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, and some scholars think that Simeon was not originally regarded as a distinct tribe.