by
Damien F. Mackey
The
popular Book of Tobit corrects some of our historical misconceptions.
Copied
and re-copied, it exerted a profound influence upon ancient literature,
including
that of the ancient Greeks.
Introduction
With the benefit of the Book
of Tobit it becomes possible, I believe,
(i) to realise the true succession of
the late C8th BC neo-Assyrian kings:
Book of Tobit and the
Neo-Assyrian Kings
(ii) to identify the famous sage,
Ahikar (var. Achior), with a leading character, “Achior”, in the Book of Judith;
and
(iii) to correct the false view (an
impediment to canonicity) that the Book of Judith’s Achior was ethnically a
Moabite;
and further, with assistance
from the Book of Judith,
(iv) to determine what exactly
happened to Sennacherib’s 185,000-strong army, and
(v) who was its commander, named
“Holofernes” in the Book of Judith. See e.g. my:
"Nadin" (Nadab) of Tobit is the
"Holofernes" of Judith
https://www.academia.edu/36576110/_Nadin_Nadab_of_Tobit_is_the_Holofernes_of_Judith
Moreover, I have found that
the Book of Tobit is, when in combination with the Book of Job (Tobias = Job),
the key to some aspects of the best of Greek literature:
Similarities
to The Odyssey of the Books of Job and Tobit
This, I would suggest, is
merely
The Book of Tobit is grounded in real history, unlike the
entertaining Greek fables that drew their inspiration from it, whilst also
distorting and paganising the original version.
Book of Tobit
“a universal
essay”
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“The resemblance of Tobit to
the Odyssey in particular was not lost on
that great student of
literature, Jerome …”.
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Ancient biblical scholar,
Saint Jerome (c. 400 AD), had noted, according to Orthodox pastor, Patrick H.
Reardon (The Wide World of Tobit. Apocrypha’s Tobit and Literary Tradition),
the resemblance of Tobit to Homer’s The Odyssey. The example that pastor
Reardon gives, though, so typical of the biblical commentator’s tendency to
infer pagan influence upon Hebrew literature - which is the opposite approach
to mine in “Similarities to the Odyssey” - whilst demonstrating a definite
similarity between Tobit and the Greek literature, imagines the author of Tobit
to have appropriated a colourful episode from The Odyssey and inserted
it into Tobit 11:9: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=12-02-036-f#ixzz2f1eu
The resemblance of Tobit to
the Odyssey in particular was not lost on that great student of literature,
Jerome, as is evident in a single detail of his Latin translation of Tobit in
the Vulgate. Intrigued by the literary merit of Tobit, but rejecting its
canonicity, the jocose and sometimes prankish Jerome felt free to insert into
his version an item straight out of the Odyssey—namely, the wagging of the
dog’s tail on arriving home with Tobias in 11:9—Tunc praecucurrit canis, qui
simul fuerat in via, et quasi nuntius adveniens blandimento suae caudae
gaudebat—“Then the dog, which had been with them in the way, ran before, and
coming as if it had brought the news, showed his joy by his fawning and wagging
his tail.”16 No other ancient version of Tobit mentions either the tail or the
wagging, but Jerome, ever the classicist, was confident his readers would
remember the faithful but feeble old hound Argus, as the final act of his life,
greeting the return of Odysseus to the home of his father: “he endeavored to
wag his tail” (Odyssey 17.302). And to think that we owe this delightful gem to
Jerome’s rejection of Tobit’s canonicity!
[End of quote]
The Book of Tobit, however, is
rooted in history, I believe, with the events narrated therein said to have
occurred during the reigns of a succession of known neo-Assyrian kings.
Moreover, I have argued that Tobit, his son Tobias (= Job), and their Israelite
(Naphtalian) relations, had attained to the highest offices in the Assyrian
kingdom.
Reardon, who - unlike the
author - does not accept the Book of Tobit as being a canonical part of the
Bible, has described it as “a kind of universal essay” (op. cit.):
Tobit is a short book. Indeed, Jerome
tells us that translating it into Latin cost him only “the labor of one day.”1
It should be remarked, however, that this small book belongs in a big world,
with a rich and very wide cultural setting.
