Tobit 1–3: I buried him": The Burials, and Two Prayers on One Day
Scripture: World English Bible · commentary free in this preview
The book of the words of Tobit, the son of Tobiel, the son of Ananiel, the son of Aduel, the son of Gabael, of the seed of Asiel, of the tribe of Naphtali; who in the days of Enemessar king of the Assyrians was carried away captive out of Thisbe, which is on the right hand of Kedesh Naphtali in Galilee above Asher.
I, Tobit walked in the ways of truth and righteousness all the days of my life, and I did many alms deeds to my kindred and my nation, who went with me into the land of the Assyrians, to Nineveh. When I was in my own country, in the land of Israel, while I was yet young, all the tribe of Naphtali my father fell away from the house of Jerusalem, which was chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, that all the tribes should sacrifice there, and the temple of the habitation of the Most High was hallowed and built therein for all ages. All the tribes which fell away together sacrificed to the heifer Baal, and so did the house of Naphtali my father. I alone went often to Jerusalem at the feasts, as it has been ordained to all Israel by an everlasting decree, having the first fruits and the tenths of my increase, and that which was first shorn; and I gave them at the altar to the priests the sons of Aaron. I gave a tenth part of all my increase to the sons of Levi, who ministered at Jerusalem. A second tenth part I sold away, and went, and spent it each year at Jerusalem. A third tenth I gave to them to whom it was appropriate, as Deborah my father’s mother had commanded me, because I was left an orphan by my father. When I became a man, I took as wife Anna of the seed of our own family. With her, I became the father of Tobias. When I was carried away captive to Nineveh, all my kindred and my relatives ate of the bread of the Gentiles; but I kept myself from eating, because I remembered God with all my soul. So the Most High gave me grace and favor in the sight of Enemessar, and I was his purchasing agent. And I went into Media, and left ten talents of silver in trust with Gabael, the brother of Gabrias, at Rages of Media.
And when Enemessar was dead, Sennacherib his son reigned in his place. In his time, the highways were troubled, and I could no longer go into Media. In the days of Enemessar, I did many alms deeds to my kindred: I gave my bread to the hungry, and my garments to the naked. If I saw any of my race dead, and thrown out on the wall of Ninevah, I buried him. If Sennacherib the king killed any, when he came fleeing from Judea, I buried them privately; for in his wrath he killed many; and the bodies were sought for by the king, and were not found. But one of the Ninevites went and showed to the king concerning me, how I buried them, and hid myself; and when I knew that I was sought for to be put to death, I withdrew myself for fear. And all my goods were forcibly taken away, and there was nothing left to me, save my wife Anna and my son Tobias. No more than fifty five days passed before two of his sons killed him, and they fled into the mountains of Ararat. And Sarchedonus his son reigned in his place; and he appointed Achiacharus my brother Anael’s son over all the accounts of his kingdom, and over all his affairs. Achiacharus requested me, and I came to Nineveh. Now Achiacharus was cupbearer, keeper of the signet, steward, and overseer of the accounts. Sarchedonus appointed him next to himself, but he was my brother’s son.
Now when I had come home again, and my wife Anna was restored to me, and my son Tobias, in the feast of Pentecost, which is the holy feast of the seven weeks, there was a good dinner prepared for me, and I sat down to eat. I saw abundance of meat, and I said to my son, “Go and bring whatever poor man you find of our kindred, who is mindful of the Lord. Behold, I wait for you.”
Then he came, and said, “Father, one of our race is strangled, and has been cast out in the marketplace.” Before I had tasted anything, I sprang up, and took him up into a chamber until the sun had set. Then I returned, washed myself, ate my bread in heaviness, and remembered the prophecy of Amos, as he said,
So I wept: and when the sun had set, I went and dug a grave, and buried him. My neighbors mocked me, and said, “He is no longer afraid to be put to death for this matter; and yet he fled away. Behold, he buries the dead again.” The same night I returned from burying him, and slept by the wall of my courtyard, being polluted; and my face was uncovered. I didn’t know that there were sparrows in the wall. My eyes were open and the sparrows dropped warm dung into my eyes, and white films came over my eyes. I went to the physicians, and they didn’t help me; but Achiacharus nourished me, until I went into Elymais.
My wife Anna wove cloth in the women’s chambers, and sent the work back to the owners. They on their part paid her wages, and also gave her a kid. But when it came to my house, it began to cry, and I said to her, “Where did this kid come from? Is it stolen? Give it back to the owners; for it is not lawful to eat anything that is stolen.” But she said, “It has been given to me for a gift more than the wages.”
