Simeon Confessed on His Deathbed That He Wanted Joseph Dead

Simeon was one hundred and twenty years old and he had a confession to make.

His brother Joseph had already died. His father Jacob had been buried long before. Simeon lay on a bed in the house of his sons in Egypt. He strengthened himself and sat up. He kissed each of them on the mouth. Then he told them a story he had never told anyone in a hundred years.

The story comes from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Jewish pseudepigraphon composed in the second century BCE in Hebrew or Aramaic and later preserved in Greek and Armenian manuscripts. The text is arranged as twelve deathbed speeches, one per son of Jacob, each patriarch confessing a single besetting sin and warning his children about it. Simeon's confession is the one that never quite makes it into a Shabbat sermon.

"I was strong exceedingly," he told his sons. "My heart was hard. My liver immovable. My bowels without compassion." The words are not translation flourish. In the Hebrew imagination the feeling organs sat low in the body, and when Simeon says his liver was immovable, he means that even the parts of him that should have shuddered at the sight of a weeping brother had been frozen shut.

Then he named what had been doing the freezing. Envy.

Jacob loved Joseph more than the others. Every son knew it. The Torah is not subtle about the coat or the dreams. But Simeon, according to his own confession, could not look at that love without feeling something rise up in him that wanted it to end. The prince of deceit, he said, sent the spirit of envy into his mind when he was young, and from then on he regarded Joseph not as a brother but as a living obstacle in his field of vision.

He told them what happened on the day. While Simeon was in Shechem for ointment, and Reuben had gone to Dothan for supplies, Judah had sold Joseph to a caravan of Ishmaelites (Genesis 37:28) and pocketed the coins. Reuben came home first, heard the news, and collapsed, because he had been planning to creep back to the pit and pull Joseph out alive. Simeon came home after him. And according to his own confession on his deathbed, Simeon's first reaction was not grief. It was fury at Judah for letting Joseph go alive.

He wanted him dead. Not sold. Not lost. Dead.

For five months, Simeon said, that rage ate him. He could not pray right. He could not eat right. The heat in his body would not settle. And then one morning, the Lord intervened in a way impossible to misread. Simeon woke up and the right hand he had used his whole life as a weapon was half withered. His hand would not close. For seven days he could not lift a cup. Simeon, who had lived his whole life convinced of his own righteousness, understood in the silence of that withered hand exactly what God had seen in him. Because of Joseph, he said, this had befallen me.

He repented. He wept. He fasted for two years, refusing meat and wine, trying to burn the envy out of his body the way a physician burns out a wound. And slowly, he wrote, the spirit of envy withdrew and his mind was lightened and his hand came back to him.

Years later, when the famine drove the brothers down to Egypt for grain, the viceroy who accused them of spying chose Simeon to be bound as a hostage (Genesis 42:24). Not by accident. The Testament of Simeon says Joseph chose his own would-be murderer to sit in the cell while the others went home. And Simeon, who by then understood what he deserved, did not grieve at the chains. He accepted them.

The Testament claims Simeon knew what Joseph was doing. And Joseph, who had the Spirit of God on him, bore no malice. He untied Simeon later. He fed him from his own table. He loved him as his own soul. He gave him more than Simeon would ever give his own sons, and he never once threw it in his face.

That is the scene Simeon told his children on his deathbed. Not the sale. Not the plot. The binding, and the untying, and the meal afterwards, and the fact that the man he had wanted to erase had fed him every year of his life since.

Then Simeon did what every patriarch in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs eventually does. He turned the wound into a warning. "Beware of the spirit of deceit and envy," he said. "For envy rules the whole mind of a man. It suffers him neither to eat nor to drink nor to do any good thing. It ever urges him to destroy the one he envies. And so long as the envied one flourishes, the one who envies fades away."

In Simeon's mouth, envy is not a moral failing. It is a slow erasure. A spirit that eats the envier from inside while the envied one keeps walking through the sun.

He told them the cure he had learned the long way. "If a man flees to the Lord, the evil spirit runs from him and his mind is lightened." Two years of fasting had taught him the one thing he wanted to leave them. Not a prayer. Not a formula. A posture. Flee toward God faster than envy can chase you.

The blessing their grandfather Jacob had given Simeon on his own deathbed (Genesis 49:5-7) was not a kind one. Jacob coupled him with Levi and cursed their anger. He said their weapons were instruments of cruelty and that he would divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel. When the land was finally divided, Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, published in seven volumes between 1909 and 1938, records that the tribe of Simeon ended up as scribes and teachers scattered across the other tribes, never holding a coherent territory of their own. The curse was literal. The most dangerous son of Jacob was diluted on purpose so his rage could never gather again in one place.

Simeon died in his bed knowing he had been diluted on purpose. He was grateful for it.