I like to think of the Book of Tobit
as a kind of universal essay, in the sense that its author makes considerable
effort to place his brief, rather simple narrative within a literary,
historical, and moral universe of surprising breadth and diversity, extending
through the Fertile Crescent and out both sides. To find comparable dimensions
of such large cultural exposure among biblical authors, one would have to go to
Ezekiel, Luke, or the narrator of Job.
It is the intention of the present article
to indicate and outline several aspects of the Book of Tobit that join the work
to other streams of literary history. These aspects, which include a fairly
wide range of themes, images, and historical references, will serve to link
Tobit to three bodies of literature in particular: the Bible; the larger world
of Near and Middle Eastern religious philosophy, history, and literature; and
the tradition of Christian exegesis down through the Latin Middle Ages.
Tobit and the Bible
The world of Tobit is, first of all,
the world of biblical literature and history. Not only does the book provide an
elaborate description of the religious deterioration of the Northern Kingdom in
the eighth century, and then the deportation and consequent social conditions2 of
those tribes after 722, but it explicitly quotes a prophet of that century,
Amos, and makes reference (14:4) to the preaching of Jonah at Nineveh.3 Tobit
thus presupposes the history narrated in Kings, Chronicles, and the
eighth-century prophets.
Tobit’s explicit reference to Jonah is
of considerable interest in the light of certain affinities between the two
books. First and second, both stories take place about the same time (the
eighth century) and both in Mesopotamia. Third, both accounts involve a journey.
Fourth, the distressed Tobit, like Jonah, prays to die. Fifth and most
strikingly, his son Tobias encounters a fish that attempts—with less success
than Jonah’s fish—to swallow him! Finally, in each book the fish serves as a
special instrument of Divine Providence.
Not surprisingly, given my
identification of Tobit’s son, Tobias, with the prophet Job, Reardon will find
similarities between the books of Tobit and Job. See e.g. my Odyssey article above.
Thus Reardon writes:
Besides Jonah, Tobit shows several
remarkable affinities to the Book of Job, some of which were noted rather early
in Christian exegesis. For example, the title characters of both works shared a
zeal for purity of life, almsgiving, and other deeds of charity (Job 1 and 31;
Tobit 1–2), patient endurance of trials sent by God,4 a deep weariness of life
itself (Job 7:15; Tobit 3:6), a final vindication by the Lord at the end of
each book, and perhaps even a common hope of the resurrection.5 As early as
Cyprian in the third century, it was also noted that both men were similarly
mocked by wives unable to appreciate their virtue and faith in God.6
Moreover, the book’s description of
long-suffering Sarah, whose seven husbands all died on their wedding night,
carries on another major theme of Holy Scripture: the barren woman, of which
the elder Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth are better known
examples. Indeed, the mockery that the younger Sarah receives from her maids in
this regard readily puts one in mind of Hagar’s attitude toward the older
Sarah, as well as Peninnah’s unkind treatment of Hannah at the beginning of
First Samuel.7
The moral teaching of Tobit is also of
a piece with the covenantal ethics of the Bible generally. For example, its
prohibition against marrying outsiders in 4:12f. reflects the strict view of
Ezra and Nehemiah (and, down the road, 1 Corinthians 7).8 Then, in the very
next verse is found the mandate about prompt payment of the laborer’s salary,
which is clearly based on Leviticus 19:13 and Deuteronomy 24:14f. And so forth.
The moral teaching of Tobit shows endless parallels with both the Torah and
Israel’s Wisdom tradition, and its solicitude for social justice and service is
at one with the teaching of the eighth-century prophets. No matter what is to
be said relative to its canonical status, the setting, imagery, and moral
doctrine of Tobit is of a piece with the rest of our biblical literature.
The Book of Job has long been praised as a masterpiece of
literature.
Consider these quotes:
"Tomorrow, if all literature was to be
destroyed and it was left to me to retain one work only, I should save
Job." (Victor Hugo)
"... the greatest poem, whether of ancient or
modern literature."
(Tennyson)
"The Book of Job taken as a mere work of
literary genius, is one of the most wonderful productions of any age or of any
language."
(Daniel Webster)
Reardon continues:
The Larger World
Even when the Book of Tobit most
closely touches the other biblical literature, however, it sometimes does so
along lines reminiscent of, and running parallel to, more extensive traditions
outside the Bible.
An obvious and rather large example is
the “Golden Rule” in Tobit 4:15, “Do not do to anyone what you yourself hate.”
