What Does Genesis 49:6 Mean?

"Let my soul come not into their council; O my glory, be not joined to their company. For in their anger they killed men, and in their willfulness they hamstrung oxen." Jacob's personal rejection of association with Simeon and Levi's violent pattern: "let my soul not enter their counsel." This is the patriarch disassociating himself from the specific quality of violence he sees in these sons. He does not disown them as sons, but he refuses to be identified with their way of operating. The Shechem massacre was precisely the kind of action that brought Jacob into danger with the Canaanites (Genesis 34:30: "you have made me odious").

"In their anger they killed men, and in their willfulness they hamstrung oxen": the two specific acts of the Shechem massacre: killing the men of the city (Genesis 34:25) and presumably harming the animals in the plunder (Genesis 34:28 to 29). The "hamstrung oxen" (or "they cut the sinews of bulls") refers to the ancient practice of disabling captured livestock: a form of sadism or deliberate destruction rather than practical plunder. Jacob names both the human violence and the animal cruelty as evidence of the quality he is characterizing: anger-driven, willful, destructive.

The consequences of the Simeon-Levi characterization will be tribal dispersal (verse 7). Levi's descendants will be scattered through all the tribes as the priestly and Levitical cities distributed across the land: no tribal territory of their own. Simeon's tribal territory will be small, eventually absorbed into Judah's. The violence of the founders produces the dispersal of the tribes: neither Simeon nor Levi will have concentrated territorial power of the kind their violence sought to obtain at Shechem. Jacob's prophecy of dispersal becomes the land-allocation reality of Numbers and Joshua.