I didn’t believe her, and I asked her to return it to the owners; and I was ashamed of her.
But she answered and said to me, “Where are your alms and your righteous deeds? Behold, you and all your works are known.”
I was grieved and wept, and prayed in sorrow, saying,
“O Lord, you are righteous, and all your works and all your ways are mercy and truth, and you judge true and righteous judgment forever. Remember me, and look at me. Don’t take vengeance on me for my sins and my ignorances, and the sins of my fathers who sinned before you. For they disobeyed your commandments. You gave us as plunder, for captivity, for death, and for a proverb of reproach to all the nations among whom we are dispersed. Now your judgments are many and true, that you should deal with me according to my sins and the sins of my fathers, because we didn’t keep your commandments, for we didn’t walk in truth before you. Now deal with me according to that which is pleasing in your sight. Command my spirit to be taken from me, that I may be released, and become earth. For it is more profitable for me to die rather than to live, because I have heard false reproaches, and there is much sorrow in me. Command that I be released from my distress, now, and go to the everlasting place. Don’t turn your face away from me.”
The same day it happened to Sarah the daughter of Raguel in Ecbatana of Media, that she also was reproached by her father’s maidservants; because that she had been given to seven husbands, and Asmodaeus the evil spirit killed them, before they had lain with her. And they said to her, “Do you not know that you strangle your husbands? You have had already seven husbands, and you haven’t borne the name of any one of them. Why do you scourge us? If they are dead, go your ways with them. Let us never see either son or daughter from you.” When she heard these things, she was grieved exceedingly, so that she thought about hanging herself. Then she said, “I am the only daughter of my father. If I do this, it will be a reproach to him, and I will bring down his old age with sorrow to the grave.” Then she prayed by the window, and said, “Blessed are you, O Lord my God, and blessed is your holy and honorable name forever! Let all your works praise you forever! And now, Lord, I have set my eyes and my face toward you. Command that I be released from the earth, and that I no longer hear reproach. You know, Lord, that I am pure from all sin with man, and that I never polluted my name or the name of my father in the land of my captivity. I am the only daughter of my father, and he has no child that will be his heir, nor brother near him, nor son belonging to him, that I should keep myself for a wife to him. Seven husbands of mine are dead already. Why should I live? If it doesn’t please you to kill me, command some regard to be had of me, and pity taken of me, and that I hear no more reproach.”
The prayer of both was heard before the glory of the great God. Raphael also was sent to heal them both, to scale away the white films from Tobit’s eyes, and to give Sarah the daughter of Raguel for a wife to Tobias the son of Tobit; and to bind Asmodaeus the evil spirit; because it belonged to Tobias that he should inherit her. At that very time, Tobit returned and entered into his house, and Sarah the daughter of Raguel came down from her upper chamber.
The Meaning
I, Tobit walked in the ways of truth and righteousness all the days of my life, and I did many alms deeds to my kindred and my nation.
He says it himself, in the first person, and the reader is meant to notice that the man is pleased with himself. This is not a flaw the author overlooked. The book opens with a good man's own account of his goodness — the tithes paid three times over, the pilgrimages when nobody else went, the food refused at Gentile tables — and then spends two chapters taking everything away from him, so that by chapter 3 the voice that began so confidently is asking God to end it. Tobit is the only story in this part of the collection told by its own hero, and he loses the thread of it.
If I saw any of my race dead, and thrown out on the wall of Ninevah, I buried him.
This is the act the whole book is built on, and it needs explaining, because to a modern reader burying a stranger sounds like a kindness rather than a crime.
In the ancient world, leaving a body unburied was a punishment that continued after death — the final humiliation, meant to be seen. A king who executed rebels and threw them over the wall was making a statement, and the statement required an audience and an uncollected corpse. To bury one was not charity. It was contradiction of the king in public, and Tobit is explicit that he did it secretly, and that the bodies "were sought for by the king, and were not found."
So the first righteous act in this book is a political crime. Tobit loses his position and his property for it, and in chapter 2 he does it again — gets up from his own dinner table, before he has tasted anything, to go and fetch a body from the marketplace, and when he buries it that evening his neighbors mock him for not having learned his lesson. The book knows exactly how he looks. It has the neighbors say so.
