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Concept
Levi
Summary
Levi (ˈliːvaɪ ; ) was, according to the Book of Genesis, the third of the six sons of Jacob and Leah (Jacob's third son), and the founder of the Israelite Tribe of Levi (the Levites, including the Kohanim) and the great-grandfather of Aaron, Moses and Miriam. Certain religious and political functions were reserved for the Levites.
The Torah suggests that the name Levi refers to Leah's hope for Jacob to join with her, implying a derivation from Hebrew yillaweh, meaning he will join, but scholars suspect that it may simply mean priest, either as a loan word from the Minaean lawi'u, meaning priest, or by referring to those people who were joined to the Ark of the Covenant. Another possibility is that the Levites were a tribe of Judah not from the clan of Moses or Aaron and that the name "Levites" indicates their joining - either with the Israelites in general or with the earlier Israelite priesthood in particular.
The Book of Jubilees () states that Levi was born "in the new moon of the first month", which means that he was born on 1 Nisan.
In the Book of Genesis, Levi and his brother, Simeon, exterminate the city of Shechem in revenge for the rape of Dinah, seizing the wealth of the city and killing the men. The brothers had earlier misled the inhabitants by consenting to Dinah's rapist marrying her in exchange for the men of the city to be circumcised, and when Jacob hears about their destruction of Shechem, he castigates them for it. In the Blessing of Jacob, Jacob is described as imposing a curse on the Levites, by which they would be scattered, in punishment for Levi's actions in Shechem. Some textual scholars date the Blessing of Jacob to a period between just one and two centuries prior to the Babylonian captivity, and some Biblical scholars regard this curse, and Dinah herself as an aetiological postdiction to explain the fates of the tribe of Simeon and the Levites, with one possible explanation of the Levites' scattered nature being that the priesthood was originally open to any tribe, but gradually became seen as a distinct tribe itself.
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