Tobit, THE BOOK OF, one of the most curious and interesting of the Old Testament apocrypha, tells of Tobit, and Tobias his son. Tobit was a pious, upright, and God-fearing Israelite of the tribe of Naphtali, who had been carried captive to Nineveh by 'Enemassar' (Shalmaneser). Among his many good works was the practice of defying the prohibition of the Assyrian kings by secretly burying the bodies of his slain fellow-countrymen. He was at last discovered, and deprived of all his goods in consequence. To add to his misfortune, through an accident that befell him as he slept in the open air one night, he became blind. In his poverty and distress he resolves to send his son Tobias to Rhagæ (Rai) in Media to recover an old debt from a friend. Tobias finds a companion for the long journey in an unknown youth (really the archangel Raphael) who on the journey gives him much valuable information and advice. Acting on this, he catches a great 'fish' in the Tigris, and secures its heart, liver, and gall. By means of the first two he is able to deliver from the power of the evil spirit Asmodeus his lovely cousin Sara, daughter of Raguël, at Ecbatana, whom he marries and, after recovering the debt for which he had been sent, leads back to his father's house. Arrived at home, he is able with the gall of the fish to cure his father's blindness. The book closes with Tobit's psalm of thanksgiving, and relates how he enjoyed a hundred years' happiness after these events, Tobias also living to see the age of 127. The Book of Tobit exists in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, and Hebrew. There is little doubt that the Greek is the original. Of this there are two recensions, a shorter and a longer, the shorter being the one generally current, and probably the earlier. The longer occurs in the Codex Sinaiticus, and has been published by Reusch (1870). It is represented by the Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, and partly also by the Syriac version. The Hebrew version was published by Münster as early as 1542; the Aramaic was first edited by Neubauer in 1878. If the Greek is the original, the book can hardly have been written before the 2d century B.C., and it can perhaps be most appropriately assigned to the period of the Jewish struggles for independence, when, for example, it was the complaint of the faithful that their oppressor had cast out many unburied (2 Macc. v. 10). Again, if originally written in Greek, it probably had its origin in Egypt. In fact it has never been widely known in the Syrian Church; its author's acquaintance with the eastern localities he names is superficial and not always accurate; and it has been pointed out that the 'fish' caught in the Tigris is most probably in reality the Egyptian crocodile, of which we know from ancient medical writers that the smoke of its liver used to be regarded as a cure for epilepsy, and its gall for leucoma. But those who trace the story to a Persian origin are also so far justified by certain facts. Asmodeus is manifestly the Persian evil spirit Aeshmâ Daevâ, and Raphael has the attributes of the protecting spirit Çraosha. The presence of the dog, too, who goes out and returns with Tobias and Raphael denotes rather a Persian than a pure Hebrew source, the Jews regarding that animal as unclean, while with the Iranians it is sacred, and the companion of Çraosha.
The nature of the additions to Tobit in the larger versions can be seen by the English reader in Churton's Uncanonical and Apocryphal Scriptures. The book has been commented on by Fritzsche (1853), Reusch (1857), Sengelmann (1857), and Gutberlet (1877). See Schürer, Gesch. d. Jüd. Volkes, vol. ii. (Eng. trans.); and A. Neubauer, The Book of Tobit: a Chaldee Text (1877).