Shimon שמעון

Leah gave the name: "for the Lord has heard that I am hated." Together with Levi he put Shechem to the sword for their violated sister—and heard from Jacob at once: "you have troubled me, to make me odious to the inhabitants of the land." Many years later, on his deathbed, his father returned to it: "instruments of violence are their swords… cursed be their anger, for it is fierce." And the sentence: "I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel."

The sentence was fulfilled literally, but not as a punishment. The tribe of Shimon received no continuous territory: its towns lay inside the portion of Judah. Rashi explains what that scattering became: from the tribe of Shimon came the scribes and the teachers of small children—and they were indeed scattered through all Israel.

In Egypt Yosef chose Shimon as the hostage; the midrash says it was because it was he who threw him into the pit. Between the two censuses in the wilderness his tribe shrank more than any other: from fifty-nine thousand three hundred to twenty-two thousand two hundred.