Reuben’s Bed, Simeon’s Liver

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — entries on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Belial, Reuben, Simeon and Bilhah.
• Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism — on the Testaments, on testamentary literature and on angels and demons.
• Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP) — on the Testaments and on the Pseudepigrapha. These are subjects to look up; exact entry titles were not checked, and none of these works is held on this disk.
• On the text — any article that says which Greek it quotes. Charles’s text (1908) follows his alpha family; de Jonge’s (1978) is built on a different manuscript family. A Greek word quoted without that distinction may not be the word on this page.

• R. H. Charles, The Greek Versions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908) — the Greek on this page, read off its page images.
• R. H. Charles, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (London: A. & C. Black, 1908) — his translation and notes; reprinted without the notes by SPCK (1917), which is the English printed here.
• R. H. Charles (ed.), The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1913).
• M. de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Study of Their Text, Composition and Origin (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1953).
• M. de Jonge et al., The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text (Leiden: Brill, 1978).
• H. W. Hollander and M. de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1985).
• H. C. Kee, “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs”, in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (1983).

Genesis 49 is a dying father’s speech to his sons, son by son, and its first two oracles are on Reuben (49:3–4) and on Simeon and Levi together (49:5–7). Each testament here is the son’s own last speech to his sons. Stage 4 measures how much of Jacob’s Greek wording each son’s confession carries.

What the Testament of Simeon does not mention is as measurable as what it does. Genesis 49:5–7 condemns the anger of Simeon and Levi, which Genesis 34 tells as the killing at Shechem. In Charles’s English of Simeon, Shechem is named once (2:9) — as the place Simeon went to bring ointment for the flocks — and Dinah not at all; across the twelve testaments Dinah is named only in Levi. Simeon’s confessed sin is envy of Joseph, not Shechem. Counted in one translator’s English; names and places survive translation, so the count is content, not wording.

Genesis gives Reuben’s sin one sentence (35:22). Jubilees 33 and the Testament of Reuben each tell it as a scene, and they share the bath, the absent Jacob and the end of the marriage — and part company over whether Bilhah knew, and over who told Jacob:

Every cell in the two right-hand columns is Charles’s English — he translated both books — so the table compares what happens, never how it is worded. Direction of borrowing between Jubilees and the Testaments is not asserted.

Both texts are held in Greek, so here a run is valid — and it is short. Against the Greek of 1 Enoch held here (chiefly 1–32 in Codex Panopolitanus and Syncellus, plus the Vat. gr. 1809 and P.Oxy. 2069 scraps — 285 rows; Online Critical Pseudepigrapha), Reuben 5:6 reaches three words (and in the, three units tie) and 5:7 three (unto the heaven, band 1). The shared vocabulary is the noun: Ἐγρήγοροι, Watchers (Stage 3).

The women are given the first move, though the Watchers still look and desire. In the Greek 1 Enoch 6:2 the angels look and desire: καὶ ἐθεάσαντο αὐτὰς οἱ ἄγγελοι υἱοὶ οὐρανοῦ καὶ ἐπεθύμησαν αὐτάς. In Reuben 5:6 the women act first: Οὕτως γὰρ ἔθελξαν τοὺς Ἐγρηγόρους — “For thus they allured the Watchers”; and the same verse goes on, ἐκεῖνοι γὰρ συνεχῶς ὁρῶντες ⌜αὐτὰς⌝ ἐγένοντο ⌜καὶ⌝ ἐν ἐπιθυμίᾳ αὐτῶν — “for as these continually beheld them, they lusted after them”, the looking and desiring of 1 Enoch 6:2. In 1 Enoch 7:1 the Watchers take wives; in Reuben 5:6 they change into the shape of men and appear to women “when they were with their husbands”. The page reports the difference; it does not adopt either account. Reuben draws a moral about women from it (5:1–5) that the page reports as the Testament’s, not as Scripture’s or the church’s.

