Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 14.djvu/826

 TOBIAS

752

TOBIAS

tisches Handbuch zu den Apocr.", II (Leipzig, 1853), 61. The answer is that the reading seven is doubtful; it is in X, AB, Old Latin, and Vulg. ; it is wanting in the Greek cursive text, Syriac, and HM. StiU, admitting the reading of the Vulgate, the Amesha Spentas have infiltrated into Avestie religion from the seven Angels of Hebraistic Revelation and not vice versa. Moreover, there are not seven Amesha Spentas in the angelology of the Avesta, but only six. They are subordinated to Ahura Mazda, the firstprincipleof good. True, he is, at times, grouped with the six lower spirits as seven Amesha Spentas; but in this grouping we have not bj' anj- means seven angels standing before the Deity.

F. Historical Worth. (1) To Protestants.— The de- structive criticism which, among Protestants, has striven to do away with the canonical books of the Old Testament has quite naturally had no respect for those books the critics call apocrj-phal. The Book of Tobias is to them no more than are the Testament of Job, the Book of Jubilee.s, and the story of Ahikhar. From the standpoint of historical criticism it is to be grouped with these three apocryjjhal (J. T. Mar- shall, Principal of the Baptist College, Manchester, in Hastings's "Diet, of the Bible", s. v.). Simrock in "Der gute Gerhard und die dankbaren Todten" (Bonn, 1858) reduces the story to the folk-lore theme of the gratitude of the departed spirit; the yarn is spun out of this slim thread of fancy that the souls of the dead, whose remains Tobias buried, did not forget his benevolence. Erbt (Encycl. Biblica, s. v.) finds traces of Iranian legend in the name of the demon Asmodeus (Tob., iii, 8) which is the Persian Aeshma daeua; as also in the dog, — "with the Per- sians a certain power over evil spirits was assigned to the dog." And again: "the Jewish nation takes up a foreign legend, goes on repeating it until it has got it into fixed oral form, in order next to pass it on to some story-writer who is able to shape it into an edifying household tale, capable of ministering com- fort to many succeeding generations." Moulton, "The Iranian background of Tobit" (Expository Times, 1900, p. 257), con.siders the book to be Median folk-lore, in which the Semitic and Iranian elements meet. On the Ahikhar story, cf. "The Story of Ahikhar from the SjTiac, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Greek, and Slavonic versions ' ' by Conybeare, Harris, and Mrs. Smith, a work which will be brought back to 407 B. c. in a new edition soon to appear (Exposi- tor, March 1912, p. 212).

(2) To Catholics. — Until recently there never was question among CathoUcs in regard to the historicity of Tobias. It was among the historical books of the Old Testament, the Fathers had always refeiTed to both elder and younger Tobias and to the other personages of the narratives as to facts and not to fancies. The stories of almsgiving, burial of the dead, angelophany, exorcism, marriage of Sara with Tobias the younger, cure of the elder Tobias, — all these incidents were taken for granted as fact-narrative; nor was there ever any question of likening them to the tales of "The Arabian Nights" and the "Fables of ^sop". Jahn, "Introductio in hbros sacros", 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1814), 452, gives the stock objections to the historicity of Tobias, and suggests that either the entire composition is a parable to teach that the prayers of the upright are heard or at most only the main outline is fact-narrative. His book was put on the Index (26 Aug., 1822). Anton Scholz, "Die heihge Schrift", II, iii, p. 12, and Movers in " Kirch- enlexicon" (first ed., I, p. 481) hold that Tobias is a poetic fiction. Cos.iuin, in "Revue biblique" (1899, pp. 50-82), tries to show that the .sacred wi-iter of Tobias had before his eyes a form of the Ahikhar story and worked it over rather freely as a vehicle to carry the inspired thought of the moral he wished to convey to his readers. Barry, "The Tradition of

Scripture" (New York, 1906), p. 128, says: "Its relation to other stories, such as The Grateful Dead and the tale of Ahichar, has been used in illustration of the romantic nature ascribed to it by modern readers; so, too, the symbolical names of its person- ages, and the borrowings, as they say, from Persian mythologj' of Asmodeus, etc." Gigot, "Special introduction to the study of the Old Testament", I (New York, 1901), 343-7, gives at length the argu- ments in favour of the non-historical character of the book and attempts no refutation of the same.

With these and a few other exceptions. Catholic exegetes are unanimous in clearly defending the historicity of Tobias. Cf. Welte in " Kirchenlexikon" (first ed., s. v. Tobias); Reusch, "Das Buch Tobias", p. vi; Vigouroux, "Manuel biblique", II (Paris, 1883), 134; Comely, "Introd. in utriusque testa- menti libros sacros", II (Paris, 1887), i, 378; Danko, "Hist, revelationis v. t.", .369; Haneburg, "Gesch. der bibl. Offenbarung" (3d ed., Ratisbon, 1863), 489; Kaulen, "Einleitung in die heihge Schrift " (Freiburg, 1890), 215; Zschokke, "Hist, sacra A. T.", 245; Kaulen in " Kirchenlexikon" (second ed., s. v. Tobias); Seisenberger, "Practical Handbook for the Study of the Bible" (New York, 1911), 343. This almost unanimity among Catholic exegetes is quite in keeping with the decision of the Biblical Commission (23 June, 1905). By this Decree Catholics are forbidden to hold that a book of the Holy Writ, which has generally been looked upon as historical, is either entu'el}' or in part not history properly so called, unless it be proven by solid arguments that the sacred writer did not wish to write history; and the solidity of the arguments against the historicity of an histor- ical book of the Bible we are not to admit either readily or rashly. Now the arguments against the historical worth of Tobias are not at all solid; they are mere conjectures, which it would be most; rash to admit. We shall examine some of these conjectures.

(a) The .\hikhar story is not in the Vulgate at all. As it is in AB, X, and the Old Latin, St. Jerome un- doubtedly knew it. Why did he follow the Aramaic text to the exclusion of this episode? He may have looked upon it as an interpolation, which was not \\Titten by the inspired author. Even though it were not an interpolation, the Ahikhar ejiisode of Tobias has not been proven to be a legend dra'mi from a non- canonical source, (b) The angelic apparition and all incidents connected therewith are no more difficult to explain than the angelophanies of Gen., x\-iii, 19, and Acts, .xii, 6. (c) The demonology is not unHke to that of the New Testament. The name "Asmo- deus" need not be of Iranian origin; but may just as readily be explained as Semitic. The Aramaic word 'dshmeday is cognate with the Hebrew hdshmed, "destruction". And even though it be a mutilated form of some Iranian ancestor of the Persian Aeshma daeva, what more natural than a Median name for a demon whose obsession was accomplished upon Median soil? The slaying of the seven husbands was allowed by God in punishment of their lust (Vulg., vi, 16); it is the youth Tobias, not the sacred WTiter, that suggests (according to .\B, N, and Old Latin) the demon's lust as the motive of his killing all rivals. The binding of the devil in the desert of L^pper Egj-pt, the farthest end of the then known world (viii, 3), has the same figurative meaning as the binding of Satan for a thousand years (Apoc, xx, 2). (d) The imlikelihood of the many coincidences in the Book of Tobias is mere conjecture (cf. (^ligot, op. cit., 345). Divine Providence may have brought about these similarities of incident, with a view to the use of them in an inspired book.

(e) Certain historical difficulties are due to the very imperfect condition in which the text has reached us. (i) It wa.-i Thcglathphalasar III who led Neph- thali (IV Kings, xv, 29) into captivity (734 b. c),