Genesis 47:28-50:26
Anger Management
At the end of his life, Jacob gathered his sons together in order to give each of them his fatherly blessing (Genesis 49:2-27). But in fact, his three oldest sons didn’t end up being blessed at all; what Jacob said to each was more in the nature of a reproach.
His words to the first of the three, Reuben, were clear enough: Jacob denounced Reuben for his sin with Bilhah (Genesis 35:22). But what Jacob said to the other two, Simeon (in Hebrew, Shim‘on) and Levi, is far from clear:
Simeon and Levi are brothers, tools of violence are their stock-in-trade.
Let me not enter their company, nor have any place in their assembly.
For in their anger they killed a man, and in a good mood, hamstrung an ox.
Cursed be their anger—so fierce! And their wrath—so harsh!
I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.
Ancient interpreters saw these words as referring to a specific incident, Simeon and Levi’s attack on the town of Shechem to avenge the rape of their sister Dinah (Genesis chapter 34). After seeming to accept the Shechemites’ offer to let bygones be bygones and merge Jacob’s family with the people of Shechem, Simeon and Levi attacked the town unawares, killing the entire male population.
But is “they killed a man” really what this passage is saying? There is no mention of the rape that brought about the revenge that followed. And Simeon and Levi did not just “kill a man”; they massacred all the adult males in the town! By the same token, there is no mention of their hamstringing anyone’s ox in the process. And who—and why—should anyone in this story be “in a good mood”?
The answer to these questions lies with a common misconception about biblical Hebrew. It doesn’t really have tenses the way we do in English (or indeed in most other Indo-European languages). Linguists are still debating exactly what to call, and how to explain, biblical Hebrew’s two contrasting verbal forms. Depending on the context, the form of a verb that usually refers to a past event can sometimes refer to something in the present or future. This sounds confusing to us nowadays, but ancient Israelites seem to have gotten along perfectly well with this.
If so, then it seems likely that Jacob’s reproach of Simeon and Levi wasn’t talking about the massacre of the Shechemites in particular. It seems to be a general characterization of these two men (or their whole tribes): they are so ruthless that when they are angered, they are capable of killing a man—no particular individual in the past, just any man whom they may feel like killing now. What is more, even when they are in a good mood, they may just decide to hamstring an ox for the fun of it. Quite a pair!
There is another indictment of excess violence that appears earlier in Genesis, and its words are sometimes similarly mistaken by commentators. Lamech, a descendant of Cain, boasts of his unfair taking of revenge: “I killed a man for wounding me,” Some Bible translations report, “and a boy for bruising me” (Genesis 4:23). But who are this “man” and this “boy”? Just as with Simeon and Levi, Lamech is not referring to some specific incident in the past, but to his general tendency in the present to take unfair revenge: “My murderous tendencies are such,” Lamech says, “that I kill a man for just wounding me, in fact, I would kill a harmless little boy to avenge a bruise.” No doubt the Torah is telling us that Lamech, Simeon, and Levi were all killers in the past, but that’s not the whole of it. They all could use to learn a little anger management for the present as well.