Tobit

In context

Tobit is in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles; most Protestant Bibles leave it out or print it apart as the Apocrypha. Tobit, of the tribe of Naphtali in Galilee, is carried off to Nineveh in the days of “Enemessar,” whom the WEB’s note names as Shalmaneser, the king of Assyria who besieged Samaria (Tobit 1:1–2; 2 Kings 18:9). As a young man he alone of his tribe kept going to Jerusalem for the feasts (Tobit 1:4–6).

In Nineveh he feeds the hungry and buries his people left dead, even those Sennacherib killed (1:16–18). It is a hard reading in places: Sennacherib is killed by two of his sons, as 2 Kings also tells (1:21; 2 Kings 19:37), and Sarah, whose seven husbands an evil spirit has killed, is so grieved that she wants to die (Tobit 3:8–10, 13). Blinded by sparrows’ droppings, Tobit prays to die, and that same day so does Sarah in Ecbatana, a city of Media in what is now Iran; “The prayer of both was heard” (2:10; 3:6, 13–16).

Tobias sets out for Media with a man who calls himself Azarias, not knowing he is the angel Raphael, “and the young man’s dog went with them” (5:4–16).