Not only does this prohibition substantially contain the biblical command to
love one’s neighbor as oneself;9 not only, furthermore, does it stand in
canonical continuity with the more positive formulation of the same Golden Rule
preserved in the Gospels;10 it is also the equivalent to an ideal found in
other ethical philosophies. These latter include Greek authors like Herodotus and
Isocrates11 and even classical Confucianism.12 This use of the Golden Rule thus
assured Tobit a featured place in the entire history of religion and moral
philosophy.13
A similar assessment is true, I
believe, concerning the way that Tobit develops the religious symbolism of the
journey. Obviously that motif had long been part of the Bible, particularly in
those sections associated with the Exodus wandering and the return from
Babylon,14 but it was a topic not limited to the Bible. Back near the beginning
of the second millennium B.C., the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic had inchoatively
explored the religious symbolism of the journey, and that exploration would
continue down through some of our greatest literature: the Odyssey, of course,
diverse accounts of Jason and the Argonauts, the Aeneid, etc., and eventually
the Divine Comedy, itself inspired by all of them. In a more secular form the
journey imagery continued with such works as the Endymion of Keats,15 even
after it had been assumed within the ascetical literature of the Church as
xeneteia, conceived as both exile and pilgrimage. A classical example of the
latter use is found in Step 3 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John of
Mount Sinai. ….
Reardon, continuing his theme of
the dependence of Tobit, in part, upon, as he calls it here, “pagan themes”,
finds further commonality with Greek literature, especially Antigone:
Furthermore, some readers have found
in Tobit similarities to still other pagan themes, such as the legend of
Admetus.18 More convincing, I believe, however, are points of contact with
classical Greek theater. Martin Luther observed similarities between Tobit and
Greek comedy,19 but one is even more impressed by resemblances that the Book of
Tobit bears to a work of Greek tragedy—the Antigone of Sophocles. In both
stories the moral stature of the heroes is chiefly exemplified in their bravely
burying the dead in the face of official prohibition and at the risk of
official punishment. In both cases a venerable moral tradition is maintained
against a political tyranny destructive of piety. That same Greek drama,
moreover, provides a further parallel to the blindness of Tobit in the
character of blind Teiresias, himself also a man of an inner moral vision
important to the theme of the play.
And the influence goes beyond the
Greek world, Reardon tells, even to Iran – not surprising, I would suggest,
given that Tobit and his family had dwelt in Mesopotamia:
Bearing just as obvious a connection
with non-biblical literature, I believe, is the demon Asmodeus (Tobit 3:8), who
is doubtless to be identified, on purely morphological grounds, with Aeshma
Daeva, a figure well known in ancient Iranian religion.20 Moreover, Tobit’s
nephew Ahikar (1:22) is certainly identical with a literary character of the
same name, time, place, and circumstances, found in the Elephantine papyri from
the late fifth century B.C.21 In short, whatever may be the case relative to
questions of historical dependency, Tobit’s cultural contacts with the ancient
world of religion, philosophy, and literature are numerous and varied.
Not surprising, either, that
tales of Tobit’s famous nephew, Ahikar, the “immensely popular” sage, should
have exerted enormous influence upon ancient literature
The Story of Ahikar, folktale of Babylonian or Persian origin, about a wise and moral man
who supposedly served as one of the chief counselors of Sennacherib, king of Assyria (704–681 bc). Like the biblical Job,
Ahikar was a prototype of the just man whose righteousness was sorely tested
and ultimately rewarded by God. Betrayed by his power-hungry adopted son,
Ahikar was condemned to death, suffered severely, but was finally restored to
his former position.
The work is classified as
pseudepigraphal; i.e., it is a noncanonical book that in style and
content resembles authentic biblical works. A considerable number of
translations (among them Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Old Turkic, Greek,
and Slavonic) indicate that the story of Ahikar was immensely popular in
antiquity. The writing follows the memoir style used by official state writers
rather than the “wisdom” genre of literature. Nevertheless, the story of Ahikar
and his proverbial wisdom influenced the development of Jewish wisdom literature
early in the Hellenistic period (3rd century bc to 3rd century ad), as is shown
by similar ethical doctrines in the Old Testament books of Psalms and
Ecclesiastes and in the apocryphal books of Tobit and Ecclesiasticus. ….
[End
of quote]
