Genesis 49:5 Commentary and Bible Study

Simeon and Levi were Jacob’s sons numbers two and three. ‘Brethren’: Jacob is not just stating the obvious. It refers surely to there being of one mind in what they did. They conspired together to do something terrible, and they were of the same mind in doing it. They plotted equally to wreak vengeance upon the Shechemites. They meted out judgment upon the city of the Shechemites because of the prince, Shechem, defiled their sister. But they did it out of anger and vengeance and hatred; it wasn't justice. They killed a lot of people and destroyed the city. They were violent men; retribution was their remedy for every problem. Simeon and Levi were like-minded, ‘instruments of cruelty in their habitations.’ Sometime later, they were proud of it and defended themselves: ‘Should he deal with our sister as with an harlot?’ (Genesis 34:31). ‘We taught them a lesson. We stood for our family. We dealt with those people.’ But they did it in an utterly wrong spirit and hence the very harsh words said about them in this prophecy. ‘Oh my soul’, says Jacob, ‘come not thou into their secret.’ Don't share councils with them. Don't plan anything with them. Don't come into their assembly, ‘Mine honour, be not thou united’. You can't join in spirit with a Simeon and a Levi because the spirit within them just wants to react violently. ‘For in their anger they slew a man’ – a prominent man, but they did far more than that: they slew all the males in his city (Genesis 34:25). ‘And in their selfwill they digged down a wall.’ The idea of this rendering is that they destroyed a city and the people in it. The Hebrew is notoriously difficult to translate, and the more popular rendering of it is that they disabled the enemy horses and oxen. They would go to their farms, presumably, and carry out massive acts of slaughter on working animals – very cruel and destructive behaviour.