Tobit

Abstract

The book of Tobit tells the story of Tobit and his family, who are living as exiles from Israel after the Assyrian conquest. Through a series of events, Tobit goes blind and sends his son on a journey accompanied by the angel Raphael disguised as a human. On his journey, the son Tobias meets Sarah, who is afflicted by a demon. Raphael intervenes and dispatches the demon, allowing Tobias and Sarah to marry. They return to Tobit and his wife, Anna, Tobit’s sight returns and he dies old and happy because of God’s intervention in their travails. The book is not historical, but rather a folk tale with manifold entertaining elements, such as defecating birds, meddling fish, menacing demons, and disguised angels. Beneath the surface, however, the book interacts with deep theological questions at the core of the human condition, questions that also find expression—with various answers—throughout the Jewish scriptures: Where does suffering come from? What are the benefits of righteousness? What is the value of religious tradition? In answering such questions through its entertaining narrative, the book of Tobit weaves together an erudite panoply of religious, scriptural, and cultural traditions. Within scholarship, there are a number of debated issues with which treatments of the book have dealt, including: original language, provenance, date of composition, and ideological disposition. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Tobit was primarily known from Greek and Latin manuscripts. Although some scholars had posited a Semitic Vorlage behind it, all major translations and interpretations of the book had to be made from Greek. Several Aramaic and Hebrew manuscripts of Tobit were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, which provided a watershed in understanding the book. Analysis of the scrolls has provided widespread agreement that the book was originally written in Aramaic. These manuscripts, however, are fragmentary and translations are still made from the Greek version of Codex Sinaiticus. Association with the Qumran community has also led to some reassessment of the book’s theological outlook. The book of Tobit is one of the Deuterocanonical books, also known as the Apocrypha. As such, it is generally not included among Protestant Christians’ list of canonical texts, while it is for Roman Catholics and most Orthodox traditions. There is no evidence that the text was ever “canonical” in the Jewish tradition.