Tobit

Tobit is one of the seven deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament — books read by the Church from the earliest centuries, included in the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, and definitively confirmed as canonical by the Council of Trent (1546). These seven books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees — are present in every Catholic and Orthodox Bible and are absent from most Protestant Bibles. They are not, as the Reformers called them, “apocrypha”; they are Sacred Scripture, divinely inspired, profitable for instruction in righteousness.

Tobit is the tender story of two righteous Israelites in exile — old Tobit in Nineveh, and young Sara in Ecbatana — and the journey by which God's providence joins them in a single family. The book was likely composed in the third or second century BC. The Hebrew and Aramaic fragments of Tobit found at Qumran (4Q196–200) confirm its early circulation in Palestinian Judaism and silence older claims that it was a late Greek invention. Saint Jerome translated it into Latin from an Aramaic exemplar in a single night, and his version became the basis of the Vulgate text used in the Douay-Rheims.

The themes of Tobit are providence, marriage, almsgiving, and the ministry of angels. Tobit, blinded by misfortune and at the end of his strength, sends his son Tobias on a long journey to recover a deposit of silver. Unbeknownst to them, the traveling companion who joins Tobias is the archangel Raphael — “one of the seven who stand before the throne of God” (12:15), a verse the Church Fathers cited to teach the existence of distinct orders of angels. On the journey Tobias catches a great fish whose heart, liver, and gall will heal Sara's affliction and restore his father's sight.

The marriage of Tobias and Sara, prepared by their fathers and blessed by Raphael, is one of the most beautiful images of Catholic matrimony in all of Scripture. “We are the children of the saints, and we must not be joined together like heathens that know not God” (Tob. 8:5, Vulgate) — the prayer the spouses pray on their wedding night has been read at Catholic weddings for centuries and remains an option in the current marriage rite. The Catechism cites Tobit when it teaches that “the matrimonial covenant... is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring” (CCC 1601).

Tobit also gives the Church one of her most important biblical foundations for the doctrine of almsgiving and intercessory prayer. “Prayer is good with fasting and alms more than to lay up treasures of gold” (12:8). And in Raphael's revelation — “When thou didst pray with tears... I offered thy prayer to the Lord” (12:12) — the Church finds direct biblical warrant for the angels presenting our prayers before God, a teaching reflected in every Mass at the prayer over the offerings.