Tobit

What Tobit is about

Tobit is a story, and a good one. Tobit is a devout Israelite deported to Nineveh who keeps risking his safety to bury the bodies of executed countrymen. One night, sleeping outside after such a burial, he is blinded by droppings from a bird. His life collapses into poverty and bitterness, and he prays to die.

At the same hour, far away in Ecbatana, a young woman named Sarah prays the same prayer. Seven husbands have died on her wedding night, and a servant has just told her it is her fault.

The book then does something quietly beautiful: it says both prayers were heard at the same moment, and the angel Raphael was sent to answer both. What follows is a journey — Tobit’s son Tobias travels to collect a debt, accompanied by a guide who is Raphael in disguise and by a dog, one of the few pets in scripture. Tobias catches a fish, marries Sarah, and comes home to heal his father’s eyesight. Only at the end does Raphael reveal who he is and say that he was present when the prayers were made.

Along the way the book gives some of the most quoted moral instruction in this literature: give alms from what you have, do not turn your face away from any poor person, and do not do to anyone what you would hate — a form of the golden rule.

Where it sits

Tobit is set among the exiles of the northern kingdom and reads as a picture of how to live faithfully as a minority far from home: keep the practices, marry within the community, bury the dead, help the poor.

It is received as scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Protestants value it but do not treat it as canonical, and Protestant Bibles that include the Apocrypha print it there. The site presents it without arguing the question.

Why it is worth reading

Because it is the most human book in this collection. Tobit is about a difficult old man, an anxious mother, a young man on his first long trip, and two households whose grief is answered in a way none of them recognised while it was happening. Its picture of ordinary faithfulness in exile has comforted readers for a very long time.