Reuben 7:2 and Simeon 8:2 both bury the patriarch in Hebron, the body carried up from Egypt; Simeon 8:2–4 goes on to say that the bones went up secretly during a war of the Egyptians, and that Joseph’s were held back. Jubilees 46:9, in Charles’s English, has the same war and the same exception: ‘the children of Israel brought forth all the bones of the children of Jacob save the bones of Joseph, and they buried them in the field in the double cave in the mountain’. Charles’s apparatus records that one Greek manuscript (d) has a further clause at Simeon 8:2: καὶ ἔθαψαν αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ σπηλαίῳ τῷ διπλῷ ὅπου καὶ οἱ πατέρες αὐτοῦ ἐτέθησαν. — and ἐν τῷ σπηλαίῳ τῷ διπλῷ stands in one of the Greek Old Testament units screened, Genesis 49:30, the cave where Jacob asked to be buried. Charles’s margin at Reuben 7:2 (Charles 1908, p. 15 (PDF p. 80)) gives a similar reading, σπηλαίῳ τῷ διπλῷ, in the double cave, for his β, A and S¹. Jubilees’ double cave is itself at Hebron: ‘the double cave over against Mamre, that is Hebron’ (19:5). By Jubilees’ own account, then, the Testaments and Jubilees name one place; Acts names another.

Acts 7:15–16 names another place. καὶ ἐτελεύτησεν αὐτὸς καὶ οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν — καὶ μετετέθησαν εἰς Συχὲμ: and he died, and our fathers … and they were carried over to Shechem (page’s gloss). The page sets the three texts side by side — two places between them — and does not harmonise or adjudicate them.

Simeon 5:4 cites a source: “I have seen it inscribed in the writing of Enoch”. Across the twelve testaments Enoch is named in 6 verses of 5 testaments. In the 1,063 verses of Charles’s 1 Enoch held here, Reuben, Simeon and Levi are not named once. Whatever writing Simeon 5:4 means, the words it reports are not in the 1 Enoch on this disk; the page cannot say whether they stood in another.

• Reuben: 66 verses, 1,745 English words. Simeon: 53 verses, 1,401 words — 1,407 in the transcription as held, six of them a section heading that leaked into 5:1 (Stage 5).
• Charles’s brackets: Reuben 3 spans (14.0% of its words), Simeon 5 (2.3%). The senses-bracket in Reuben alone (208 words) is about ten times all four of Simeon’s brackets that Charles calls Christian (21).
• The ages. Reuben speaks “in the hundred and twenty-fifth year of his life”, “Two years after the death of Joseph”; Simeon “in the hundred and twentieth year of his life, at which time Joseph, his brother, died” and dies “being an hundred and twenty years old”. Joseph died at 110 in both the Greek and the Hebrew Genesis (50:26). Reuben’s twenty-fifth year stands inside Charles’s half-brackets in the 1917 print (words the Armenian lacks, in that edition’s key); Simeon’s twentieth does not. The Testaments’ figures therefore make Simeon about ten years older than Joseph and Reuben about thirteen (twelve, if the 125th year is read as age 124); the text does not do that sum, and the page goes no further with it.
• The sevens are Reuben’s: seven months’ plague, seven months’ sickness, seven years’ penance, seven spirits — 8 verses with seven or seventh — against Simeon’s one (the hand withered seven days).
• Reuben’s abstinence (1:10) — no wine, no strong drink, no meat, no pleasant bread — is presented as penance for his sin (1:9–10). The word Nazirite does not occur in Charles’s English of either testament.

Simeon. Three times Simeon says τὰ ἥπατά μου — my liver was immovable (2:4), I set my liver against him (2:7), I am pained in my liver (4:1). In the 30,348 Greek Old Testament units screened those three words stand once: Genesis 49:6, Jacob’s oracle on Simeon and Levi — καὶ ἐπὶ τῇ συστάσει αὐτῶν μὴ ἐρείσαι τὰ ἥπατά μου, and on their gathering let my liver not be fixed (page’s gloss). They stand in no New Testament verse. The run with Genesis 49:6 is three words at each of the three verses, and the bands say what kind of three it is: Simeon 2:7’s deepest Greek Old Testament run is three, tied 51 ways, and Simeon 4:1’s is three, tied 32 ways — the other ties are on other words (upon him the, my father), and Genesis 49:6 is the only unit whose three words are my liver; Simeon 2:4 reaches four elsewhere (and my bowels, 4 Maccabees 5:30 and Psalms of Solomon 2:14). Simeon 2:7 uses a different verb from Genesis — ἐστήριξα, I fixed, beside Genesis’s ἐρείσαι, be fixed — and Simeon has upon him between verb and noun, so the run is the noun phrase alone.

