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.

Two ruined households

The story opens on two prayers for death, offered the same day by two people who have never met. In Nineveh, the capital of the empire that has swallowed his people, Tobit speaks. He is a devout Israelite of the northern tribe of Naphtali, deported with the rest, and he has kept the law of his fathers in a land that mocks it — tithing, feeding the hungry, and, above all, burying the corpses of fellow Jews thrown out unburied by the king. For this last mercy he has been hunted, stripped of his property, and forced to bury the dead by night. Then, sleeping in his own courtyard with his face uncovered, he is blinded by the droppings of sparrows that fall warm into his open eyes. His wife Anna must work for wages; when she brings home a goat given to her as a bonus, he accuses her of theft, and she answers him with a wife’s bitter accuracy. Shamed, betrayed in every charity he ever practiced, he turns his face to the wall and asks God to let him die.

Far to the east, in the Median city the book calls Ecbatana, a young woman named Sarah prays the same prayer in the same hour. She has been married seven times, and seven times the demon Asmodeus — driven by a jealous, devouring love for her — has killed the bridegroom on the wedding night before the marriage could be consummated. Her own maids taunt her as a husband-killer. She climbs to an upper room intending to hang herself, thinks of the grief it would bring her aged father, and instead begs heaven to take her cleanly. Two cries, one moment; and the narrator lifts the camera, as it were, above both houses to say that the prayer of each was heard at once in the presence of the glory of God, who sent Raphael to heal them both — Tobit of his blindness, Sarah of the demon that haunted her bridal bed.

The road, the fish, and the disguised guide

The machinery that joins the two houses is a debt. Years before, Tobit had left a deposit of silver with a kinsman in Media; now, expecting to die, he sends his son Tobias to recover it, and gives the young man a deathbed sermon first — a compact manual of diaspora virtue: honor your mother, give alms, avoid pride, marry within the people, pay the laborer at once. Tobias needs a guide for the long road east, and one presents himself: a fellow Israelite who calls himself Azarias, son of Ananias, and who knows the way to Media well. He is Raphael, an angel, and neither father nor son perceives it.

On the first night the travelers camp by the Tigris, and a great fish leaps at Tobias’s foot. The guide tells him to seize it, gut it, and keep three organs — the heart, the liver, and the gall. The smoke of the burned heart and liver, he says, will drive off any demon or evil spirit; the gall will cure white films of the eyes. The instruction is given as plain travelers’ lore, and the boy obeys without understanding what is being prepared. At the kinsman’s house in Media, Raphael steers Tobias toward Sarah, who is his nearest marriageable relative and therefore his by right — and warns him, too, of the seven dead grooms before him. On the wedding night Tobias does as he was told: the fish-heart and liver are laid on the burning incense, and Asmodeus, repelled by the reek, flees to the far deserts of Upper Egypt, where Raphael binds him. The couple survives the night. The marriage holds.

The return reverses every loss. Tobias carries home the silver, the bride, and the gall; the gall, smeared on his father’s eyes, peels away the blindness like a membrane, and Tobit sees his son and his daughter-in-law and the light of heaven again. Only then, asked how he may be repaid, does the guide refuse the wages and name himself: he is Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who stand and enter before the glory of God, who carry up the prayers of the saints. He has been sent, he tells them, because Tobit and Sarah prayed; he ate and drank nothing the whole journey but only seemed to; and now he returns to the One who sent him. The two men fall on their faces in terror, and when they rise he is gone.

Composition, language, and the shape of the text

The book wears the costume of the eighth-century Assyrian deportations, but it does not fit them. Tobit is made to remember, within a single lifetime, events strung across reigns that no single life could span, and the geography of his travels sits loose to the real map. Scholarship reads the Assyrian setting as a frame and a stage, not a chronicle: the deportation furnishes the pressure — how to live as a faithful Jew in a foreign empire that does not bury its dead or honor its God — while the moral concerns belong to a later diaspora. The composition is placed in the third or early second century BCE, before the Maccabean crisis, with an eastern (Mesopotamian) diaspora the most favored place of origin.

For centuries the original language was disputed, the Greek being all that survived in quantity. The discovery resolved it. Among the scrolls of Qumran’s Cave 4, recovered in 1952 and finally published in 1995, were five copies of Tobit in Aramaic (cataloged 4Q196 through 4Q199, with a further fragment) and a single copy in Hebrew (4Q200), the manuscripts dating roughly between 100 BCE and the first decades of the common era. They settled that the book was composed in a Semitic tongue — most likely Aramaic, with the Hebrew a near-contemporary secondary version — and only afterward rendered into the Greek of the Septuagint, in which it was chiefly transmitted to the church.

The Greek itself survives in more than one shape, so that there is no single fixed text of Tobit but a small family of them. A short recension, the form long printed in the standard editions, is carried by the great codices Vaticanus and Alexandrinus; a markedly longer recension, fuller in detail and more Semitic in texture, is preserved chiefly in Codex Sinaiticus and a handful of later manuscripts; a third, fragmentary form survives in part. The decisive point came when the Qumran Aramaic and Hebrew fragments were laid against the Greek: they track the longer Sinaiticus form, which is now generally judged the closer witness to the lost original. Modern translations have followed the verdict — where older English Bibles printed the short text, the long recension underlies most recent versions.

