The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs is a Jewish work — with significant later Christian editorial layers — composed roughly in the second century BCE. Its form is straightforward and elegant: twelve farewell discourses, one from each of Jacob’s twelve sons, addressed to their descendants gathered at the deathbed of the patriarch.
Each testament follows a recognizable pattern. The patriarch reviews the salient lessons of his own life — usually a moral failure or a virtuous choice — and exhorts his descendants to follow the right path. He then delivers prophetic counsel about the future of his tribe and the future of Israel as a whole, often including glimpses of a coming Messiah. The Testament of Reuben is dominated by warning against lust (Reuben’s sin with Bilhah); Judah’s by warning against drunkenness and the love of money. The Testament of Joseph is the most extensive — a sweeping ethical narrative drawn from Joseph’s resistance to Potiphar’s wife and his forgiveness of his brothers.
The messianic prophecies are striking and have long been a focus of scholarly discussion. Several of the testaments anticipate a king and a priest from the tribes of Judah and Levi — readings that fit easily with Christian Christological reflection, and the case for substantial Christian editorial reworking is well-developed. Where the Jewish core ends and Christian editing begins is among the longest-running questions in the scholarly literature on the Testaments.
For Latter-day Saint readers, the Testaments offer rich context for patriarchal blessings as an ancient and continuing tradition. The form — a patriarch’s deathbed counsel to his descendants, mixing ethical exhortation with prophetic vision — survives, in transformed form, in the Latter-day Saint practice of patriarchal blessings given today. The canonical model is Jacob’s blessing of his twelve sons in Genesis 49↗; the Testaments stand as witnesses to the wider Second Temple Jewish tradition that took up and extended that form.