And Genesis 49:6 is where the Greek and the Hebrew vowels part company. The Masoretic text has בִּקְהָלָ֖ם אַל־תֵּחַ֣ד כְּבֹדִ֑י, in their assembly let my glory not be joined (page’s gloss). The four letters כבדי are the letters of my liver as well as of my glory; the vowels choose. Here is every token in the Masoretic text spelled with exactly these four letters — there are four — and the one that has only the preposition by in front (Exodus 29:43): other tokens ending in these letters are other words — participles and construct forms, such as Ezekiel 3:5’s heavy of.

At the one place the vowels read liver, the Greek has glory; at the first place they read glory, the Greek has liver — and that place is Simeon’s. The page reports what each column reads. Why the Greek reads as it does, and whether whoever wrote Simeon’s testament knew Genesis 49 in Greek, are not things these columns can settle, and the page does not assert them.

Reuben. ἐμίανα κοίτην τοῦ πατρός μου, I defiled the bed of my father. The three words κοίτην τοῦ πατρός stand in two Greek Old Testament units, and both are about Reuben: Genesis 49:4, ἀνέβης γὰρ ἐπὶ τὴν κοίτην τοῦ πατρός σου τότε ἐμίανας, and 1 Chronicles 5:1, ἐν τῷ ἀναβῆναι ἐπὶ τὴν κοίτην τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ. None in the New Testament. The run with Genesis 49:4 is three; the verb is the same verb in another person, you defiled becoming I defiled.

Now the narrative. Genesis 35:22 is the verse that tells the act: ἐπορεύθη Ρουβην καὶ ἐκοιμήθη μετὰ Βαλλας τῆς παλλακῆς τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ. Against it, the five verses of Reuben’s story (3:11–15) reach 1, 0, 2, 1 and 1 consecutive words — the two being of the father. Their deepest Genesis contact is elsewhere: Reuben 3:13 runs five words with πρὸς Ισαακ τὸν πατέρα αὐτοῦ, band 3 (Genesis 27:22, 31:18 and 35:27 tie). The confession carries the oracle’s wording; the story does not carry the narrative’s.

Depth is not rarity, and a band of 1 is not always a rare phrase. Reuben 1:10 reaches five, band 1, with Psalm 109:30 (Greek 108:30) on ἐν τῷ στόματί μου· καὶ, in my mouth, and — band 1 only because the and that opens the next clause in both verses is counted; in my mouth alone stands in 5 units. Simeon’s three-word my liver stands in one unit of 30,348 with no such help, and Reuben’s bed of the father in two. Reuben 1:6’s own deepest Greek Old Testament run is four, the God of heaven (page’s gloss), tied seven ways; its run with Genesis 49:4 is three.

Reuben 3:13 sets the sin ἐν Γαδὲρ πλησίον Ἐφραθὰ ἐν Βηθλεέμ. The Greek Old Testament units screened carry Γαδερ twice: Joshua (B) 12:13, a king’s city, and Genesis 35:16, ἐπέκεινα τοῦ πύργου Γαδερ, beyond the tower of Gader (page’s gloss). The CATSS Genesis 35 has 28 verses and no 35:21; the Masoretic Genesis 35 has 29, and its 35:21 — immediately before Reuben’s sin — has לְמִגְדַּל־עֵֽדֶר, to the tower of Eder (page’s gloss). The Greek has the tower five verses earlier, before Rachel dies near Ephrath; the Testament puts Gader, Ephratha and Bethlehem in one sentence with the sin. The spelling with a Gamma is the Greek Genesis’s; Charles’s English writes Eder.

Against the 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament, the 33 verses read: all 33 reach two, 29 reach three, 10 reach four, 2 reach five, and nothing reaches six.

Against the 30,348 Greek Old Testament units: all 33 reach two, 31 reach three, 18 reach four, 7 reach five, and one reaches seven.

The machine-read text, as a lower bound. Screened page by page across all 27 PDF pages of the two testaments (2,683 Greek tokens after cleaning), the OCR finds nothing deeper than 5 in the New Testament and 5 in the Greek Old Testament. It misses the deepest run on the page: see Reuben 6:9 below.

