Shimon, son of Jacob

Shimon, the second son of Jacob and Leah, was born on Tevet 21 (according to another opinion, on Tevet 28), of the year 2194 from creation (1567 BCE), nine years after Jacob's arrival in Charan. Jacob was 86 at the time (by another calculation, Shimon was born in 1566, when his father was 85). According to Seder Hadorot, Shimon also died on this date, at age of 120, seventy-five years after Jacob's family relocated to Egypt.

Shimon and his younger brother Levi were the most volatile of Jacob's sons. It was they who (age 14 and 13 at the time) killed the inhabitants of Shechem in response to the rape of their sister Dinah, and who led the brothers' plotting against Joseph. To separate the two, Joseph ordered that Shimon be held as a "hostage" in Egypt until the brothers would bring Benjamin to him. Shimon and Levi they were rebuked by Jacob on his deathbed, though he only cursed their "anger" and "wrath", not their person or even their actions. Jacob deemed that they be "divided up... scattered in Israel": they were the only two tribes not allotted a distinct territory in the land of Israel (the tribe of Levi was assigned to serve in the Holy Temple and were given 48 cities within the other tribes' territories, while the tribe of Shimon became itinerant schoolteachers and received their portion in the land within the territory of Judah).

Shimon had six sons -- Yemuel, Yamin, Ohad, Yachin, Zochar, and Saul "the son of the Cannaaitess." According to one Midrash, "the Cannaaitess" is Dinah, who refused to leave the home of Shechem until Shimon promised to marry her. A year after the Exodus from Egypt, Shimon's descendents numbered 59,300 heads of household (i.e., adult males between the ages 20 and 60), but they were greatly disseminated by the Pe'or incident; on the eve of the Children of Israel's entry into the Holy Land 40 years later, only five of the six Shimonite families survived, with a total population of 22,200 heads of household.