Book of Tobit

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The Book of Tobit is a short Jewish narrative, set among the exiles deported to Assyria, in which the angel Raphael travels in human disguise to heal two suffering households and to drive off a demon. It belongs to the deuterocanonical or apocryphal layer of the Old Testament — scripture for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, placed outside the canon by Jews and most Protestants — and it reads less like law or prophecy than like a told tale, closer to a folk romance than to anything else in the Bible.

The story follows two ruined families. Tobit, a devout Israelite of the northern tribe of Naphtali, has gone blind and lost everything for the sake of his piety, above all his insistence on burying the executed dead. Far away in Media lives Sarah, whose seven successive husbands have each been killed on the wedding night by the jealous demon Asmodeus. Both pray to die on the same day; both prayers are heard. Tobit sends his son Tobias to recover a deposit of silver, and a stranger named Azarias offers to guide him — Raphael, an angel, unrecognized. On the road Tobias takes a fish from the Tigris and keeps its heart, liver, and gall on Raphael’s instruction. The organs, burned, repel Asmodeus on Tobias’s own wedding night to Sarah; the gall, applied later, restores Tobit’s sight. Only at the end does the guide name himself: “I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels.”

Scholarship places the book’s composition somewhere in the third or second century BCE, well after the events it describes, and reads its Assyrian setting as a frame rather than a chronicle — the geography and history are loose, the moral concerns those of a later diaspora. The original language was long disputed; fragments in Aramaic and Hebrew found at Qumran settled that it was composed in a Semitic tongue and only afterward translated into the Greek in which it was chiefly preserved. The Greek itself survives in two notably different recensions, so that the book exists in more than one shape.

What later readers drew from it was less the plot than its figures. Raphael, whose name means “God heals,” became one of the named archangels of Jewish and Christian angelology and a standard patron of travellers and of the sick; the scene of the angel walking beside Tobias, unknown, is among the most painted episodes in Western art. Asmodeus passed into the demonology of magical and grimoire traditions as a great demon, his name and his lust-driven malice carried far from the modest tale where he first appears. The book also gave the tradition its image of the protecting angel who travels at a person’s side without being seen — a thread that runs on into the later idea of the guardian angel. Tobit closes quietly, with the old man’s deathbed counsel and the burial of the dead that his piety had always demanded.

→ In the library: Charles (ed.) — Apocrypha & Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913)

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