Levi, who is elevated beyond Judah in Jubilees as in the Testaments, Judah is more specifically named as the vehicle through which God's political deliverance will come on Israel's behalf.

Some read the promise of God ‘dwelling among human beings on the earth’ in this passage as a Christian interpolation. ⁷³ That God should ‘appear’ and effect Israel's deliverance reflects both the diction and the themes of Jewish eschatology (see Ps. 102.16; Isa. 40.5; 60.2). The promise of God dwelling with human beings, moreover, is rooted in the Torah and the Hebrew prophets (compare Lev. 26.11–12; Ezek. 37.27). Once again, the incarnational lens is one that modern scholars (and, no doubt, earlier Christian readers) bring to the text, rather than a necessary background for the text.

In the Testament of Gad, Gad and Judah sell Joseph for 30 pieces of gold (T. Gad 5.6–11), whereas Joseph is sold for 20 silver coins in the MT version of Gen. 37.28. The change in value is not, however, the result of a Christian author's or editor's attempt to make of Joseph a precursor of Jesus. ⁷⁴ Such a possibility is belied by the fact that Joseph is sold for 30 gold coins here, rather than 30 silver coins, as was Jesus. The change in currency from silver to gold coins is the result of the influence of the Septuagint version of Gen. 37.28, where Joseph was sold for 20 gold coins. The author of the Testament of Gad increases this to 30 coins to allow for Judah and Gad's embezzlement of 10 coins before showing the 20 remaining coins (the official price in public knowledge, hence the scriptural record, of the sale) to their brothers.

Gad warns that hatred distorts one's ability to assess matters accurately: ‘it makes small things out to be great, represents darkness as light, calls what is sweet bitter, and breeds slander and wrath’ (T. Gad 5.1). As a result, ‘just as love would bring back the dead to life and revoke a death sentence, so hatred would kill those who are alive and allow no one to live who is guilty of even the smallest crime’ (T. Gad 4.6). Robert Kugler finds ‘the reference to Jesus as a miracle worker and redeemer of the lost’ here to be ‘transparent’, ⁷⁵ but this transparency is the result of the reader's lens. The argumentative purpose of 4.6a (the wish, out of love, to restore the dead to life or nullify a death sentence) is to provide a contrast to the action of hatred upon the human soul in 4.6b (the tendency of hatred to seek to destroy another's life, often inflicting harm way out of proportion to the injury), highlighting by antithesis the difference between love and hate. It is not likely to imply a reference to Jesus, as love ‘incarnate’, actually resuscitating the dead (though readers from the period after Jesus’ ministry may always infer what they will).

Kugler also reads the reference to Joseph spending ‘three days and three nights’ in the pit (T. Zeb. 4.4) as a detail that ‘is almost certainly meant to make him a type of Jesus’, hence a sign of Christian authorship. ⁷⁶ Early Christian readers would indeed have been inclined to read through such a lens, but this does not in itself point to Christian invention of the text. The exact phrase ‘three days and three nights’ appears twice in the Septuagint. In 1 Sam 30.12, it refers to the length of time that an Egyptian slave had been left in the desert without food or water before David found him. More famously, Jonah was said to have been in the belly of the great fish for ‘three days and three nights’ (Jonah 1.17). A Jewish author might easily have latched upon this phrase, which was closely associated with times of liminality and hardship, in the course of elaborating upon Joseph's trials without any need for us to posit an intent informed by Christian typology (though it would be amenable to the same later in its reception history).

Asher, looking beyond Israel's predicted disobedience, looks ahead to the day on which God will gather his descendants ‘in faith through hope on [God's] compassion (εὐσπλαγχνία), for the sake of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’ (T. Ash. 7.7). Robert Kugler claims that the author thus affirms that ‘faith in Jesus alone suffices to please God’, since ‘T. Zeb. 8.2 had previously called Jesus God's compassion (σπλάγχνον)’. Therefore, ‘lawkeeping, at least in this instance, is not necessary for salvation; faith in God's compassion, Jesus, suffices’. ⁷⁷ Such a Christocentric reading is, however, unwarranted. The Testament of Zebulon 8.2 does not support the identification of Jesus as God's compassion, which already invalidates Kugler's argument. He had also mistranslated the preposition διά in T. Ash. 7.7 as ‘through hope’ when the accusative form of ‘hope’ would rather require ‘on account of the hope of his compassion’. The second διά clause, ‘on account of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’, provides by way of apposition an explanation of the basis for this hope: it is God's faithfulness to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (and not anything attributed to Jesus’ intervention) that ultimately provides the basis for Israel's hope of being gathered and restored to their land. The absence of any distinctive Christian formulation or idea in this verse is almost as striking as Kugler's Christianizing reading of it.

8. Some More Complicated Passages in the Testaments

9. Conclusion

Should we use the Testaments as a window into Second Temple-period Judaism and, thus, as a window into the ethical and eschatological thought-world that contributed to early Christianity, or should we rather read them merely as a product of early Christianity? The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in its present form is a Christian text preserved within Christian communities, and there is indeed value in studying them as windows into the concerns of the Christians who preserved them. However, the impossibility of establishing the exact wording of the original, Jewish form of the Testaments with methodological precision at some points has led some scholars only to value reading the Testaments as a Christian document.

This position moves well beyond scholarly caution into a counsel of despair. While we may not recover with certainty the ipsissima verba of the pre-Christian version of the Testaments, we do not need therefore to abandon the Testaments as a witness to pre-Christian Jewish reflection on ethics, eschatology, and the stories of the patriarchs themselves. There are sufficient text-critical and literary-critical grounds to certify the fact of Christian glossing and expanding, if not the precise extent. There are also sufficient traditional-critical grounds for affirming that the Testaments are best explained as a Jewish text that was later adapted to Christian interests than an original Christian composition. Scholars have also tended to exaggerate the extent of the Christian content of the Testaments, not sufficiently recognizing the extent to which their own awareness of New Testament traditions has colored their reading of the Testaments and, therefore, their assessment of the original author's or authors’ awareness of early Christian traditions and interest in the Christian messiah. ⁹⁵