Moses Blessed Eleven Tribes and Said Nothing About Shimon

The Eleventh Blessing

Moses stood before the nation and blessed them. He went through the tribes one by one, finding the right word for each, drawing on everything he knew about each tribe's character, its history, its territory, its future. He blessed Reuben. He blessed Judah. He blessed Levi, Benjamin, Joseph, Zebulun, Issachar, Gad, Dan, Naphtali, Asher. He finished. The blessing was over. Shimon's name had not been spoken.

This is not the kind of absence you can attribute to oversight. Moses was dying. He was making his final testament. Every tribe in the text is there for a reason. Shimon is missing for a reason. The sages of Sifrei Devarim knew this and they explained the silence with a parable about debt and credit and the arithmetic of moral history.

Two Debtors Before the King

Two men borrow from a king. The first repays his debt and then borrows again, which means the king now holds a fresh claim on him, a current obligation that the borrower is actively working to meet. The second fails to repay the original loan and then borrows a second time on top of the first, which means the king now holds two claims, neither of which is being addressed. The question is not which man owes more. The question is which man is in worse standing with the king.

The answer is obvious: the man who has compounded a failure with a second failure stands worse than the man who discharged his first debt before taking on a second. The first man's new borrowing is a sign of ongoing relationship. The second man's new borrowing is a sign that the original failure has been buried rather than resolved.

Levi's Debt and Shimon's Debt

The two debtors are Levi and Shimon. Both tribes carry an earlier debt: the violence at Shechem, when Shimon and Levi killed the men of a city in retaliation for the assault on their sister Dinah. Jacob rebuked both of them on his deathbed. Both were sanctioned in the original tribal cursing. Both entered Moses' farewell address carrying that original mark.

But Levi paid its debt. At the golden calf, when Moses came down from Sinai and found the people worshiping an idol, it was the Levites who responded to his call, who took up their swords, who moved through the camp and restored order at enormous cost. The very capacity for violent action that had earned Levi's censure at Shechem was directed, at the golden calf, in service of the covenant. Levi discharged the original debt through subsequent devotion. The tribe that had used its force wrongly used it rightly when it mattered most.

Shimon did not pay its debt. Instead, at Shittim, the tribe compounded it. The man who brought a Midianite woman into the camp in full view of Moses and the weeping congregation at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting was Zimri son of Salu, a Simeonite leader. Shimon's representative at the crisis of Baal Peor was not a man trying to hold the covenant together. He was a man making a public demonstration of contempt for it.

The Silence as Verdict

Moses could not bless what had not discharged its debt. He could not speak Shimon's name in the register of blessing when the name was still attached to an unpaid account. The silence in Deuteronomy 33 is not punishment in the ordinary sense. It is an accurate ledger. Levi borrowed, repaid, and borrowed again; Moses blessed Levi. Shimon borrowed, failed to repay, and borrowed again; Moses said nothing.

The Midrash Tanchuma takes note of the fact that the Torah itself records Shimon's territory as carved out from within Judah's, a tribe without a coherent geographic identity of its own. The silence at the blessing is not the only mark Shimon carries. It is the final one.