τοῦ ποιεῖν ἀλήθειαν ἕκαστος πρὸς τὸν πλησίον αὐτοῦ καὶ — “to do truth each one unto his neighbour”. Seven words with Zechariah 8:16, λαλεῖτε ἀλήθειαν ἕκαστος πρὸς τὸν πλησίον αὐτοῦ καὶ, tie band 1: no other Greek Old Testament unit screened reaches seven with it. Reuben has to do truth where Zechariah has speak — in Charles’s main text.

Ephesians 4:25 is the third text. λαλεῖτε ἀλήθειαν ἕκαστος μετὰ τοῦ πλησίον αὐτοῦ: it shares three words with Zechariah 8:16 (speak truth each) and two with Reuben 6:9 (truth each). From Ephesians’ side its deepest Greek Old Testament run is three, and 22 units tie at three, Zechariah 8:16 among them. No citation formula stands in Ephesians 4:25, and no dependence in any direction is asserted. Reuben 6:9’s own deepest New Testament run is four, the God of heaven (page’s gloss) (Revelation 16:11, band 1; seven Greek Old Testament units carry the same four).

The triangle is Charles’s before it is this page’s. His apparatus on this same page (Charles 1908, p. 14 (PDF p. 79)) records that manuscript c reads λαλεῖν, to speak, where his text has to do — in his words, ‘a reading possibly due to Zech. viii. 16 (cf. Eph. iv. 25)’ — and that manuscript e has μετὰ τοῦ πλ., with the neighbour, the preposition Ephesians 4:25 has. His 1908 English introduction (§26, held as OCR) sets Ephesians 4:25 beside Reuben 6:9 and the Testament of Dan 5:2 and judges: ‘The words in Ephesians and in both these Testaments are drawn from Zech. viii. 16.’ Those judgements are reported as his; the runs above are measured on his main text only.

And the OCR cannot see it. The machine-read line has Ἔξκαστος for ἕκαστος (and it fuses an apparatus numeral into autou and reads kai as Latin), so the OCR text of that page reaches only 3 words of Zechariah 8:16. This is why the page prints no Greek it has not read off the image.

Καὶ οἶνον καὶ σίκερα οὐκ ἔπιον — “And wine and strong drink I drank not”. Luke 1:15, the angel on John the Baptist: καὶ οἶνον καὶ σίκερα οὐ μὴ πίῃ. A run of five, tie band 1 — and from Luke’s side, its deepest Greek Old Testament run is four, with seven units tied (Judges 13:14 in both Greek texts, Leviticus 10:9, Deuteronomy 29:6 (Greek 29:5) among them).

Read the fifth word. It is the negative, οὐκ in Reuben and οὐ in Luke — one word in two spellings, which the shelf’s cross-edition rule treats as one. Counted letter for letter the run is four, Reuben’s New Testament band becomes 2, and from Luke’s side six Greek Old Testament units tie at four — Judges 13:14 in both texts and Leviticus 10:9 on these same words. A penitent’s abstinence and an angel’s charge share the commonest words for abstaining; the page prints the run with its fifth word exposed and claims no more for it.

The other five. Simeon 2:8 reaches five with Acts 3:13, 5:30 and 22:14 — ὁ θεὸς τῶν πατέρων ἡμῶν, the God of our fathers — band 3, and thirteen Greek Old Testament units reach five with the same verse: a formula. Fold every movable nu and the band is fifteen: Theodotion’s Daniel 3:95 and 6:23 (3:28 and 6:22 in English Bibles) then join, on sent his angel and, where Simeon has apesteile and they have apesteilen. Charles’s English reads “the God of his fathers” there — the αὐτοῦ his margin gives for β-d, A^abh and S¹ — not the our of his main text.

Where their words stand in the Greek New Testament at all, they stand as common phrases; the words that carry the doctrine — taking a body, God and man — stand there nowhere. Each bracketed span, measured on its own against the Greek New Testament:

• Simeon 6:5, [ὡς ἄνθρωπος] — two words, found in 3 New Testament verses (Mark 4:26, 13:34; Philippians 2:7) and 9 Greek Old Testament units (Numbers 23:19 among them): as a man is common Greek. Charles’s 1908 English notes judge these two words a Christian interpolation (held as OCR; paraphrased).
• Simeon 6:7, ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς σῶμα λαβών, καὶ συνεσθίων ἀνθρώποις ἔσωσεν ἀνθρώπους — deepest New Testament run three, that God, band 8. σῶμα λαβών, taking a body, occurs in neither corpus.
• Simeon 7:2, [Θεὸν καὶ ἄνθρωπον] — as a phrase, in neither corpus; the deepest run of its three words is two, tied 19 ways in the New Testament.
• Simeon 7:2, [πάντα τὰ ἔθνη καὶ] — four, band 3 (Matthew 25:32, 2 Timothy 4:17, Revelation 18:3), and 14 Greek Old Testament units carry the same four: a formula.