The teller also reaches outside his own tale. Tobit is made the uncle of Ahiqar, the famous wise courtier of Mesopotamian legend whose story — the upright sage betrayed by his ungrateful adopted nephew and vindicated in the end — circulated widely in Aramaic and was already old (a copy survives among the fifth-century BCE Jewish papyri of Elephantine in Egypt) when Tobit borrowed it. By making the celebrated Ahiqar a member of his own pious family, the author folds an international wisdom legend into the household of an exiled Israelite, and the book takes on the layered, allusive quality of a story told by someone who knows the whole storehouse of the East.

Canon, councils, and Jerome’s day’s labor

Tobit’s place in scripture has been settled differently by different communities, and the disagreement is old. The book was never received into the Hebrew canon fixed by the rabbis, and it accordingly stands outside the Jewish Bible; the Reformation churches, returning to that Hebrew canon, placed Tobit among the Apocrypha — read for example of life, not appealed to for doctrine. The Greek and Latin churches kept it. Latin and Greek Christian writers of the second through fifth centuries — Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine among them — drew on Tobit freely, above all for its teaching on almsgiving, and the western councils that drew up canon lists included it: Rome in 382, Hippo in 393, Carthage in 397. The Council of Florence reaffirmed it in 1442, and the Council of Trent, at its fourth session on 8 April 1546, defined the deuterocanonical books — Tobit with them — as sacred and canonical against the Protestant rejection, where the matter stands for Catholics still. The Orthodox churches likewise retain it within their wider canon.

The Latin transmission carries a small, vivid episode of its own. When Jerome prepared the Vulgate at the close of the fourth century, he held the Apocrypha in low regard and at first declined to render Tobit at all; pressed by two bishops, he relented, working from an Aramaic text he could not himself read fluently. He had a Jewish scholar turn the Aramaic into oral Hebrew, which Jerome then dictated into Latin — and in his preface he remarks, with the air of a man defending a slight piece of work, that the whole of it cost him the labor of a single day. His Latin Tobit, made that quickly and from a text now lost, became the form in which the Christian West read the book for a thousand years, a third distinct branch beside the long and short Greek.

What the book left behind

What later readers drew from Tobit was less the plot than its figures and its furniture. Raphael, whose name carries the sense God heals, became one of the named archangels of Jewish and Christian angelology and the standard patron of travelers and of the sick; the self-naming at the book’s climax — one of the seven who stand before God and carry up the prayers of the holy — gave the heavenly court a fixed number and a fixed office, and set Raphael beside Michael and Gabriel among the three angels the church was willing to name. The scene of the angel walking the road beside Tobias, unrecognized, unsleeping, became one of the most painted episodes in Western art, and the deepest single source for the later idea of the guardian angel — the protector who travels at a person’s side without being seen.

Asmodeus traveled the other way. His name reaches back through the Talmud’s Ashmedai to the Avestan aēšma-daēva, the Persian demon of wrath, and his presence in Tobit is one of the clearest traces of Iranian belief in Jewish demonology. From the modest tale where he first kills out of jealous love, he passed into the Testament of Solomon and from there into the grimoire literature, where he hardened into a great king of demons — the demon of lust, numbered among the seventy-two of the Lesser Key — his name carried far from the bridal chamber in Ecbatana into the apparatus of conjuration and exorcism. The fish-organ remedy that drove him off, told in the book as a single night’s plain deliverance, was read by later ages as the seed of an art.

The book itself never raised its voice. For all the angel and the demon and the fish from the river, its center is domestic — a blind man and his sharp-tongued wife, a son sent on an errand, a girl shamed past bearing, a debt repaid, a marriage that holds. It sits among the wisdom-and-piety writings of the later Second Temple period beside Sirach, the Book of Wisdom, Baruch, and the Letter of Jeremiah — books carried in the Greek and Latin Bibles, set apart in the Hebrew and Protestant ones. Tobit closes quietly, with the old man’s deathbed counsel to his son and grandsons — give alms, leave the doomed city of Nineveh, bury the dead — and the burial, in the end, of Tobit himself and of Anna, the charity to the dead that his whole life had insisted on coming home at last to his own grave.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

The book is hosted in the encyclopedia’s library within R. H. Charles’s collection The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1913), still the standard English gateway to the apocryphal corpus. The modern critical foundation is double. Carey A. Moore’s Tobit: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible 40A, Doubleday, 1996) and Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s Tobit (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature, de Gruyter, 2003) are the two reference commentaries; Fitzmyer is also the editor who published the Qumran Cave 4 Aramaic and Hebrew fragments in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIX (1995), the edition that resolved the question of the original language. On the demon’s pedigree, the Jewish Encyclopedia’s article “Aeshma / Asmodeus / Ashmedai” (1901–1906) traces the line from the Avestan demon of wrath through the Talmud to Tobit. The book’s reception by the Latin and Greek fathers, and the canonical disputes that followed, are treated in de Wet’s study of Tobit in early Christianity (HTS Teologiese Studies, 2020), which surveys the second- through fifth-century interpreters and the road to the councils.

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

→ Related: Sirach · Book Of Baruch · Book Of Wisdom · Letter Of Jeremiah · Guardian Angel · Michael · Gabriel · Raphael · Demon · Exorcism · Deuterocanonical Books · Apocrypha · Second Temple Judaism