The lexica agree on the root and hedge on the formation. BDB and HALOT, s.v. שִׁמְעוֹן, register the connection to שָׁמַע (to hear, heed, obey) while treating the precise formation as uncertain, and BDB already observes that if the name is older than the Genesis narrative its original force may be irrecoverable, which makes Genesis 29:33 an interpretation rather than a derivation. The name sits in a large onomastic family from this root: שֶׁמַע, שָׁמָע, שַׁמּוּעַ, שִׁמְעָה, שִׁמְעִי, מִשְׁמָע, שְׁמַעְיָה and שְׁמַעְיָהוּ, אֱלִישָׁמָע, and יִשְׁמָעֵאל.
The contested element is the ending ־וֹן (Semitic -ān). Martin Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung (1928), still the standard framework, classifies short names of this shape as abbreviated forms, and Frank Moore Cross, Richard Hess (Amarna Personal Names, 1993) and Ran Zadok (The Pre-Hellenistic Israelite Anthroponymy and Prosopography, 1988) all work within it. J. J. Stamm assembled the Akkadian material behind the competing reading, on which the name is a hypocoristicon of a sentence name: beside Išme-Dagan and Išme-Adad stand fuller forms such as Ili-išmeanni (my god has heard me) and Ištar-išmešu (Ishtar has heard him), and Hebrew prefers the terser coined form. Alan Millard, "Patriarchal Names in Context" (Tyndale Bulletin 75, 2024, 164), sets out the form history together with a third option: the root yields many Amorite names but not the form šmʿn, which surfaces later in Ugaritic, and the suffix may mark a diminutive or an adjectival form. Zadok (1988, 159) cautions that the -ān suffix, though pan-Semitic, seems to serve purposes other than hypocoristic in Hebrew names. The nineteenth-century comparison with Arabic simʿ, a hyena and wolf crossbreed, advanced by Ferdinand Hitzig, William Robertson Smith, Bernhard Stade and Kerber as a totemic clan name, is recorded in the reference literature but has been abandoned by mainstream philology.
On Genesis 29:33 the Genesis commentators are unanimous that Leah's speech is paronomasia rather than etymology. Moshe Garsiel, Biblical Names: A Literary Study of Midrashic Derivations and Puns (1991), argues that the biblical writers were committed to literary rather than linguistic considerations and that their name explanations are far more pliable, morphologically and semantically, than a real etymology would be; only the first syllable echoes שָׁמַע, and the ending goes unexplained. Herbert Marks, "Biblical Naming and Poetic Etymology" (JBL 114, 1995), reaches the same judgement. The Leah birth notices of Genesis 29:31 to 35 are classically assigned to J, since the mother names the children and uses the divine name.
Attestation runs contrary to expectation. The specific form šmʿn is first attested at Late Bronze Age Ugarit (Frauke Gröndahl, Die Personennamen der Texte aus Ugarit, 1967, 50-51; cf. Viktor Golinets, Das amurritische Onomastikon 2, 2018, 449-451), yet it is essentially absent from the pre-exilic Hebrew inscriptional corpus as collected by Zadok (1988) and by Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (1997), a negative that the standard corpora support but that should be checked against the print volumes before being asserted absolutely. In the Second Temple period the name becomes the commonest Jewish male name: Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity I: Palestine 330 BCE to 200 CE (2002), heads her list with 257 bearers, ahead of Joseph (231) and Judah (179), and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), calculates that 15.6 percent of men bore one of the two commonest names, Simon and Joseph, against 18.2 percent in the Gospels and Acts. Ilan and Martin Hengel credit the surge above all to Simon Thassi, and both note that Σίμων was already a Greek name formed from σιμός.
On the tribe, Nadav Naʾaman, "The Inheritance of the Sons of Simeon" (ZDPV 96, 1980), frames the territorial debate and argues for a real Simeonite population interspersed with Judah down to 586 BCE; Zecharia Kallai (Historical Geography of the Bible), Yohanan Aharoni, Israel Finkelstein and Kenneth Kitchen engage the same Judah enclave picture. On Genesis 49, Jean-Daniel Macchi (Israël et ses tribus selon Genèse 49), Raymond de Hoop (Genesis 49 in Its Literary and Historical Context), Claus Westermann and Horst Seebass read the scattering language as aetiological, explaining a situation the poet already knew, and discuss the hapax מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶם of v. 5 against the divergent Greek and Samaritan readings. Roland de Vaux (The Early History of Israel) represents the dominant reconstruction of an early tribe absorbed by Judah, while a more sceptical line associated with Finkelstein, Ernst Axel Knauf, Diana Edelman and Daniel Fleming (The Legacy of Israel in Judah's Bible) treats much of the tribal picture as later Judahite construction. For the Chronicler's northern Simeon, Sara Japhet (I and II Chronicles; The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles), Gary Knoppers, H. G. M. Williamson, Ralph Klein and Yigal Levin read it within his all-Israel programme. Jeffrey Tigay (JPS Deuteronomy) attributes Simeon's absence from Deuteronomy 33 to absorption into Judah, where the Septuagint and the Lucianic witnesses appear to preserve the name inside Reuben's blessing at 33:6, a restoration discussed by S. R. Driver and by Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman.