Simeon's Right Hand Went Numb for Five Months Because He Wanted Joseph Dead

He was Leah's second son, born when his mother was still measuring her own worth by how many boys she had produced. His name meant that the Lord had heard. By the time he was gathering his own sons around him to die, at one hundred and twenty years old in Egypt, he had a different kind of hearing in mind. He wanted his children to hear what he had never fully said to anyone while he was still at full strength.

The Testament of Simeon, preserved in the collection of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs from the second century BCE, is the confession of a man who spent his life being strong and used that strength badly. Simeon described himself as someone who shrank from no achievement, who was afraid of nothing. He was exceedingly strong, hard-hearted, his liver immovable, his bowels without compassion. These are his own words. He was not describing a weakness. He was describing a capacity that had been put in service of something he was not proud of.

The thing he had not been proud of was Joseph. Jacob loved the youngest of Leah's sons less than he loved Rachel's child, and this fact had been visible in the household for years. When Joseph was seventeen and reporting back to his father about his brothers' behavior, when Joseph was wearing the coat that made Simeon's skin feel tight every time he saw it, the spirit of jealousy entered through that gap. Simeon told his sons: the prince of deceit sent forth the spirit of jealousy and blinded my mind, so that I regarded him not as a brother, nor did I spare even Jacob my father.

He had set his mind against Joseph to destroy him. Not just to stop the favoritism, not just to correct the imbalance of affection, but to destroy him. When the opportunity came at Dothan, when the brothers had Joseph at their mercy and the pit was there and Reuben had left and Judah had proposed the sale, Simeon was wroth that Judah let Joseph go away alive. He was angry about the mercy. For five months after the sale, he burned with anger at Judah for sparing Joseph's life.

And then his right hand went numb. The Testament is precise about this: the Lord restrained him and withheld from him the power of his hands; his right hand was half-withered for seven days. He knew immediately what the cause was. He repented. He wept. He fasted for two years in the fear of the Lord, and he came to understand that deliverance from envy comes through the fear of God. The withered hand was a mercy, because the hand that had been planning violence against Judah for preserving Joseph's life was taken away before it could act.

When Joseph, the viceroy of Egypt whom none of them recognized, held Simeon as hostage after the first visit and sent the other brothers home, Simeon knew it was just. He said this to his sons with no ambiguity. He had been bound by the viceroy as a spy, and he had not grieved, because he was suffering justly. The punishment fit. The man who had been held captive in a pit was now holding Simeon in captivity. This is the arithmetic of sin that the testamentary literature takes seriously, not as grim moralism but as the actual texture of a life where consequences track actions.

What Simeon offered his children at the end was not abstraction. He did not warn them against jealousy by describing it philosophically. He described what it had felt like from inside. Jacob on his deathbed had cursed the anger of Simeon and Levi, not the brothers but the anger itself, understanding that the weapon these two sons carried was dangerous precisely because of how effective it was. Simeon survived. He died at one hundred and twenty, surrounded by his children and theirs. But the testimony he left them was the record of a mind blinded by envy until a withered hand taught it to see.

The apocryphal literature of the second century BCE was particularly interested in this kind of testimony: the confession that comes too late to change what happened but in time to change what comes next. Simeon could not give Joseph back his years in the pit. He could not give Jacob back his twenty-two years of mourning. But he could describe, with the authority of the man who had lived it, what jealousy looked like when it ate a strong man from the inside out: it ruleth over the whole mind of a man, and suffereth him neither to eat nor to drink, nor to do any good thing. It suggests to him how to destroy the one he envies. And so long as the envied one flourishes, the envious one fades away.