The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

In modern English a testament is a will. In this literature it is a genre, and a rich one. A famous figure is shown near death; he gathers his descendants; he recounts his life, confesses his failures, explains their spiritual causes, warns his children, exhorts them to virtue, and speaks of what is coming.

A substantial body of Second Temple Jewish literature grew in that form, with testaments attributed to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the twelve patriarchs, Job, Moses and Adam. The biblical prototype is Genesis 49 above all, but also Jacob's final instructions, Moses' farewell discourses in Deuteronomy, Joshua's last speech and David's last charge.

Fr Stephen De Young calls this collection the most significant example of the genre for understanding the New Testament — and, in 2024, chose it as the first work for The Lord of Spirits' extended treatment of Second Temple literature, saying he regarded it as perhaps the most important such text for Christians to get a handle on. That is a stronger recommendation than he gives any other work in this section.

Dating this collection is its most disputed question, and the disagreement is not a technicality — it changes what the book can be used to prove.

Older scholarship, R. H. Charles above all, reconstructed a substantially pre-Christian Jewish collection into which Christian scribes later inserted interpolations, and treated the task as separating the two. Marinus de Jonge fundamentally challenged that model, arguing that the Greek form cannot simply be peeled apart into a pure Jewish original and obvious Christian additions.

What the collection probably contains is genuinely ancient Jewish traditions, Second Temple testamentary source material, Greek literary composition and redaction, and early Christian interpretation and editing — layered rather than stacked. The safest dating for the surviving Greek collection is broadly late Second Temple through the early Christian centuries, with its present form shaped during Christian transmission, while individual underlying traditions may be substantially older.

Fr Stephen De Young favours a much stronger Second Temple Jewish provenance for the bulk of it. That is his position, recorded as his, and not uncontested consensus.

This is where a catalogue should be more precise than most popular presentations, because a very common sentence about this book is too strong.

Fr Stephen De Young describes the testaments as originally Hebrew, translated into Aramaic and Greek and later into Armenian, Slavonic and other languages, pointing to Hebrew and Aramaic fragments found at Qumran and elsewhere.

The critical qualification is that the complete Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs survive as a Greek literary collection. Related Jewish materials genuinely do survive in Semitic languages — the Aramaic Levi Document, Hebrew Testament of Naphtali traditions, the Qumran Levi material, the Cairo Geniza Levi material. They demonstrate that older Jewish patriarchal testament traditions circulated before or independently of the Greek collection. They are not fragments of our Greek Twelve Testaments in Hebrew.

So: "the Hebrew original of the Testaments was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls" is not a sentence this page will print. What it prints instead is that ancient Hebrew and Aramaic testamentary traditions closely related to portions of the collection — Levi and Naphtali especially — survive at Qumran and the Cairo Geniza, that the complete collection survives in Greek, and that scholars continue to debate how the two relate.

The collection came down principally through the Greek Church, transmitted as apocryphal rather than canonical, and survives in Greek alongside Armenian and Church Slavonic versions and the related Semitic materials. Charles's critical edition used nine Greek manuscripts with Armenian, Slavonic and Hebrew comparative evidence; later scholarship added further Greek witnesses, including manuscripts from Mount Athos.

Fr Stephen De Young stresses the monastic side of that — Athos, St Catherine's at Sinai, Mar Saba — as places where testamentary literature was kept, and uses the collection in his 2018 essay as a leading example of noncanonical literature deliberately preserved in Orthodox Christian culture.

The statement this supports is precise and worth getting right: the Orthodox Church did not canonise the Testaments, and Orthodox monastic communities did a great deal to preserve their manuscript tradition. Medieval Orthodox literary culture plainly did not operate on the rule that anything outside the Bible should be destroyed. Preservation is still not endorsement.

The collection's governing idea is that morality is participation in an unseen conflict. Human action arises out of an interaction between thoughts, desires, passions, virtues, spirits, demonic influence and free will — and the last item never drops out.

This is not a deterministic demonology. A spirit may tempt; a passion may be intensified; Beliar may deceive; and the person remains responsible. Reuben chose. Simeon chose. Dan chose. Gad chose. And each of them can repent, which is what the testaments are for.

The structure is remarkably close to the later Orthodox ascetic account — temptation, thought, consent, passion, act — and the resemblance should be stated as resemblance. There is no evidence of direct dependence, and the later Orthodox system should be sourced from the Desert Fathers, Evagrius, St John Cassian, St Maximus, St John Climacus and the Philokalic tradition. This collection is historical background, not doctrinal foundation.

