TOBIT, BOOK OF, one of the most curious and interesting of the Old Testament apoc ryphal books. It exists at present in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Hebrew MSS., the texts of which differ considerably, yet not materially, from each other. The oldest and most valuable is the Greek Septuagint; indeed, where the others depart from it, they possess little claim to our respect, although the original text was certainly not Greek. When and where the book was written, are questions to which various answers have been given; but the opinion of Ewald, who selects Persia as the scene, and the middle of the 4th c. it.c. as the date of its composition, agrees best with its internal character The author be imagines to have been a Palestinian Jew who wrote in Hebrew, and con jectures that a translation of the work was made into Alexandrian Greek in the 1st c. That the contents of Tobit are not historical scarcely requires proof in modern times; yet up to the period of the reformation no serious difficulty was felt in receiving it as such. Luther was the first to speak of it as a " poetical," i.e., an imaginary, didactic produc tion; and since his time biblical critics have been pretty unanimous on the point; al though some contend for what they call a historical basis. The leading incidents of
the story do not differ by a hairbreadth in grotesque and peurile miraculousness from the fantastic extravaganzas of the Arabian Nights. Tobit, sleeping outside the wall of his court-yard one night, is blinded by sparrows " muting warm dung into his eyes;" his son Tobias is attacked on the Tigris by a fish, which leaps out of the water to assail him; and marries a Jewish maiden called Sara, seven of whose bethrothed lovers had been successively carried off by an evil spirit called Asmodeus. Asmodeus is driven off by an angel—who first appears under the name of Azarias, but subsequently turns out to be Raphael—and then flies to the uttermost parts of Egypt, where he is bound. Old Tobit is cured of blindness by an application to his eyes of the gall of the fish that had tried to devour his son. The sentiments are often very pious and didactic, the descriptions of social life are picturesque, and apparently true, but no excellence of that kind can reconcile us to the childish absurdities of the story.