According to the
Book of Genesis,
Simeon was, the second son of
Jacob and
Leah, and the founder of the
Israelite Tribe of
Simeon. However, some
Biblical scholars view this as postdiction, an
eponymous metaphor providing an
etiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation. With Leah as a
matriarch, Biblical scholars regard the tribe as having been believed by the text's authors to have been part of the original Israelite confederation, however, the tribe is absent from the parts of the Bible which
textual scholars regard as the oldest (for example, the ancient
Song of Deborah), and some scholars think that Simeon was not originally regarded as a distinct tribe.