And one bracket that is not christological goes deeper. Reuben 3:7, which Charles brackets as a span of its own (his note ties it to 3:1–2 of the senses passage), opens Ἐπὶ πᾶσι δὲ τούτοις, and over all these — four words with Colossians 3:14 (ἐπὶ πᾶσιν δὲ τούτοις), band 1, where Colossians’ own deepest Greek Old Testament run is two. A connective phrase, and the page says so.

Low numbers do not show the brackets are wrong, and high ones would not show them right: the screen measures shared wording, and a doctrinal sentence can be added to a text without quoting anything. What the numbers do show is that these lines are statements, not quotations.

Charles read these as influence. His 1908 English introduction has a section headed ‘Influence of the Testaments on the New Testament’ (§26), setting New Testament verses beside lines of the Testaments. It is held here only as OCR of two copies, whose two-column layout breaks several pairs apart. The page measures only the pairs whose Testament verse it has read in full off the page image, and it reports Charles’s view as his. So it leaves out, as the OCR of his list appears to read them, his Romans 1:21 and Ephesians 4:18 (both beside Reuben 3:8), 2 Corinthians 9:7 (Reuben 1:9), Luke 10:19–20 (Simeon 6:6), 1 Corinthians 13 (Simeon 4:8), 1 Peter 3:3–5 and 2 Peter 2:4 (Reuben 5:5, of which only the opening clause was read) and 2 Peter 2:3 (Reuben 3:5); his Ephesians 4:25 beside Reuben 6:9 is taken up in the Reuben 6:9 section above, and his Acts 7:10 pair names Reuben 4:8 and 4:10, of which only 4:8 was read. Measured on the Greek read off his own pages:

• Matthew 12:45 → Reuben 2:2 (Charles’s reference; the words he quotes stand in 2:3) — runs of TWO and ONE. Matthew’s ἑπτὰ ἕτερα πνεύματα, seven other spirits. Reuben 2:2 shares two words with it, and they are of the man; Reuben 2:3 has the same three words in another order, ἕτερα ἑπτὰ πνεύματα, and shares one — and 2:3 is inside Charles’s own interpolation bracket.
• Luke 2:52 and Acts 7:10 → Reuben 4:8 — ONE each. εὗρεν χάριν ἐνώπιον θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπων, found favour before God and men, of Joseph. Luke 2:52 says favour with God and men in other cases and another preposition (χάριτι παρὰ θεῷ καὶ ἀνθρώποις). Reuben 4:8’s own deepest New Testament run is three, tied twice (Acts 7:46, found favour before; 1 Timothy 2:5, of God and men).
• Luke 6:10 → Simeon 2:13 — TWO. A withered hand restored in both: ἵνα ἀποκατασταθῇ ἡ χείρ μου beside ἀπεκατεστάθη ἡ χεὶρ αὐτοῦ; the shared run is the hand.
• Acts 12:11 → Simeon 2:8 — FOUR. τὸν ἄγγελον αὐτοῦ καὶ, his angel, and: an angel sent to deliver, in both. Simeon 2:8’s deepest New Testament run is the five-word formula with Acts 3:13 above.
• Romans 6:7 → Simeon 6:1 — THREE, band 3. ὅπως δικαιωθῶ ἀπὸ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὑμῶν beside δεδικαίωται ἀπὸ τῆς ἁμαρτίας: the run is from the sin, which Romans 6:18 and 6:22 carry too.
• Acts 7:16 → Reuben 7:2 — TWO, and a different place. Charles wrote that the statement in Acts that the patriarchs’ bones were carried up to Shechem is found first in the Testaments; Reuben 7:2 and Simeon 8:2, as he prints them, both say Hebron. The run is in the.

Charles’s list was compiled by reading, and it caught likenesses of thought a word-run screen cannot see. What the screen adds is the size of each likeness in shared wording: on these pairs, one to four words, and none longer than the formulas around them.

