Welcome to this first lesson of a new Bible study. This one is entitled, Tobit, God's Faithful, Remnant, and Exile. It's going to be a four-part series, and I'm very, very excited to go through this really fun, really amazing, and really symbolically, typologically significant book for the mystery of Christ and His Church. So I'm really excited about this.
It's really briefly, if you want to take a look at your course syllabus that I include here in the course, don't want to spend too much time on this. Just draw out your attention that this is a four-part series, and so the lesson titles are here on the top of your page. This lesson, this first one's going to be a general introduction to the Book of Tobit. We'll talk about all that here really soon.
In the next three lessons, we're going to divide the 14 chapters into three parts. The lesson two will be God's Faithful, Suffering, and Exile. We'll cover chapters one through three. Lesson three will be Raphael is sent to heal God's suffering, people, or the heal of suffering.
That's Tobit, four through nine. In the final lesson, number four will be God's Faithful, Rejoicing, and Exile. So you can see there's a problem, there's going to be a solution, and there's going to be rejoicing. So I'm looking forward to that.
It's so much fun. You can just see all the suggested suggestions for further reading, for further research. I quote all these commentaries that you find here within the notes. You'll find those in the footnotes as I do in all my Bible studies.
There's a lot of great content there. We're so grateful for these scholars doing the great work they're doing, so we can study more. So with that, then let's look at the general introduction here to the Book of Tobit. And if you have your notes in front of you, you're going to notice I divided this into two parts.
The first part is the general introductory topics like title, language, authorship, dating, literary, genre, main themes, all the typological connections that we're going to see. I want to spend time going over that. A lot of people in new Bible studies skip over some of these things because, you know, some students eyes glaze over a little bit when you're talking about this. But I always emphasize how important it is to look at these introductory topics, to contextualize the book in the larger whole of the Bible itself.
It then to begin to see, like right away, we're going to start talking about the title of the book, but that title of the book of Tobit, as banal as it is, just seems like, oh, it's about this dude named Tobit in his life. Well, that in and of itself touches upon a very important theme. So it's worthwhile spending some time looking at these introductory topics. Then also part two, in the last, I don't know, 15 minutes or so, what I'd like to try to do is condense the long topic of the duro-canonical discussion in the end because you may know that Tobit is accepted by Catholics and Orthodoxists and Catholic Bibles, but it is not in Protestant Bibles and Hebrew Scriptures.
And that is a big, long discussion. I highly recommend you go to my other core scripture 101. It's lesson six, where we talk at length about the whole history of the canon of Scripture. How do we get the Bible that we have today?
Why are these books included and those books are not included and so on and so forth? I'm going to try to condense that really briefly into 15 minutes, simply because we're talking about this fantastic duro-canonical book. So for more information, go check out to the scripture 101 course lesson six, where I talk about that in much more depth. Alrighty, so without any further ado, then let's jump in here to the book of Tobit, the introductory topics, the first of which is the title.
Now, it is really straightforward. It's called the book of Tobit. So what I'd like to do is to share it with you this kind of a long of a quote from your Catholic American Old Testament, and you're going to find this in other commentaries as well. But it explains a little bit about the Hebrew meaning of Tobit and his son Tobias.
And in so doing, you're going to begin to see the main themes come to the forefront. So the quote says, the original name of the book is unknown, but it was probably derived from the book's narrator Tobit, which in Hebrew is Tobit, which is goodness. His name means goodness, or it's the name of the protagonist, is son Tobias, which could be Tobiah, meaning the Lord is good, or Tobiah, which is the Lord is my good. So you can see a pattern developing here with the theme of goodness.
In fact, Tobit's name, excuse me, his father's name is Tobielle. If you look at the beginning of the book, this first opening verses, that means God is good. So, so you've got three generations of basically proclaiming God's goodness. Tobielle, then Tobit in Tobius.
There's a theme here, right? There's a pattern going on. And the fact that it keeps repeating this beat, that's drumbeat of God's goodness is going to be one of the great plots of this book. God is good.
God is good to this faithful family in exile, Tobit and his son Tobias and their family and their relatives, their obeying God's loss. So God is good to them and shows mercy to them. And their names themselves reflect that plot and that theme of this entire book. We'll talk a lot more about this in the themes and the typology coming along here really, really soon.
But I think that's really, really significant. The Lord is good, or the Lord is my good, or God is good, and he's goodness. That's good, good, good, good, good, good, good, God is good. So that's awesome.
And God is good. So anyways, the quote goes on in the Latin and Greek translations, one or both of these characters give the book its name under a wide variety of spellings, which you can see right here, the spellings and the quotation. And the bowl gate and at least one other version, both Father and Son are called Tobius, which is pretty fascinating. So I think that's important.
Again, we're looking at the title, it seems so banal, but it's significant. You begin to see so many important beautiful themes there. Okay, as far as the language is concerned, it's going to be Semitic, meaning it's probably Aramaic, which was a widely spoken language of the period of exile. At this particular time, Assyria is the world's superpower, the King of the Hill, the head honcho, so they're in control.
