Today I learned that…

–In Deut 33 Simeon alone is missing in Moses’s blessing of the “twelve” tribes;
–In Gen 49 Simeon is (quasi?) cursed in Jacob’s blessing of his twelve sons;
–In Joshua 19 Simeon’s descendants are absorbed into Judah’s territory;
–In the census of Numbers 26, Simeon’s tribe is already down to 22,000 men aged 20yo or older;
–In Rev 7, however, it is Dan and not Simeon that is missing from the twelve tribes of Judah each numbering 12,000, sealed on their foreheads.

I’ve skimmed Leithart’s commentary on the passage in Revelation, which contains a whole long excursus on the Dan question. For me, a naive historical-biblical question: Why even think there are Simeonites around after 1000 or 500 BC, much less in AD 100 or thousands of years in the future?

I sent all this to a friend and he replied (no name to protect the innocent, but this is all him, not me):

Perhaps Simeon’s tribal identity is recapitulated in Simon Peter (called Simeon directly in Acts):

–swords of violence + rebuke;
–weakened and scattered;
–absorbed into Judah.

If so, there are still 1.5 billion Simeonites alive today!