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The book at a glance
Tobit is set among the Israelites deported to Nineveh after the fall of the northern kingdom in the eighth century before Christ. Tobit, a devout man who buries the dead at the risk of his life, is blinded; far away in Media, his kinswoman Sarah is tormented by a demon. God answers both their prayers at once by sending the angel Raphael, who travels with Tobit's son Tobiah, brings him to Sarah as his wife, and heals Tobit's eyes. Most scholars read the book as an edifying story rather than a chronicle, written perhaps in the third or early second century before Christ; fragments in Aramaic and Hebrew were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is one of the deuterocanonical books, which the Church received in her canon and the Council of Trent confirmed, and she reads it as inspired Scripture, whatever its literary form.
Tobit is a story, not a book of prophecy, and it holds no oracle in the strict sense. It looks forward through images that Revelation takes up again (the angels who stand before God and present the prayers of the holy ones; a Jerusalem built of precious stones), through a promise of a restored temple and of the nations turning to God, and through a wedding that the Church still reads at weddings. Each card below names which.
Key to the labels
How a passage stands
Fulfilled Accomplished in history, above all in Christ.
Unfolding Being worked out now in the life of the Church.
Future Clearly still to come at Christ's return.
Mystery Its meaning or moment is not yet settled.
What kind of passage it is
Prophecy God's word through a prophet, or Christ, about what will come.
Promise A pledge God makes, kept over generations.
Type A person or event that foreshadows Christ or the Church.
Image A picture Scripture returns to and completes at the end.
Apocalypse A vision unveiling history from heaven's side, in symbols.
More on the labels
| Passage | Subject | Standing |
|---|
| 8:4–8 | The wedding prayer of Tobiah and Sarah | Unfolding Future |
| 12:12–15 | Raphael, one of the seven angels | Unfolding |
| 13:9–18 | Jerusalem built of sapphire and precious stones | Future |
| 14:4–7 | The restored temple and the nations turning to God | Fulfilled Unfolding Future |
The passages
“Blessed are you, O God of our ancestors; blessed be your name forever and ever!” (8:5)
- Reading
- On their wedding night Tobiah and Sarah rise to pray before anything else: “My sister, come, let us pray and beg our Lord to grant us mercy and protection” (8:4). Their prayer goes back to the beginning, to Adam and Eve and God's word, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (8:6; Genesis 2:18). Tobiah takes Sarah “not with lust, but with fidelity” (8:7), and they answer together, “Amen, amen!” The Church offers this passage among the Old Testament readings for the celebration of Marriage.
- Unfolding
- St. Paul says of the words “the two shall become one flesh”: “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31–32). Every Christian marriage made in prayer, as this one was, is a living image of that union.
- Future
- The Bible ends with a wedding: “For the wedding day of the Lamb has come, his bride has made herself ready” (Revelation 19:7). The angel who guarded Tobiah and Sarah's wedding points ahead to the angel who says, “Blessed are those who have been called to the wedding feast of the Lamb” (19:9).
“I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand and serve before the Glory of the Lord.” (12:15)
- Reading
- At the end of the journey the companion reveals who he is. He has been carrying their prayers to God: “Now when you, Tobit, and Sarah prayed, it was I who presented the record of your prayer before the Glory of the Lord” (12:12). He did nothing by his own favor, “but by God's will” (12:18), and now he says, “Look, I am ascending to the one who sent me” (12:20). His name means “God heals,” and he healed both Tobit and Sarah. Raphael is one of only three angels named in the Bible, with Michael and Gabriel, who also says, “I am Gabriel, who stand before God” (Luke 1:19). The Church keeps the feast of the three archangels on September 29.
- Unfolding
- John sees the same heavenly court: “And I saw that the seven angels who stood before God were given seven trumpets” (Revelation 8:2). Then an angel offers incense at the altar, and “the smoke of the incense along with the prayers of the holy ones went up before God from the hand of the angel” (8:4). What Raphael did for one family in Nineveh, the angels do for the whole Church. The Catechism teaches that from infancy to death human life is surrounded by the angels' watchful care and intercession (CCC 336).