What it does show, and shows better than anything else in this section, is that the enemy's battlefield was already understood to be the human heart rather than the haunted house. That is why Fr Stephen puts it ahead of far more sensational apocalypses.

The chief adversary is Beliar, a Greek form of Belial — a name known from Hebrew biblical usage, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, from other Second Temple literature, and from the New Testament, where Paul asks what accord Christ has with Belial. Throughout the collection he leads the hostile powers and is associated with deception, lawlessness, the passions, hatred, sexual sin, anger, spiritual blindness, idolatry and opposition to God's people.

Whether Beliar is Satan is the question a catalogue has to answer carefully. Functionally he occupies the satanic adversary's role. Historically, ancient Jewish literature uses Satan, Belial, Beliar, Mastema, Azazel and Sammael with varying degrees of overlap, and building a demonological family tree in which each name must denote a different individual would misread how the literature works. Beliar is the principal satanic adversary of these texts; whether every ancient occurrence of these names refers to precisely the same conceived personality varies by text and tradition.

Beneath him are the spirits of deception, and they are the collection's real contribution. They work through and alongside the passions — lust, anger, envy, hatred, falsehood, greed, arrogance, injustice — so that the dangerous work of a demon here is not a spectacular manifestation but a moral distortion. The unseen world appears inside ordinary experience.

Several testaments look forward to Beliar's defeat, and the framework is the ordinary Jewish apocalyptic one: history is not an endless balance between good and evil, God's righteousness finally triumphs, Beliar's works are destroyed and the righteous inherit peace. Some messianic passages describe the coming deliverer as binding or overcoming him, which invites comparison with the binding of the strong man, with Satan falling like lightning, with the ruler of this world cast out, and with Revelation 20 — as shared Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic expectation rather than as demonstrated dependence.

Reuben's testament is the most important single chapter for anthropology, and the most easily misread.

He confesses his sin with Bilhah and warns his descendants against lust, and then does something unusual: he describes a series of spirits or faculties bound up with human existence and the senses — life, sight, hearing, smell, speech, taste, and the reproductive faculty — and then describes further spirits of deception that exploit them.

The point is not that the senses are demonic. They are created, and the testament distinguishes them from the deceiving spirits that disorder them. The danger arises when a created faculty is turned by passion. That distinction is precisely the one Orthodox ascetic anthropology makes, and it is the reason "the body and the senses are evil" is a misreading of this text rather than a summary of it.

Reuben's account of his own fall is correspondingly analytical. He does not say he made one bad decision; he traces how sight, imagination, desire, opportunity and passion combined. Beliar exploits the process. Reuben remains responsible for it.

Three testaments give the collection's finest psychological writing, and each takes one passion apart.

Simeon's is envy, and its object is Joseph. Envy is destructive here because it makes another person's good register as one's own injury: he is blessed, I resent the blessing, and I become willing to destroy him. The progression from envy to hatred to a desire for violence is set out as a sequence rather than an outburst.

Dan's is anger, and it is the most extensive treatment. Anger distorts perception, turns small injuries into enormous offences, produces lying, hardens into hatred, separates people, and leaves the soul open to Beliar. That anger makes the soul see falsely is the claim, and it is a claim about perception rather than temper.

Gad's is hatred, and he describes it almost as a disease: it seeks another's death, refuses to recognise good, reads everything in the worst sense, rejoices at harm, and blinds moral judgment. Repentance reverses the pattern — which is the point of the confession.

None of this is an official taxonomy of demons, and it should not be turned into one. The testaments speak of spirits of deception associated with passions; they do not assign a named demon to each vice, and later lists that do so are not drawing on this book.

Asher's testament sets out two ways, good and evil, in a tradition that runs through Psalm 1, Deuteronomy, the Didache and Barnabas, and early baptismal catechesis. Its interest is discernment: a superficially good act can be corrupted by the motive behind it, so the question is which direction an action actually serves.

Joseph is the model of self-control, and the Genesis episode with Potiphar's wife is greatly expanded into repeated temptation repeatedly refused. His chastity is not presented as mere avoidance but as a form of warfare against Beliar — which makes him something very like an ascetic saint inside ancient Jewish moral literature, and helps explain why monks found the collection so congenial. Historical plausibility is not proof of monastic dependence.

Benjamin's is the good mind. A person whose intention is set on goodness becomes resistant to Beliar, and the theological implication is important: evil does not have power equal to God's, and Beliar's influence requires human cooperation. Someone oriented towards righteousness is not helpless.