And I notice what the law meant to him. He had every argument available for leaving the bodies: the risk, his family, his position, the sheer futility of it. The one thing burying the dead could not do was help anybody. The man was past caring for.
My eyes were open and the sparrows dropped warm dung into my eyes, and white films came over my eyes.
Then the book blinds him with bird droppings.
I want to be careful here, because the tone of this is genuinely strange and I do not think it is an accident. Tobit sleeps outside because he has handled a corpse and is unclean; he sleeps by the wall; birds foul his open eyes; he goes blind. The man who risked his life for the dead is destroyed by sparrows. Nothing in the story needed to happen that way. A fever would have served.
What it does is refuse the shape we want. If his blindness came from the burials — from a beating, say, or the king's men — the book would be a martyrdom and the suffering would mean something. The author declines to supply that. Tobit's catastrophe is stupid, random, and faintly humiliating, which is how catastrophe usually arrives. The book is going to spend eleven more chapters restoring him, and it will not once suggest that the sparrows were sent.
My wife Anna wove cloth in the women's chambers, and sent the work back to the owners.
For years — eight of them, the book says at its end — the blind man is kept by his wife, and she is one of the few characters in scripture allowed to be unimpressed by her husband's piety to his face. When he suspects her of stealing a goat she has been given, she turns on him — "Where are your alms and your righteous deeds? Behold, you and all your works are known." — and the book records it without comment and without taking his side. Later, when he sends their son away on a dangerous journey, she says the thing out loud that his piety cannot: that the money is not worth the boy.
She is wrong about the money and right about the boy, and the book lets her be both. I find her the most recognizable person in it.
"O Lord, you are righteous, and all your works and all your ways are mercy and truth, and you judge true and righteous judgment."
His prayer is worth reading closely, because of what it does not do. He does not protest his innocence. He has just spent a chapter and a half telling us how righteous he is, and now, in the prayer, he abandons the argument entirely: deal with me according to that which is pleasing in your sight. Command my spirit to be taken from me. He asks to die. And he confesses the sins of his people as his own.
Then the book does the thing that makes it a work of art rather than a tract. It cuts.
The same day it happened to Sarah the daughter of Raguel in Ecbatana of Media, that she also was reproached by her father's maidservants.
The same day. In another country, a young woman is being told by the household servants that she has strangled seven husbands — seven wedding nights, seven dead bridegrooms, and the servants' verdict that she is the cause. She thinks of hanging herself, thinks of what it would do to her father, and prays at her window to die instead.
Two prayers, two countries, one day, and neither person knows the other exists. And the reader is immediately told what neither of them is told: that the prayers were heard "before the glory of the great God," and that Raphael was sent. We find out in chapter 3. Tobit and Sarah find out in chapter 12. Everything in between — the journey, the guide, the fish, the dog, the wedding — happens to people who think they are managing their own affairs.
That structure is the book's whole theology, and it is put as story rather than as doctrine. Both of them asked to die. Neither of them died. Both of them were answered, and the answer was already traveling toward them while they were still praying, and it looked, when it arrived, exactly like an ordinary young man looking for work.
On the hard places. Two, and the first is Sarah's. The text says plainly that a demon killed the seven husbands, and so the book itself clears her — but it also puts into the servants' mouths the accusation that she strangled them, and it is the accusation, not the clearing, that history remembered. Women blamed for the deaths of men, for infertility, for miscarriage, for being the locus of a household's misfortune: this is one of the oldest and most durable cruelties there is, and the fact that the book knows the accusation is false has not stopped the story being told as if it were her story. It is not. She is a young woman who has watched seven men die, who is mocked in her own house by the people who work in it, and whose first instinct is to spare her father the shame of finding her body. The second hard place is Tobit's blindness, for the opposite reason — not because it is unjust but because it is meaningless, and the book offers no account of why the righteous man goes blind by accident. It simply tells the reader, early, that help is already on the road. For anyone reading this in the middle of their own senseless catastrophe, that is either the whole comfort of the book or no comfort at all, and I am not going to pretend it closes the question.
Tobit tells his own story for three chapters, and then stops being able to. A deportee in Nineveh who keeps the law when his whole tribe has stopped, he rises to a position at court, loses it for burying the bodies of executed Jews, is reduced to nothing, and is then blinded by an accident so undignified that the book seems to be daring the reader to laugh. His wife earns their bread and tells him what she thinks. He prays to die. And the narrative, which has been his voice alone, cuts without warning to a young woman in another country, on the same day, praying the same prayer.