- See also
- Revelation 1:4, the “seven spirits before his throne”; The Lamb's Victory, chapter 8.
“The gates of Jerusalem will be built with sapphire and emerald” (13:16)
- Reading
- Healed and restored, Tobit sings a hymn of praise. Its second part is addressed to the city: “Jerusalem, holy city” (13:9). God will chastise her and then have mercy again. “A bright light will shine to the limits of the earth. Many nations will come to you from afar” (13:11), bringing gifts for the King of heaven. The city will be rebuilt as God's house, with walls and towers of precious stones; “the streets of Jerusalem will be paved with rubies and stones of Ophir” (13:17), and all its houses will cry out, “Hallelujah!” (13:18). The Church prays parts of this hymn as a canticle in the Liturgy of the Hours.
- Future
- This is one of the closest parallels in the Old Testament to John's vision of the new Jerusalem. There too “the wall was constructed of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass” (Revelation 21:18); “the foundations of the city wall were decorated with every precious stone” (21:19); “the twelve gates were twelve pearls,” and “the street of the city was of pure gold, transparent as glass” (21:21). The light and the nations are there too: “The nations will walk by its light” (21:24). Even Tobit's “Hallelujah” returns: the word appears in the New Testament only in Revelation, where the NABRE spells it “Alleluia,” in the song of heaven at the fall of Babylon (19:1–6).
- See also
- Isaiah 54:11–12 and 60:1–3, which Tobit and John both echo.
“They will build the house again, but it will not be like the first until the era when the appointed times will be completed.” (14:5)
- Reading
- On his deathbed Tobit tells his son that the word of the prophets against Nineveh will come true: “It will all happen and will overtake Assyria and Nineveh” (14:4). Israel will be scattered and the temple burned, but God will bring them back and “they will rebuild Jerusalem with due honor” (14:5). Then comes a wider hope: “All the nations of the world will turn and reverence God in truth; all will cast away their idols” (14:6). The faithful “will bless the God of the ages in righteousness” (14:7).
- Fulfilled
- Nineveh fell in 612 BC, and the exiles of Judah returned to rebuild the temple, as Ezra and Nehemiah tell. Tobit himself says that second house would not be “like the first.” Christians have read the fuller temple he waits for in Christ, who said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” speaking “about the temple of his body” (John 2:19, 21).
- Unfolding
- The nations casting away their idols is the mission of the Church. Paul praises the Thessalonians for turning “to God from idols” (1 Thessalonians 1:9).
- Future
- In the new Jerusalem there is no temple at all: “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God almighty and the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22). See The Temple of His Body.
Tobit and Revelation
A book about one family in exile shares a remarkable amount of its imagery with the Bible's last book.
| Tobit | Revelation |
|---|
| Raphael, “one of the seven angels who stand and serve before the Glory of the Lord” (12:15) | “The seven angels who stood before God” (8:2) |
| The angel presents the record of their prayer (12:12) | The prayers of the holy ones go up from the hand of the angel (8:4) |
| Gates of sapphire and emerald, walls of precious stones (13:16) | Foundations of every precious stone, gates of pearl (21:19–21) |
| A bright light, and nations coming from afar (13:11) | “The nations will walk by its light” (21:24) |
| All its houses cry out, “Hallelujah!” (13:18) | The “Alleluia!” of heaven (19:1–6) |
| A wedding guarded by an angel (8:4–8) | The wedding feast of the Lamb (19:7–9) |
Still to come on this pageFurther passages to add: Tobit's burial of the dead and his almsgiving (1:16–20; 12:8–9), the prayers of Tobit and Sarah heard at the same moment (3), the binding of the demon Asmodeus (8:2–3; compare
Revelation 20:2), the healing of Tobit's eyes (11; compare
John 9), and the first part of Tobit's hymn, on the God who afflicts and shows mercy (13:1–8).
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