• Reuben 5:5 → 1 Corinthians 6:18, ‘Flee fornication’ — run of TWO. Λοιπὸν φεύγετε τέκνα μου τὴν πορνείαν against φεύγετε τὴν πορνείαν: the same three words, with my children standing between the verb and its object. The three-word phrase stands in no Greek Old Testament unit screened.
• Reuben 2:1 → Revelation 1:4 — run of THREE, band 1. τῶν ἑπτὰ πνευμάτων: in Reuben the seven spirits are of deceit; in Revelation they are before the throne. The deepest New Testament contact of the verse that names the seven spirits of deceit is with a verse about seven spirits before the throne.
• Simeon 4:5 → Psalm 84:11 (Greek 83:12) and Revelation 5:12. ὁ Θεὸς χάριν καὶ δόξαν καὶ εὐλογίαν: five words with the Psalm (ὁ θεός χάριν καὶ δόξαν, band 1) and four with Revelation 5:12 (band 1, where Revelation’s own deepest Greek Old Testament run is three). Two runs overlapping on one phrase; the words are a doxology’s stock.
• Simeon 4:4 → Genesis 41:38 — run of FOUR, band 2. πνεῦμα θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ, of Joseph; Genesis 41:38 is Pharaoh on Joseph, and Numbers 24:2 (Balaam) ties it.
• Simeon 4:3 → Genesis 42:24 — run of ONE as the normaliser scores it, TWO as read. The one moment Genesis tells of Simeon alone — Joseph binding him — and the Testament’s telling of it share and bound: καὶ ἔδησέ beside καὶ ἔδησεν, one form with and without its movable nu. The shelf’s normaliser folds only spelling pairs the SBLGNT itself attests, and this is not one of them.
• Simeon 8:4 → Exodus 10:22–23 — content, not wording. Darkness, and a man unable to know his brother: the Testament’s σκότος καὶ γνόφος stands in two Greek Old Testament units (Exodus 14:20 and Isaiah 60:2, not Exodus 10), and his brother is a three-word phrase in 37 of them (38 occurrences; Genesis 4:8 has it twice).
• Simeon 6:2 → Hosea 14:5–6 (Greek and Hebrew 14:6–7). A lily, and the scent of Lebanon, in both: ὡς ὀσμὴ Λιβάνου beside ἡ ὀσφρασία αὐτοῦ ὡς Λιβάνου. The runs are two with the Greek 14:6 (as a lily) and two with 14:7 (and shall be); the verse’s deepest Greek Old Testament run is four, with another verse entirely (Psalm 63:1, Greek 62:2, my flesh in, band 1).

The English held on this disk was built from two OCR scans of the 1917 reprint and repaired; its provenance asks that any verse be compared once with the scan before printing. For this page all of Reuben and Simeon was read against the 1917 page images (PDF pages 29–39), and four places of substance differ from the print (punctuation slips aside, such as Simeon 6:2’s for ever. where the print has for ever,; that verse’s English is not printed here):

• Reuben 1:2 — the transcription has “his sons sons”; the page prints “his sons' sons” (1917 p. 25 (PDF p. 29): the apostrophe is printed).
• Simeon 5:1 — the transcription has “I. The Comeliness of Joseph V. Therefore”; the page prints “Therefore” (1917 p. 33 (PDF p. 37): 'V. 1. The Comeliness of Joseph' is the SPCK section heading and 'V.' the chapter numeral; neither is text).
• Simeon 5:5 — the transcription has “conquer air your hosts”; the page prints “conquer all your hosts” (1917 p. 33 (PDF p. 37): 'all' in half-brackets, read by the OCR as 'air').
• Simeon 6:5 — the transcription has “shall come [as man. And saving”; the page prints “shall come [as man], And saving” (1917 p. 34 (PDF p. 38): the bracket closes after 'as man').

The page prints the corrected text and the self-check fails if the transcription changes, so a repair upstream will be noticed. The 5:1 leak also adds six words to Simeon’s count and one to Joseph’s name count, and the headings file is short by that heading.

