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(BA) Tobit
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23 July 2022

Tobit is a book found in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles, but not in Protestant and Jewish Bibles. The beginning of the book identifies it as being the work of a man who survived and was taken captive during the destruction of the Northern Kingdom (which occurred in 722 BCE). But it has a number of historical errors that work against such an early date, and most scholars now date it to around 200 BCE.[1]

Summary
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The book begins in the first-person perspective of Tobit, who was carried captive by the Assyrian king "Enemessar".[2] Tobit becomes a favored employee of Enemessar, following the literary pattern of Joseph, Esther, and Daniel. When Enemessar's son Sennacherib comes to power, Tobit is persecuted for burying murdered Jews,[3] Sennacherib is murdered by his sons,[4] and succeeded by his son Sarchedonus.[5] Tobit is restored to his position, but his religion gets him in trouble again. Someone strangles an Israelite, and Tobit feels obliged to bury him. He sleeps outside that night, not wanted to bring corpse-defilment[6] into his house. For reasons not made clear, he sleeps with his eyes open, and bird droppings fall into his eyes and blind him. He can no longer support his household and his wife begins working. At one point, an employer gifts her with a goat, and Tobit gets angry, thinking his wife stole the goat. His wife gets upset, and Tobit feels bad, and prays that God will kill him.[7]

The scene shifts to another person praying for death on the same night. This other person, a young woman named Sara, is likewise in distress that has lead to conflict. She has tried to get married seven times, but the demon Asmodeus keeps killing her husbands before she can consummate the marriage. She has become frustrated and beats her female servants, who get upset and express to her their hopes that she will die. She becomes suicidal and prays that God will kill her or help her from her troubles.

The great god hears both prayers and sends his angel Raphael[8] to heal them both.

Tobit remembers (!)[9] that he has left ten talents of gold with someone named Gabael. He expresses to his son that he will die, and gives his son moral advice, and then tells him to go collect his inheritance.

Tobit's son, Tobias, sets out looking for someone to accompany him on the journey, and unwittingly selects the angel Raphael. On their way, they come to the river Tigris, where, as Tobias is washing himself, a large fish leaps out of the water and tries to eat Tobias. Raphael tells Tobias to pull the fish out of the water and take its heart and liver and gall.[10] They roast the fish and eat the rest. The angel explains that smoke from burning the heart and liver can drive away a demon that is bothering a person, while the gall can cure blindness.

As they approach where Sara lives, the angel explains that Sara is supposed to be married to Tobias, on account of rules of family inheritance which are not spelled out.[11] Tobias objects that the last seven men to marry her were killed by a demon, but the angel explains that they will use the smoke of fish-organs to drive it off. Tobias does so, and the newlywed couple sleep together that night. Meanwhile, Sara's father Raguel digs a grave for Tobias, so that he can secretly bury him if he dies, to hide the story from getting out. However, he finds that Tobias has survived, and they celebrate. Tobias retrieves the ten talents, and Raguel gives him half his wealth as well.

Tobias arrives home and uses the gall to heal his father's eyes. They all live happily ever after. We learn that Tobias was 85 when he went blind, 93 when he was healed, and 127 when he died. The book ends on a note of Schadenfreude, as Tobias before his death learns about the destruction of Nineveh by Nebuchadnezzar and "Assuerus."[12]

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  1. Geoffrey Miller, Marriage in the Book of Tobit, pp. 10-11.↩︎
  2. That no such king as Enemessar is known to history poses an interesting problem. We read in 1:15 that Enemessar was succeded by his son Sennacherib. Sennacherib is an actual historical figure we can place, ruling Assyria from 705 to 686. His father was the Assyrian king Sargon (II) (722-705), who completed the defeat of Jerusalem in 722, after a three-year siege which was begun by his elder brother Shalmaneser (V) (727-722). So Shalmaneser, the initiator of Jerusalem's destruction, is the uncle of Sennacherib, and his reign is only separated from Sennacherib's by 5 years. The simplest explanation then is that history had gotten a bit garbled by the time Tobit was written, and that Enemessar is a misremembered version of Shalmaneser.↩︎
  3. A Jew elevated to high status in a foreign land is threatened with death because of their Jewish convictions. This trope likewise appears in Esther and Daniel.↩︎
  4. Sennacherib murdered by his sons. This actually, historically happened.↩︎
  5. Sarchedonus. More commonly known as Esarhaddon.↩︎
  6. corpse-defilement. Traditionally, Judaism has a well-developed idea of ritual defilement and the need to prevent it from spreading. One source of this defilement was corpses.↩︎
  7. prays that God will kill him. Like Job, a righteous character who falls on unfairly hard times.↩︎
  8. Raphael is not named in the Hebrew Bible; only Michael and Gabriel are. An enormous elaboration of the names and roles of angels occurred in Judaism during the second temple period, but this trend is mostly not reflected in the Hebrew Bible, with the partial exception of Daniel, an exceedingly late book, possibly written slightly after Tobit.↩︎
  9. remembers (!). This is surprising because the sum is ten talents of gold. A talent was three thousand shekels, and gold was more valuable than silver by a ratio of 10:1 or more. So this sum of money is worth at least 300,000 shekels of silver. The Bibles gives about 30 shekels as the price of a slave; so 300,000 talents is a tremendous quantity of money. How could one forget such an amount as one falls into poverty?↩︎
  10. a fish tries to eat someone. Compare Jonah for a fish eating a person. For finding something useful in a fish, compare Jesus and the tax money in a fish's mouth.↩︎
  11. supposed to be married to Tobias. Compare the hypothetical in the New Testament about a woman married to seven brothers who each die.↩︎
  12. Let's work out the implied chronology here. Although the book of Tobit is confused about who reigned before Sennacherib, let's have Tobit exiled in 722 BCE when Jerusalem is destroyed, and 85 when he is blinded during the reign of Esarhaddon (681-669). So he has to have been born between 766 and 754, and therefore to die between 639 and 627. But the destruction of Babylon is in 612, so Tobit is off by at least fifteen years. Furthermore, Nebuchadnezzar doesn't become king until 605. Assuerus must be an equivalent of the Hebrew Ahashwerosh, which is Hebrew for what is more commonly called in English Xerxes. But Xerxes does not become king until 486. However, the book of Daniel, written around 165 BCE, reflects a view in which "Darius the Mede" was the son of an Ahashwerosh. Darius the Mede becomes king, according to Daniel, when the Assyrians were defeated by the Babylonians. In history the king who first defeated the Babylonians was Cyrus, although Daniel places this Darius the Mede before Cyrus. Cyrus begins his reign over the defeated Babylonians in 539. The whole timeline is thoroughly confused by later Jewish traditions.↩︎
Table Of Contents

(BA) Tobit

Summary

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