Tobit

Tobit is a Jew of the tribe of Naphtali, carried off to Nineveh when Assyria took the northern kingdom. He keeps the law in a hostile city: he feeds the hungry, and he buries Jewish dead the king has left lying in the street, which is dangerous work. One night, sleeping in his own courtyard, sparrow droppings fall into his eyes and he goes blind. Poor, mocked by his wife, he prays to die.

The same day, far off in Ecbatana, a young Jewish woman named Sarah prays exactly the same prayer. She has been married seven times, and every husband died on the wedding night, killed by the demon Asmodeus. Her own maids taunt her with it. She wants to die too.

God answers both prayers with one messenger. The angel Raphael takes human form, calls himself Azarias, and hires on to walk with Tobit's son Tobias to collect a debt in Media. At the Tigris a great fish lunges at the boy; Raphael tells him to catch it and keep the heart, liver, and gall. Burning the heart and liver drives the demon away. The gall heals his father's eyes. Tobias marries Sarah, and they kneel and pray together before they touch each other — and he lives.

At the end the angel tells them who he is: "I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels, which present the prayers of the saints" (12:15). He says he never really ate or drank; they were seeing a vision. Tobit answers with a hymn (chapter 13), then dies old, telling his son to get out of Nineveh because the city is coming down (chapter 14).

It was probably written in Aramaic or Hebrew, somewhere in the Jewish dispersion, most likely between about 225 and 175 BC. The original language was long disputed until copies turned up at Qumran — four fragmentary Aramaic manuscripts and one Hebrew — settling the question. The setting is eighth-century Assyria, but the distances and the royal names do not line up with the history we know, which is one reason most readers take it as a teaching story rather than a chronicle.