Tobit: The Man Who Buried the Dead

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish writer, most likely in Aramaic. The story is told by Tobit himself at first, then by a narrator.

When: Probably the 200s or early 100s BC. Pieces of five copies, four in Aramaic and one in Hebrew, were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Where it fits: Set among the northern tribes carried off to Assyria after 722 BC (2 Kings 17), in Nineveh and in Media. Written centuries later, as a story, not a history.

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Protestant Bibles moved it to the Apocrypha, and most later dropped it.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Its rule what you yourself hate, do to no man (Tobit 4:15) is the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12 turned around. A woman married to seven brothers in turn, a puzzle the Sadducees put to me (Mark 12:20–23), is close to its Sarah. Its seven holy angels stand before God in Revelation 8:2.

How close it stays to me: Very close on the poor, the dead and fair wages. Far in giving nothing to sinners.

If you only read three chapters: Tobit 2, Tobit 4 and Tobit 12.

Words to Know

Alms — gifts to the poor. In Tobit’s Greek the word is eleēmosynē, mercy, and the book uses it for everything from coins to bread to a burial.

Raphael — the angel in this book. His name means God heals.

Asmodeus — the demon who kills Sarah’s husbands.

Nineveh — the capital of the Assyrian empire, which carried off the northern tribes of Israel in 722 BC.

The Book in Brief

Tobit, a man of the tribe of Naphtali, has been carried off to Nineveh. He tells his own story: how he kept God’s law when his tribe did not, how he fed the hungry and clothed the naked, and how he secretly buried the bodies of his people that the king had thrown out. For this he loses everything and has to hide.

In chapter 2, after burying another body, he sleeps outside, and sparrow droppings fall into his eyes and blind him. His wife Anna supports them by weaving. When she brings home a young goat, a bonus from her employers, he accuses her of stealing it, and she throws his good deeds back in his face. In chapter 3, Tobit prays to die.

On the same day, far away in Media, a young woman named Sarah also prays to die. She has been married seven times, and each time the demon Asmodeus killed her husband on the wedding night. God sends the angel Raphael to help them both.

In chapters 4 to 6, Tobit sends his son Tobias on a long journey to collect money he once left with a kinsman, and gives him a long speech of advice first. Tobias hires a guide, who is Raphael in disguise. A dog goes with them. A great fish jumps at Tobias from the river, and Raphael has him keep its heart, liver and gall.

In chapters 7 to 9, Tobias marries Sarah. The smoke of the fish’s heart and liver drives the demon away to Egypt, and Tobias survives the night.

In chapters 10 to 12 they come home, the fish’s gall cures Tobit’s eyes, and Raphael reveals who he is before going back up to God. In chapters 13 and 14 Tobit sings a song of praise for Jerusalem, gives his last advice, and dies old. Tobias and his family leave Nineveh before it falls.

If I saw any of my race dead, and cast forth on the wall of Ninevah, I buried him (Tobit 1:17).

That is Tobit. He is an exile in the capital of the empire that destroyed his country. When the king has people of his tribe killed and their bodies thrown out over the city wall, Tobit goes out at night and buries them. Someone reports him. He has to run. Everything he owns is taken (Tobit 1:18–20).

When he is allowed home, he sits down to a holiday dinner, sends his son out to find a poor man to share it, and his son comes back to say there is a body lying in the market. Tobit gets up from the table without eating, carries the body home, and buries it after dark (Tobit 2:2–8).

I told you that on the last day the question will be whether you fed the hungry, clothed the naked and visited the sick and the prisoner (Matthew 25:35–36). Tobit did all of that, and added the one thing no one could ever repay him for. He buried strangers.

A story, not a history

You should know first that Tobit is a story. It does not pretend to be anything else, and the people who first heard it would not have mistaken it for history.

Tobit says that when he was young, his tribe broke away from Jerusalem and sacrificed to the golden calf (Tobit 1:4–5). That happened around 930 BC. He also says he was carried off to Nineveh by the Assyrians, which happened in 722 BC. He would have to have been more than two hundred years old. The book gives him 158.¹

It does not matter. Jonah is a story too, and so is the one I told about a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell among robbers. A story can be true about God and people without being true about dates. Tobit is a folk tale, with a helpful angel in disguise, a demon, a magic fish, a faithful dog and a happy ending. It was written to teach, and to delight.

Go deeperTobit at Qumran, and two Greek versions

For a long time no one knew what language Tobit was first written in. The Greek was all anyone had, and it came in two forms: a shorter one, found in most Greek Bibles, and a longer one, found chiefly in the great Codex Sinaiticus copied in the 300s. Jerome, making his Latin Bible around 400, said he worked from an Aramaic copy, translating it in a single day with the help of a Jew who knew both Aramaic and Hebrew.²

Then came the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Cave 4 at Qumran were pieces of five copies of Tobit: four in Aramaic and one in Hebrew. They are numbered 4Q196 to 4Q200 and were copied between about 100 BC and the time of my life. They agree, more often than not, with the longer Greek version.²

So the longer text is probably closer to the original, and the original was most likely in Aramaic, the language I spoke at home. The book was read in my people’s own language, by my people, in my century.

The two Greek versions also show you something about every ancient book. Copyists and translators shortened, expanded and smoothed as they went. The book you hold in English is one form of a story that existed in several. Ask your Bible’s notes which form it follows.

What a father tells his son

Chapter 4 is the heart of the book. Tobit, blind and expecting to die, calls his son and tells him how to live. Read it slowly. It is close to what I taught.

Give alms from your possessions … Don’t turn away your face from any poor man, and the face of God won’t be turned away from you (Tobit 4:7).

