Simeon Confessed at 120 That He Wanted Joseph Dead

He was one hundred and twenty years old and he had been carrying it for a century.

Simeon lay down on the bed in his sons' house in Egypt, and then he did something he had not done in the course of a hundred years. He strengthened himself and sat up. He kissed each son on the mouth. Then he told them the truth.

The Organ That Would Not Soften

He began with his body. I was strong exceedingly. My heart was hard. My liver immovable. My bowels without compassion. These are not metaphors. In the ancient Hebrew imagination, the feeling organs sit low in the body. The bowels churn with pity. The liver clenches against grief. When Simeon says his liver was immovable, he means that even the parts of him designed to shudder at the sight of a weeping brother had been frozen shut.

Then he named what had frozen them. Envy.

Jacob loved Joseph more than the other sons, and every brother knew it. The Torah does not hide this. It is the engine of the whole story. But the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Jewish pseudepigraphical text composed in roughly the second century BCE and preserved in Greek and Armenian manuscripts, does something the Torah does not do: it puts Simeon inside his own head and keeps him there until he confesses what jealousy actually looks like from the inside.

He did not see Joseph as a brother who was loved more. He saw Joseph as an enemy who had stolen something that belonged to him.

The Day at Shechem

Simeon told his sons about the days of the conspiracy. When he went to Shechem for ointment and Reuben went to Dothan for supplies, it was Judah who made the practical suggestion to sell Joseph to the Ishmaelites passing in the road (Genesis 37:28). Simeon had not been satisfied with selling. He had wanted more. His own account of what he intended, standing in the field at Dothan while the caravan passed, is the confession he had never made to anyone in a hundred years.

The prince of deceit had sent forth the spirit of envy, he told his sons, and it had blinded his mind. He had not been a man who weighed his brother's life against his brother's advantage. He had been a man who had ceased to see a life at all.

What Jacob Already Suspected

The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's synthesis of rabbinic tradition published in the early twentieth century, captures what Jacob read in his sons' faces when they returned with the blood-stained coat. The patriarch's grief was not only about Joseph. It was an accusation. Me have ye bereaved of my children. These words, the midrash says, were not a lament but a pointed indictment. Jacob suspected his sons of foul play. He saw their explanations as elaborate lies. And he knew, from the way they told their story, that more than one of them had wanted Joseph gone long before the Ishmaelite caravan appeared.

Simeon in his death speech is confirming what Jacob already knew.

The Warning His Envy Made Him Give

A deathbed speech in the Testaments carries more than confession. It is instruction. Simeon had carried the sin. He had watched it work through him across a century. He had seen what it produced. Now he wanted to leave his sons something that would outlast him.

He told them: do not look at a man's face. Do not love a man's appearance. Do not desire a man's position. The prince of deceit will find the crack and pour itself in. It will not announce itself as envy. It will feel like justice. It will feel like clarification. You will not know you have stopped seeing a person and started seeing a threat until you are standing in a field in the sun with your hands already dirty.

He paused. He asked his sons to pray for him. He said that after his death he wanted no labor done over him, only the anointing of the body, and burial in Hebron, in the cave where the patriarchs lay.

He died at the end of that first day of his hundred and twentieth year.