• Any Greek outside the 34 verses read. The other 85 verses exist on this disk only as OCR, which fuses Charles’s apparatus numerals into words and misreads common words as Latin. Every OCR figure on this page is a lower bound, and Reuben 6:9 shows by how much: seven on the image, three in the OCR.
• The accents and breathings. They are printed as read at about 500 dots per inch, where a grave and an acute can look alike; Simeon 6:7’s ἀναστησόμαι is printed with the accent the page shows. Every measurement drops accents, so no number depends on them.
• De Jonge’s critical text (1978), which follows a different manuscript family, is in copyright and was not consulted. A reader with it may find different words at some of these verses; this page cannot say where.
• The Armenian and Slavonic versions, except where Charles’s apparatus or his half-brackets report them. The half-brackets in the English transcription are not carried by it; those printed here are read off the Greek page.
• Charles’s 1908 English notes and introduction are held as two OCR copies, not page images. The headings of his §20 and §26, and one sentence of §26 on Ephesians 4:25, are quoted from those copies (each is clean in at least one); the rest of their contents, his note on as man and his remark on Acts 7:16 are paraphrased, not quoted. The §26 pairs left unmeasured are named as the OCR appears to read them.
• The commentaries in Stage 1. None is held; none was consulted. The two accounts of the Testaments’ origin are reported as their authors’ positions, not checked.
• Whether the Watchers story, the burial or Jubilees 33 stand in a line of dependence. The comparisons in Stage 2 are of content in one translator’s English; they cannot show who knew whom.

• The headline rests on three words. My liver is rare in the corpus and the Hebrew-Greek divergence at Genesis 49:6 is measured; but a three-word run proves contact with a reading, not knowledge of a book.
• The Greek is one editor’s text. Charles chose among nine manuscripts; his margin and apparatus show other readings at many of these verses (Simeon 2:8’s our/his among them), including at the headline noun and its verb. At Simeon 2:4 his note (Charles 1908, p. 16 (PDF p. 81)) records that the Armenian witnesses he cites as A^ab read, in his Greek equivalent, ἡ κοιλία, the belly, where his Greek has my liver. At Simeon 4:1 his note (Charles 1908, p. 19 (PDF p. 84)) records that the verb he prints, I am swollen, is manuscript c’s: h and d read κακοῦμαι, I am afflicted, after the same my liver, and the Armenian, in his Greek, τὰ ἄλγη τῶν ἡπάτων μου, the pains of my liver. His English there reads “I am pained in my liver”. Runs are measured on his main text only.
• The English is quotation, not a measured parallel. It is Charles’s, from his own Greek, but it sometimes follows his margin rather than his text, and it renders τὰ ἥπατά μου as mind once. Where the page draws on English counts (brackets, names, sevens), they are counts of Charles’s English.
• The structure diagram claims an order, not a design. It is labelled a sequence and is.

• R. H. Charles, The Greek Versions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (1908) — read for this page; the source of every Greek word printed.
• R. H. Charles, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (1908; SPCK 1917) — the English printed; the 1908 notes held only as OCR.
• M. de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Study of Their Text, Composition and Origin (1953) — not held.
• H. W. Hollander and M. de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Commentary (1985) — not held.
• H. C. Kee, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (1983) — not held.

• Confession in the words of the verdict. Reuben says I defiled the bed of my father where Jacob said you defiled; Simeon speaks of his liver where Jacob’s Greek oracle did. Whatever else these testaments are, they picture repentance as agreeing with the judgement already spoken.
• Envy and lust are treated as things that take hold of the body. A plague in the loins, a withered hand, a liver that will not move, a mind that cannot sleep. The page reports this as the Testaments’ picture, not as medicine or doctrine.
• The brother held up is the one they wronged. Both testaments set Joseph — “he bore no malice against me” — against their own sin.
• Measure before you repeat. The pairs that look closest — flee fornication, the seven spirits — measure two and three; the Christian lines are statements, not quotations; and the deepest run on the page — with Zechariah, which Charles had already set beside this verse — is hidden in the machine-read text.
• Pleasant Springs’ own view, stated as such. We confess that Jesus is God and man from the New Testament itself (John 1:14; Philippians 2:6–8). Lines like Simeon 6:7 and 7:2, which an editor of this text brackets as later additions, neither add to that confession nor count as evidence for it, and we do not cite them for it.
• One concrete response. Seven consecutive Greek words of Reuben’s charge stand in Zechariah 8:16; the verb differs, to do where Zechariah has speak: “to do truth each one unto his neighbour”. Ephesians 4:25 gives the same charge to the church. Find the one conversation this week where you have been shading the truth, and stop.