The Testament of Levi is by far the richest section for this catalogue, and the one with the firmest Jewish pedigree.

Levi receives a visionary ascent into heaven, which places him beside Enoch, Abraham and Isaiah among the ascending seers of this literature. He is shown multiple heavens and celestial realities, and the vision legitimates the priesthood of his line: his descendants' earthly office reflects a heavenly one. He encounters exalted beings associated with God's presence — the same broad angelological vocabulary as Jubilees' Angels of the Presence, and no more correspondent to the later Dionysian orders than that.

Its multi-heaven scheme should not be harmonised with 2 Enoch's or the Ascension of Isaiah's. Textual forms and numbering vary, and the existence of several competing schemes is the evidence: ancient authors shared the idea of layered heavens without a fixed diagram between them.

This is also where the Semitic antecedents are strongest. The Aramaic Levi Document survives at Qumran and in the Cairo Geniza, so a substantial Jewish Levi priestly and visionary tradition demonstrably predates Christianity. How Aramaic Levi relates to the Greek Testament of Levi is still debated.

The testament also foretells a future ideal priest, associated with holiness, revelation, righteousness, light, the defeat of evil and renewal — and some of those passages sound remarkably Christian, which raises the collection's central problem in its sharpest form.

If Levi carries priesthood, Judah carries kingship, and the pairing follows the biblical division of authority. Messianic expectation in these testaments develops around both tribes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls independently confirm that expectation of both a priestly and a royal eschatological figure genuinely existed in Second Temple Judaism. Building a tidy two-messiahs system out of every passage is nevertheless risky, because the text has been through Christian hands that naturally tended to draw both expectations together onto one Christ who is King and High Priest at once.

For a Christian reader the convergence is powerful: Christ belongs bodily to Judah, and Hebrews presents Him as the great High Priest. This collection is valuable historical background for why that convergence mattered.

But the surviving Greek text contains passages that sound unmistakably Christian, and there are three possible accounts of them — Jewish prophecy later recognised as fulfilled, Christian interpolation into older Jewish documents, or Christian composition and redaction using older Jewish testament traditions. Scholarship has argued this for more than a century, and de Jonge in particular challenged confident attempts to reconstruct a pristine Jewish original beneath every Christian-sounding line.

So no passage here is labelled on this site as a Jewish prophecy of Jesus written centuries before Christ. What can be said is that the surviving Greek collection contains explicit or strongly Christianised messianic material, and that scholars dispute which of it derives from pre-Christian Jewish sources and which reflects Christian composition or redaction.

Not canonical: the Testaments are not part of the Eastern Orthodox biblical canon. Extensively preserved by Orthodox Christians: yes — Greek and Slavonic manuscript traditions and major monastic repositories show it. Useful: historically and spiritually, considerable. Binding doctrine: no.

That combination makes this collection the section's clearest illustration of a distinction the whole site depends on — the difference between canonical authority and received, preserved Christian literature. "Orthodox monks copied them, so they are Holy Tradition" does not follow, and neither does "they are not canonical, so they are worthless".

Direct patristic use is hard to establish, because so many of the themes were shared broadly across ancient Judaism and Christianity. Jerome knew of the Testaments or closely associated material, the work travelled principally through Greek Christian tradition, and Byzantine Christians plainly read and copied it. But no Father should be said to have used this collection merely because he preaches against anger, lust or envy — the graded categories used elsewhere in this section apply here too.

The value is in reconstructing a shared vocabulary rather than establishing who read whom, and Fr Stephen De Young's emphasis is exactly there: the collection is a window into the ordinary religious language of the apostolic world. Direct literary dependence has to be argued passage by passage.

It can illuminate Second Temple Jewish morality; the testament genre; patriarchal traditions; Jewish priestly expectation and the Levi traditions; Judah and kingship; messianic expectation; Beliar; spiritual warfare and the spirits of deception; the analysis of the passions; chastity, envy, anger, hatred and repentance; the moral vocabulary of the early Church; the background of Paul and of the Johannine literature; and Orthodox preservation of noncanonical writing.

It cannot establish Orthodox dogma; an official list of demons assigned to each passion; the canonical biography of Beliar; that every Christological passage is pre-Christian prophecy; that the complete work was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls; that all twelve testaments were originally written together in Hebrew; an Orthodox celestial hierarchy; or the dependence of Paul or John on this Greek collection without further evidence.