Origin
According to the Torah, the tribe consisted of descendants of Simeon the second son of Jacob, and of Leah, from whom it took its name; however some Biblical scholars view this as postdiction, an eponymous metaphor providing an aetiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation. With Leah as a matriarch, Biblical scholars believe the tribe to have been regarded by the text's authors to have been part of the original Israelite confederation. However, the tribe is not mentioned in the ancient Song of Deborah, and some scholars think that Simeon was not originally regarded as a distinct tribe; according to Israel Finkelstein, the south of Canaan, in which Simeon was situated, was simply an insignificant rural backwater at the time the poem was written.
Read more about this topic: Tribe Of Simeon
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