Book of Tobit

The plot runs on two afflicted people in different cities who know nothing of each other. In Nineveh, Tobit of the tribe of Naphtali, deported under the Assyrians, keeps the law scrupulously and in particular buries Israelites executed and left lying in the street, which the king has forbidden. It costs him his property and then, by way of bird droppings in his eyes as he sleeps by a wall, his sight. In Ecbatana, Sarah has been married seven times and widowed seven times on the wedding night, each husband killed by the demon Asmodeus before the marriage could be consummated. Both pray for death in the same hour, and both prayers are heard.

The mechanism of the answer is Raphael, who attaches himself to Tobit's son Tobias as a hired travelling companion under a false name and an invented genealogy, and is not identified until the end. On the Tigris a fish lunges at Tobias; Raphael has him keep its gall, heart and liver. Heart and liver, burned as a smoke, drive Asmodeus off so that Tobias can marry Sarah, who is his kinswoman; the gall restores Tobit's sight. Raphael then declares himself one of the seven angels who stand before God, refuses payment, and tells them to write the account down.

The book's interests are practical and familial: marriage within the kindred, almsgiving, honest wages, honour to parents, and above all the burial of the dead, which frames the whole narrative and returns in Tobit's dying instructions. It is didactic fiction rather than history and is unembarrassed about being a good story. The dog that goes along on the journey and comes home with them has no theological function whatever.

The original language of Tobit was argued over for centuries. The book was known in Greek in two recensions of markedly different length, a shorter form in the Vatican and Alexandrian codices, a longer and more circumstantial one in Codex Sinaiticus, and in Latin, Syriac, and later Hebrew and Aramaic versions of uncertain descent. Jerome, preparing the Vulgate, said he worked at speed from an Aramaic text through an interpreter, and his Latin diverges from the Greek at many points, which is why older Catholic Bibles carry details other versions lack.

Qumran settled the central question. Cave 4 produced fragments of five manuscripts of Tobit: four in Aramaic and one in Hebrew. That establishes beyond argument that the book existed in a Semitic language in the Second Temple period rather than being composed in Greek, and it tells against the older view that the Semitic versions were later retranslations. Most scholars now take Aramaic as the original with the Hebrew copy a translation of it, though the reverse has been defended.

The fragments also arbitrate between the Greek recensions: where comparison is possible they side with the longer Sinaiticus text, and modern translations have followed, so a reader comparing an older English version with a recent one will find the recent one noticeably fuller. Dating rests on the same evidence together with the book's own silences. The palaeography of the Qumran copies sets a limit, and the book shows no knowledge of the Maccabean crisis while taking a close interest in the eastern diaspora, which points to composition in the third or early second century BCE, more probably in the east than in Judea.

Tobit is not scripture in Judaism. It circulated widely among Jews, the Qumran copies prove that, and Hebrew and Aramaic versions of the story were still being copied in the Middle Ages, but it never entered the Tanakh, and rabbinic literature does not treat it as authoritative.

It entered Christian use through the Septuagint, the Greek collection the early church inherited and read as its Old Testament, which carried a wider set of books than the Hebrew canon the rabbis settled on. Christian writers cite Tobit freely from the second century onward, chiefly for almsgiving and for the burial of the dead. Jerome, who knew enough Hebrew to know which books stood outside the Hebrew canon, translated it under protest and called it apocryphal; Augustine and the western church went the other way, and it stayed in.

At the Reformation the difference hardened into a dividing line. The reformers held to the Hebrew canon for the Old Testament and moved Tobit, with the other disputed books, into a separate section headed Apocrypha, printed in Luther's Bible and in the King James version of 1611, described as useful reading but not a basis for doctrine, and dropped from most Protestant printings during the nineteenth century. The Council of Trent, in 1546, responded by defining the wider list, Tobit included, as canonical without distinction. The Orthodox churches receive it too, generally under the heading anagignoskomena, the books to be read. The Catholic term deuterocanonical means second in the order of recognition, not second in authority, and Catholics regard it as scripture on the same footing as Genesis.