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T he Testament of Naphtali is the purported last words of the patriarch identified in Genesis 30:8 as the son of Jacob and Bilhah. The Testament contains many of the expected elements of this genre including: the gathering of family at the time of the patriarch’s death to hear a review of the patriarch’s life through a mixture of canonical and apocryphal events which are interspersed with final instructions/warnings about living in righteousness. One aspect that is shared by many but not all of the documents contained in the corpus of The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is a description concerning the particulars of each patriarch’s birth.2 Three of the Testaments simply identify both parents and the order in which the son was born.3 The T. Issachar describes the patriarch’s birth through a reworking of the canonical mandrakes story in Genesis 30:14–19. The T. Benjamin, on the other hand, provides an apocryphal description of a miraculous birth after a long period of barrenness while the T. Levi merely notes the location of the patriarch’s birth as Haran. The T. Naphtali is unique, however, because it is the only Testament that provides a lineage for the patriarch beyond that of the parents. The presence of this lineage has usually been viewed as an addition that provided the concubine Bilhah with Semitic descent4 and positioned her offspring in the Abraham–Isaac–Jacob line thus guaranteeing them a place in the destiny of the nation.5 While this is undoubtedly the case, this paper will demonstrate that the lineage is also the result of tensions concerning sexual relationships between patriarchs and slaves and the symbolic problems associ-

Noble Lineage as a Response to Enslavement in the Testament of Naphtali 1.9–12