TOBIT, BOOK OF. This book of the Apocrypha is a religious novel which was for many centuries exceedingly popular both in Christian and Jewish circles in many lands. This is shown by the multiplicity of versions and editions which have survived. Moreover, it was not without influence upon some of the writers whose work is contained in the Old Testament (e.g., Daniel and some of the Psalms), Jewish pseudepigraphists (e.g., the authors of the Book of Jubilees, the Testament of Job), some New Testament writers (e.g., the Synoptists, especially in the description of the Resurrection and Ascension, St. Paul, the author [s] of the Pastoral Epistles) and numerous post-apostolic Christian writers, many of whom, as did in particular Clement of Alexandria, regarded it as "Scripture." But in one respect it has achieved a distinction shared by no other Book of the Apocrypha, and by at most only one book (Jonah) of the Old Testament : it has made a remarkable appeal to the exponents of Christian Art, and its hero and his dog and certain dramatic ' incidents in his history became, in the Middle Ages, a favourite theme of the workers in ecclesiastic glass and mural decorations.
The author wrote to inculcate respect for the dead, consanguine ous marriages, and practical virtues such as almsgiving. He found the ultimate sanction for these ideals in the Old Testament, but when he set out to inculcate them in his tale he drew on earlier, and even contemporary pagan models. The Egyptian Tractate of
Khons supplied him with the idea of a maiden possessed by a demon whom the god expelled. It is also clear that the widely diffused "Fable of the Grateful Dead"—a dead man reward ing the burier of his corpse—was much in his mind when he set out to write his book; but in this case it may have been less a matter of consulting a literary model than of reproducing the general ideas of a class of fables known to him from boyhood. Similarly there is no reason to posit any literary source, as J. H. Moulton formerly did, to account for the alleged Median and more specifically Magian elements in the book—e.g., the dog, the demon Asmodeus (AHma daeva), the seven angels, the saving heavenly visitor (Raphael). These are mostly not char acteristics of the later Zoroastrian system, but belong equally to its earliest phases, and in great part even to pre-Zoroastrian Magianism, which, by 25o B.C., would be known wherever Persian traders and soldiers were to be found.
If, as is suggested, the author was an Egyptian Jew of 25o B.C., he may have written in Aramaic or in Greek. Numerous attempts, based on the theory of mistranslations in the extant Greek texts from an Aramaic original have been put forward, but on the whole the hypothesis that he was a Jew who "thought in" Hebrew or Aramaic, while writing in the Greek of his period, to explain the "Semitisms" which are observable in his Book. Apart from the poem in ch. 13 there seems to be no reason for not regarding the book as a literary unity.