Fate
Simeon is listed in the Book of Joshua, elsewhere in the same Book these towns are ascribed to Judah; some textual scholars view the Book of Joshua as being spliced together from several different source texts, in this particular case, the lists of towns being different documents, from different periods to each other. This seeming contradiction can be explained in the following way. The tribe of Simeon, like Levi, was decreed to be scattered throughout as punishment for massacring Shechem. Levi was scattered throughout all of Israel whereas Simeon was scattered in towns only within Judah. The tribe seems to have dwindled in size, and the size of the tribe dramatically drops by over half between the two census recorded in the Book of Numbers; although the Bible places these census during the Exodus, textual scholars place them in the period of priestly source, roughly 700-600 BC. The tribe is completely absent from the Blessing of Moses, which textual scholars date to near the time of the Deuteronomist, after the dates of these census; some Septuagint manuscripts appear to have attempted to correct this, adding the name of Simeon to the latter half of verse 6, which scholars view as unwarranted based on the Hebrew manuscripts.
In the Bible, the dwindling of Simeon is portrayed as being a divine punishment for their reaction to the Rape of Dinah, though many biblical scholars view the episode, and Dinah herself, as an aetiological myth which developed to explain Simeon's misfortune, after it had occurred. In the Blessing of Jacob, this punishment appears to be prophesied, with the tribe being predicted to become divided and scattered. Textual scholars view this as a postdiction, since some believe that the Blessing of Jacob was written in a period around the 9th or 8th centuries (900-701 BC), the same period in which the tribe was actually dwindling.
As part of the kingdom of Judah, whatever remained of Simeon was ultimately subjected to the Babylonian captivity; when the captivity ended, all remaining distinctions between Simeon and the other tribes in the kingdom of Judah had been lost in favour of a common identity as Jews. Nevertheless, an apocryphal midrash claims that the tribe was deported by the Babylonians to the Kingdom of Aksum (in what is now Ethiopia), to a place behind the dark mountains. Conversely, Eldad ha-Dani argued that the tribe of Simeon had become quite powerful, taking tribute from 25 other kingdoms, some of which were Arabians; though he names their location, surviving versions of his manuscripts differ as to whether it was the land of the Khazars or of the Chaldeans - Chaldeans would be an anachronism, though it could possibly refer to Buyid Dynasty Persia. A few modern-day groups claim descent from the tribe of Simeon, with varying levels of academic and rabbinical support; some Christian Identity followers believe themselves to be descendants of the tribe.
Read more about this topic: Tribe Of Simeon
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