Levi

Levi
Levi, from the Twelve sons of Jacob, Holland c. 1590
Died	Age 137 Exodus 6:16

Levi (or Levy) (/ˈliːvaɪ/, Hebrew: לֵּוִי‎‎; Standard Levy Tiberian Lēwî) was, according to the Book of Genesis, the third son of Jacob and Leah, and the founder of the Israelite Tribe of Levi (the Levites). Certain religious and political functions were reserved for the Levites.

The Torah suggests that the name of Levi refers to Leah's hope for Jacob to join with her, implying a derivation from yillaweh, meaning he will join, but some Biblical scholars have proposed quite different origins of the name. These 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 originated as migrants, and that the name Levites indicates their joining with either the Israelites in general, or the earlier Israelite priesthood in particular. In the Book of Jubilees 28:14-15; it says that Levi was born "in the new moon of the first month" which means that he was born on 1 Nissan.

In the narratives found in the Book of Genesis, Levi’s youth is marked by impetuosity. He and his brother, Simeon, destroy 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 of Shechem by consenting to Dinah's rapist marrying her, 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 (the Levites).