What Happens in the Book of Tobit, and Who Is the Angel Raphael?

What happens in the Book of Tobit?

Tobit opens with two people asking God to let them die on the same day, in different cities. Tobit, an exiled Israelite in Nineveh, has gone blind, and Sarah, in Ecbatana in Media, has lost seven husbands to a demon, each on the wedding night (Tobit 3:1-15).

The narrator then says both prayers "were heard in the glorious presence of God" and that Raphael was sent to heal them both (3:16-17). So the reader knows who the helpful stranger is two chapters before he appears, and no character finds out until chapter 12.

Tobit's blindness has an unusual cause. He had been burying executed Israelites against the king's order, and after one burial he slept in his courtyard, where sparrow droppings fell into his eyes and left white films that the physicians' ointments only made worse (2:9-10).

The ending reaches past the family. Tobit's hymn in chapter 13 looks toward a rebuilt Jerusalem, and before he dies he tells Tobias to take his children to Media because Nineveh will be destroyed (14:4).

What were the fish's heart, liver, and gall used for?

On the first night out, a large fish leaps from the Tigris and tries to swallow Tobias's foot. Raphael tells him to catch it, cut it open, and keep the gall, heart, and liver because they "are useful as medicine" (6:2-5). Tobias roasts and eats part of the fish and keeps the rest salted for the road (6:6). Only later does he ask what the organs are for.

Raphael gives two separate uses. Burned, the heart and liver make a smoke that drives a demon or evil spirit away from the person it troubles, and the gall, smeared on eyes covered with white films, heals them (6:7-9).

Two details are easy to miss. Tobias applies both remedies with his own hands, and the smoke does not finish the demon off: Raphael has to follow Asmodeus to Egypt and bind him "hand and foot" (8:3).

The eye cure is physical and it hurts. The gall stings, Tobias peels the white films from the corners of his father's eyes, and Tobit cries out that he can see his son, "the light of my eyes" (11:11-14).

The fish is not the whole remedy. Raphael also tells the couple to stand and pray before they sleep (6:18), and they do, asking that they "may find mercy" and "grow old together" (8:4-8).

Who is Asmodeus, and why were Sarah's husbands dying?

Asmodeus is the "wicked demon" who killed each of Sarah's seven husbands in the bridal chamber before the marriage was consummated (3:8). When her father's maid taunts her for it, Sarah thinks of hanging herself and prays instead (3:7-10).

The NRSVUE text gives no motive; Tobias only says the demon kills anyone who tries to approach her (6:15). The Latin Vulgate supplies one, saying the devil has power over men who marry while shutting God out of their minds and giving way to lust (Tobias 6:17, Douay-Rheims).

The name probably comes from Persia. The Jewish Encyclopedia derives it from the Avestan aeshma-daeva, "demon of wrath," and the same figure returns in the Babylonian Talmud as Ashmedai, king of the demons, in a story about Solomon (Gittin 68a).

In Tobit itself the demon never speaks. He appears only through the deaths he has caused, and he is dealt with by smoke, prayer, and one angel's pursuit.

Why is Tobit in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not in Protestant ones?

Tobit never entered the Hebrew Bible. Jews copied it in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, but the rabbinic canon that became the Tanakh does not include it, and Jewish Bibles today leave it out.

Christians knew the book mainly through the Greek Septuagint, and early writers quoted it freely. Polycarp's letter to the Philippians, from the early second century, repeats Tobit's teaching that almsgiving saves from death (Tobit 4:10; 12:9).

Jerome translated it while recording the objection. His prologue says "the Hebrews exclude" the book "from the catalogue of Divine Scriptures," and that he did the work at the request of two bishops.

Western councils at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed Tobit among the scriptures. The Council of Trent fixed it in the Catholic canon on 8 April 1546, naming "Tobias" in its list of Old Testament books.

The Protestant split turned on the Hebrew canon. Luther's 1534 Bible moved Tobit into a separate section headed Apocrypha, "books not held equal to Holy Scripture, and yet useful and good to read."

The Church of England took a similar position in Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571). It reads "the Book of Tobias" and the others "for example of life and instruction of manners," but does not use them "to establish any doctrine." That is why the 1611 King James Bible printed Tobit in an Apocrypha section between the Testaments. Many later Protestant Bibles dropped the section entirely.

The label a reader uses, deuterocanonical or apocryphal, therefore says which Bible they are holding. The story inside is the same in both.

Which Tobit text do Bibles translate, and what did the Dead Sea Scrolls add?

Tobit survives in several ancient forms that differ enough to change what a verse says, as the chapter 12 comparison shows. Most English readers meet it through Greek, but the Greek is itself a translation.

The two main Greek forms are called GI and GII. GI is the shorter text of Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus and stands behind the King James Apocrypha, while GII is the longer text of Codex Sinaiticus, which the NRSVUE and the Catholic NABRE follow.

For a long time many scholars treated the shorter GI as the older text. The Dead Sea Scrolls changed that. Cave 4 at Qumran held five copies of Tobit, four in Aramaic (4Q196-199) and one in Hebrew (4Q200), copied roughly between 100 BCE and 50 CE. Joseph Fitzmyer, who published them in 1995, found that they side with the longer Sinaiticus text.

The fragments settled that Tobit was first written in a Semitic language, not Greek. They did not settle which one, and scholars still disagree; the four Aramaic copies against one Hebrew copy are one reason many lean toward Aramaic.

• Qumran fragments (4Q196-200): the oldest surviving copies, partial, and closest to the longer Greek.
• GII, Codex Sinaiticus (4th century): the longer Greek, used by the NRSVUE and NABRE, with gaps in chapters 4 and 13 that translators fill from the Old Latin, made from a very similar Greek text, or from the shorter Greek.
• GI, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus (4th and 5th centuries): the shorter Greek, used by the 1611 King James Apocrypha.
• Old Latin: translations of a longer Greek text, older than Jerome's.
• Vulgate (around 400): Jerome's fast translation from an Aramaic copy, used by the Douay-Rheims.

Jerome's Latin is a separate line of descent. He had a speaker of Aramaic read the lost Aramaic copy aloud in Hebrew, dictated the Latin to a scribe, and finished in what he calls "the work of one day." That method explains why the Vulgate carries material found in no Greek copy, such as three nights of prayer before the marriage and the dog that runs ahead and shows "his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail" at the homecoming (Tobias 11:9, Douay-Rheims).

Is the Book of Tobit history or a story?

Most modern scholars read Tobit as a religious story rather than a historical record, and the text supplies the reasons itself.

Tobit says that as a young man he saw his tribe desert the house of David (1:4), which happened around 930 BCE, yet he is taken captive in the days of Shalmaneser (1:2), who ruled Assyria in the 720s BCE, and his son lives to hear of Nineveh's fall in 612 BCE (14:15). The book also calls Sennacherib the son of Shalmaneser (1:15), though Sennacherib's father was Sargon II.

It borrows a famous outside character as well. Ahikar, the wise courtier of the Aramaic Story of Ahikar, known from a fifth-century BCE papyrus found at Elephantine in Egypt, appears as Tobit's nephew and speaks up for him at court (1:21-22).

For Catholic and Orthodox readers, calling it a story does not take it out of scripture. The Catechism and the wedding readings use Tobit for what it teaches about prayer, almsgiving, and marriage, and none of those uses depends on its dates.