If you have little, don’t be afraid to give alms according to that little (Tobit 4:8). That is the poor widow and her two small coins.

Don’t let the wages of any man who works for you wait with you, but give it to him out of hand (Tobit 4:14). Pay the worker the same day. That law is in Moses (Deuteronomy 24:14–15), and Tobit made it part of a father’s last words.

Give of your bread to the hungry, and of your garments to those who are naked (Tobit 4:16).

And then the line you already know, in another form. And what you yourself hate, do to no man (Tobit 4:15).

The great teacher Hillel, a generation before me, is remembered for saying the same thing, when a man asked him to teach the whole law while standing on one foot: what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole law, the rest is commentary.³

I said it the other way round. Whatever you desire for men to do to you, you shall also do to them; for this is the law and the prophets (Matthew 7:12). Tobit and Hillel say: do no harm. I said: do the good. It is a step further. But it is a step on the same road, and Tobit was already walking it.

Alms delivers from death

Tobit says one thing twice that churches later built a great deal on. Alms-giving delivers from death (Tobit 4:10). And when the angel reveals himself, he says it again: Alms delivers from death, and it purges away all sin (Tobit 12:9).

This line is one reason Protestant reformers distrusted the book. They said it taught that you could buy your way out of your sins with money, and in the centuries before them, the church had sold indulgences that many people believed did exactly that.⁴

But read it in its place. The sentence just before it is It is better to give alms than to lay up gold (Tobit 12:8). The book does not mean that a rich man can pay for his sins. It means that mercy to the poor is what God wants, more than prayer alone, more than a full treasury. A poor widow who gives what she has is doing it. A rich man who keeps it is not.

I said nearly the same. When you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind … because they don’t have the resources to repay you (Luke 14:13–14). The only thing I added was to do it quietly, so that your left hand does not know what your right hand does (Matthew 6:3). Tobit buried the dead at night. He knew.

The wife who was right

There is a small scene in chapter 2 that I would not want you to miss.

Tobit is blind. His wife Anna has taken in weaving to keep them alive. One day her employers pay her wages and give her a young goat as well. When it bleats in the house, Tobit accuses her of stealing it and tells her to give it back. She tells him it was a gift. He does not believe her, and says he was ashamed of her. And she answers him: Where are your alms and your righteous deeds? Behold, you and all your works are known (Tobit 2:14).

She was right, and the book lets her be right. The good man, so careful about strangers, could not trust the woman who was feeding him. It is a small story about a large habit: men who are generous in public and hard at home. The book does not hide its hero’s fault.

Where Tobit and I part

Two of Tobit’s rules go somewhere I did not.

He tells his son: take first a wife of the seed of your fathers. Don’t take a strange wife, who is not of your father’s tribe (Tobit 4:12). A small people in exile, afraid of disappearing, keeping its families close. I understand it. But my own family line, as Matthew tells it, runs through a Moabite woman named Ruth (Matthew 1:5).

And right after telling his son to feed the hungry, Tobit says: Pour out your bread on the burial of the just, and give nothing to sinners (Tobit 4:17).

I ate with sinners. That was the most common complaint made against me. I said the Father makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good (Matthew 5:45). If you only feed the people you judge to be good, you will be the one deciding who is good, and you will get it wrong.

Go deeperAhikar, the wise man of Assyria

Tobit mentions a man named Ahikar, or Achiacharus, several times. He calls him his nephew, a high official of the Assyrian king, who fed him when he was blind (Tobit 1:21–22; 2:10). At the end, Tobit tells his son how Ahikar’s adopted son tried to destroy him, and how Ahikar was saved and the traitor went down into darkness (Tobit 14:10).

That would mean little to you, but it meant a great deal to the first readers. Ahikar was famous. The Words of Ahikar was one of the best-known stories in the ancient Near East: a wise counselor of the Assyrian king, betrayed by his nephew, condemned to death, hidden by a friend, and finally restored. It was told in Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Greek and other languages. The oldest copy known was found on papyrus at Elephantine, an island in the Nile in southern Egypt, where a community of Jewish soldiers lived in the 400s BC.⁵

The writer of Tobit took a famous foreign wise man and made him a member of Tobit’s family, a faithful Jew. It is a little like a modern writer making a beloved national hero the cousin of his main character. It told the first readers that the wisdom of the nations and the faithfulness of Israel belonged together.

The angel who did not eat

Raphael travels with Tobias the whole way, under the name Azarias, and nobody guesses who he is. At the end he tells them: I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels, which present the prayers of the saints, and go in before the glory of the Holy One (Tobit 12:15). And something gentle: All these days I appeared to you. I didn’t eat or drink, but you all saw a vision (Tobit 12:19).

A messenger of God who travels with an ordinary family, carries out a dull errand about money, saves a frightened young man from a fish, gets a young couple safely married, heals an old man’s eyes, and then goes home. That is the God of this book. Not distant. Present in the errands.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Tobit 4, the whole chapter.

You will find: alms, fair wages, bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and what you yourself hate, do to no man (Tobit 4:15). Then, two verses later, give nothing to sinners.

Then read Matthew 7:12 beside Tobit 4:15, and Tobit 2:11–14, where the wife is right.

The Short Version

• Tobit is a folk tale, with an angel in disguise, a demon, a magic fish and a dog. Pieces of five copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• Its hero feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and buries the dead the king threw out, and loses everything for it.
• His advice to his son is close to what I taught: alms, wages paid the same day, and what you yourself hate, do to no man.
• Its line that alms delivers from death was later read as buying forgiveness. In its place it means mercy to the poor matters more than gold.
• It parts from me in marrying only your own and giving nothing to sinners.