are weapons of slaughter; O my soul, come not thou into their assembly! mine honour, be thou far from their band! for they slew men in their anger, and in their self-will they houghed oxen; cursed be their anger—­so fierce! and their wrath—­so cruel!  I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them over Israel!” (Genesis xlix.5-7).  The offence of Simeon and Levi here rebuked cannot have been committed against Israelites, for in such a case the thought could not have occurred, which is here emphatically repelled, that Jacob, that is to say, Israel as a whole, could have made common cause with them.  What is here spoken of must be some crime against the Canaanites, very probably the identical crime which is charged upon the two brothers in Genesis xxxiv., and which there also Jacob (ver. 30) repudiates,—­the treacherous attack upon Shechem and massacre of its inhabitants, in disregard of the treaty which had been made.  In Judges ix. it is related that Shechem, until then a flourishing town of the Canaanites, with whom moreover Israelite elements were already beginning to blend, was conquered and destroyed by Abimelech, but it is quite impossible to bring into any connection with this the violent deed of Simeon and Levi, which must have taken place earlier, although also within the period of the judges.  The consequences of their act, the vengeance of the Canaanites, the two tribes had to bear alone; Israel, according to the indication given in Genesis xlix. 6, xxxiv. 30, did not feel any call to interfere on their behalf or make common cause with them.  Thus they fell to pieces and passed out of sight,—­in the opinion of their own nation a just fate.  In the historical books they are never again mentioned.

It is quite impossible to regard this Levi of the Book of Genesis as a mere shadow of the caste which towards the end of the monarchy arose out of the separate priestly families of Judah.  The utterance given in Genesis xlix. 5-7 puts the brothers on an exact equality, and assigns to them an extremely secular and blood-thirsty character.  There is not the faintest idea of Levi’s sacred calling or of his dispersion as being conditioned thereby; the dispersion is a curse and no blessing, an annihilation and no establishment of his special character.  But it is equally an impossibility to derive the caste from the tribe; there is no real connection between the two, all the intermediate links are wanting; the tribe succumbed at an early date, and the rise of the caste was very late, and demonstrably from unconnected beginnings.  But in these circumstances the coincidence of name is also very puzzling:  Levi the third son of Jacob, perhaps a mere patronymic derived form his mother Leah, and levi the official priest.  If it were practicable to find a convincing derivation of levi in its later use from the appellative meaning of the root, then one might believe the coincidence to be merley fortuitous, but it is impossible to do so. the solution therefore has been suggested that