What happened to the tribe of Simeon?

Simeon was absorbed into Judah.

The story begins with Genesis 34 — the rape of Dinah. Shechem son of Hamor sees Jacob's daughter Dinah and violates her, then asks to marry her. Jacob's sons, led by Simeon and Levi, negotiate with deceit. They require the men of Shechem to circumcise themselves as a precondition. Three days later, while the men are in pain:

"Two of the sons of Jacob — Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers — took each man his sword, and came upon the city unawares, and killed every male." — Genesis 34:25

Jacob's immediate response (Gen 34:30) is practical: "You have brought trouble on me, making me stink among the inhabitants of the land." But the narrator reserves moral judgment for Jacob's deathbed blessing at Gen 49.

Jacob's verdict on Simeon and Levi together is uncompromising:

"Simeon and Levi are brothers; weapons of violence are their mekherot... Let my soul not enter their council; in their assembly let my glory not be joined. Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel. I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel." — Genesis 49:5–7 (MT)

The word for "violence" is חָמָס (chamas, H2555) — the Genesis flood-word, the sin that filled the earth in Gen 6:11, 13. Jacob sees in his sons the pre-Flood impulse. And the curse is not annihilation but scattering (aphitsem, Hiphil imperfect of puts, H6327).

What happens to Simeon's half of the curse:

When Joshua allots the land to the twelve tribes after the conquest (Josh 13-19), Simeon receives an inheritance that sits entirely within Judah's territory:

"The second lot came out for Simeon, for the tribe of the sons of Simeon, according to their families. And their inheritance was within the inheritance of the sons of Judah." — Joshua 19:1

Simeon has towns — seventeen of them listed in Josh 19:2-9 — but he has no separate region, no independent territorial block, no border on the map. The scattering of Gen 49:7 is fulfilled by absorption. Simeon survives as a subset of Judah.

Then comes the striking datum: Simeon is omitted entirely from Moses's final blessing in Deuteronomy 33. Moses blesses the tribes before his death, and the sequence runs: Reuben (v.6), Judah (v.7), Levi (vv.8-11), Benjamin (v.12), Joseph-Ephraim-Manasseh (vv.13-17), Zebulun and Issachar (vv.18-19), Gad (vv.20-21), Dan (v.22), Naphtali (v.23), Asher (vv.24-25). Eleven tribes receive something. Reuben gets a diminished blessing ("let Reuben live and not die"). Simeon gets no line at all.

The omission is not oversight. The Mosaic blessing registers what the Jacobic curse announced — Simeon has ceased to be a tribe with a standing institutional role in Israel. By the time of the prophets and the later history, Simeon's tribal census numbers decline steadily (compare Num 1:23's 59,300 with Num 26:14's 22,200 — a massive drop by the second wilderness census, before the conquest has even begun). By the monarchy, Simeon has largely been reabsorbed into the southern kingdom of Judah.

The contrast with Levi makes the pattern visible. Simeon and Levi were cursed together. Simeon was scattered and absorbed — the curse ran its course. Levi was also scattered — Gen 49:7's language is identical — but Levi's scattering was repurposed. The forty-eight Levitical cities distributed across every tribal territory (Num 35:1-8; Joshua 21) made Levi the priestly presence to the whole nation. The same curse-word, two different outcomes. The difference is not temperament (Levi remained cursedly zealous, as the golden-calf massacre shows). The difference is that YHWH redirected Levi's zeal at Sinai and Peor, while Simeon's temperament was simply allowed to fade into Judah's region.

The Bible's stern honesty about forfeiture is one of its marks of integrity. Simeon did not recover. The firstborn's privileges pass, the scepter goes to Judah, the priesthood goes to Levi, and the second son of Leah — named "YHWH has heard" (Gen 29:33) — is last heard from as a subset of his younger brother's inheritance.

For the full treatment — including Reuben's forfeiture, Levi's redemption, Judah's scepter, and the Hebrews 7 argument about how Christ unifies the divided offices — see the study Priesthood and Scepter.