Simeon Confessed the Envy That Almost Killed Joseph

The Confession at the Edge of Death

Simeon gathered his sons around him in his final hours and did not begin with a blessing. He began with a confession. He had stood in the same room as Joseph. He had exchanged civil words, perhaps even formal ones. And then he had walked out, and the moment the door closed, something took hold of him. He calls it a spirit of envy that darkened everything. Within that darkness came a single thought that he could not remove: the specific contemplation of ending his brother's life.

He was not confused about what this was. Looking back from the edge of death, he named it precisely: he could not endure Joseph's prosperity. Not Joseph's arrogance, not some injury Joseph had done him. The prosperity alone was enough. Joseph flourished and Simeon felt it as a wound that demanded blood.

The Warrior Who Could Not Win the One Battle

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Jewish pseudepigraphic work composed in the Second Temple period, does not soften the portrait. It gives Simeon a long and remarkable career as a fighter. In battle he could break men and gates alike. He was the one who seized Joseph in the pit at Dothan. He was the one left as hostage in Egypt, held in the dark while his brothers went home with grain. Physical courage he had in abundance. What defeated him was not an army. It was the misery that visited him every time a brother's portion appeared greater than his own.

The Midrash on the Twelve Patriarchs in the Aggadic tradition adds a second Simeon to the record, one who is harder to recognize beside the brooding figure in the Testaments. This Simeon is a man of impulsive strength who acted first against Shechem and first against Joseph, but whose impulses had to be tempered by his tribe for the tribe to survive. The Testaments pick up where the Midrash leaves off: a man who had spent a lifetime watching his own destructive pattern return again and again, and who finally understood it too late to do more than warn his children.

The Instruction He Left Them

His warning to his sons was unusually specific for a deathbed speech. He did not simply tell them to love one another or to serve God. He told them to watch for the precise emotion that had ruined him: do not grieve if you see another person flourishing more than you do. Do not measure your portion against another man's. Pray for the man who has more, that his good fortune should be complete. This was not abstract moralizing. It was a man describing the mechanism of his own failure in enough detail that his sons might recognize it when it arrived in them.

He fasted, he says. He struggled against it. He prayed. None of it was enough until he stopped seeing Joseph's good fortune as something taken from his own supply.

Joseph's Answer

The tradition closes the circle. When the brothers came down to Egypt the second time, it was Simeon who was returned to them, held in comfortable captivity on Joseph's orders. The man Simeon had wanted dead had kept him safe. Joseph wept in private chambers before he revealed himself. He kissed his brothers. He asked only whether their father still lived.

Simeon's deathbed instruction to his sons takes on its full weight against that scene. The measure Simeon gave others was not the measure he had used on Joseph. The measure Joseph gave back was not what Simeon had earned. The gap between those two things is the whole lesson, and Simeon understood it only at the end.