Aramaic is the widely spoken language of the period, but it could also be Hebrew, honestly, we just don't know. Aramaic and Hebrew, or these Semitic languages, it makes a lot of sense considering this is a Semitic people. I mean, these are like, so we're crying out loud. So there's this little quote here as well from the Catholic introduction, which says that this conclusion, meaning that it's Aramaic as the original language or Hebrew, but Aramaic, this conclusion is grounded in the remarkable fact that in the mid 20th century, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at Cunran, among the many hundreds of scrolls were four fragments of the book of Tobit in Aramaic and two in Hebrew, which is really, really interesting because we're going to talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls in a little while when we talk about the Deuterocanonical books, the seven books that Catholics have that Protestants don't have.
We're talking about that as we move down towards the end of this lesson, but it is very, very interesting that we discovered these four fragments in Aramaic and two in Hebrew because the manuscript tradition of the book of Tobit, this is point senior notes, is very, very complicated. I mean, it's, I'll be honest, above my pay grade, you got scholars who delve deep into the weeds of all this stuff, trying to figure out what the manuscript tradition was, what is the original, it's very, very confusing because we own the entirety of the book of Tobit only survives in Greek. We do not have the entirety in Aramaic or Hebrew. So the entirety survives in Greek and it makes it even more complicated.
There's a long version of Tobit and there's a shorter version of Tobit. It's almost like there's the director's cut and then there's the edited version that went out to the public. So let's pick, right? These certainly must be later Greek translations of the Hebrew or probably Aramaic original.
That's really interesting that we have the full Greek versions, but we have two versions and those two versions, I mean, if you go back to the complete Old Testament Greek versions that we have, the Septuagint is what it's called. The shorter version is in the Vaticanus and Alexandrinos versions and the longer Greek version is the Sinaiticus. So there's the Vatican, Alexandrinos and the basically Sinai editions there. It is, it's really, really confusing to try to make sense of what came first.
Why do we have the longer versions? So as we said a moment ago, the Hebrew and Aramaic portions are preserved. We have some of those, especially since we discovered them in Dead Sea Scrolls. That's very interesting to point out how they, they're not just in Greek that we do have them in Hebrew and Aramaic, which lends to there being the, those being the original languages.
But then Saint Jerome's Latin version differs both from the Greek and the Semitic manuscripts. So go figure that out. It's complicated. The more and more you read on this, the more and more uncertainty there is.
Suffice it to say that the shorter version is the one that the revised standard version uses. That's what I'm going to be reading from. You know, like I do in all my Bible studies, I think it's the ESV based on the longer version. It's pretty intense.
So that's the manuscript tradition based on those, those languages that we have of the Semitic, Greek and Latin copies. So if that was confusing, then you also have the authorship. Authorship is unknown as well. So we don't know a lot about the book, unfortunately, because we have no clear evidence internally or externally of who the person was, the time, the place.
We can conjecture a lot of stuff, but we have nothing that is explicit, meaning that it doesn't begin, the book doesn't begin with, you know, I, Tobit in the X, a year reign of X King and sitting down in this city to write you the story. It doesn't start like that. I mean, there is some historical context. We're going to talk about the historicity of this in just a little bit.
But we don't have anything explicit that would lend us to say, okay, this is the guy who wrote it and this is where he was and this is the time period based on the ruling monarch's reign. So having said that, though, what we do know based here is another quote from your Nature's Galaxy Bible, Tobit appears to have been written by a devout Israelite who wished to encourage faithful observance of the Torah among the dispersed community of Israel and exile. That seems pretty clear. The author may have written from anywhere in the near east, see it's pretty broad, from anywhere in the near east, including the land of Israel, but the book's realistic depiction of life and exile suggests to many scholars that it originated in the Eastern diaspora.
That's the scattering of the people of God into the nations. It's in Babylonia or media, in quote. So again, pretty broad. I mean, I think it is very certain it is written by Israelite as we go through the main themes of this book, talking about fidelity to God, God's people, fidelity to marriage, etc.
Yeah, this is the message. And of course, it is Israelite is going to write this in order to encourage the people to stick with it, right, to do not abandon the faith and God will be faithful to you. And that is probably written while they are in exile because Tobit is situated in the context of the exile of God's people of the north and then we'll get to that historical context momentarily. So then that brings up to the question of dating.
So if this is written, if the authorship and dating, they're always connected in every single book of the Bible, if you're talking about authorship and dating, the one sheds light on the other. If you have an opinion on when the book was written, then that's going to influence your authorship. If you have an early firm opinion on who wrote it, that's going to affect your dating. Of course, right?
There are two sides of the same coin. So because we don't know who wrote it, it was about Israelite at least. And it was probably in exile, makes sense. We just, it's a shot in the dark.
It's a shotgun approach to say when did this actually take place? The broadest time period is from the seventh to sixth century BC. That's a that's 500 years. That's not really narrowing it down too much.
Some scholars, it seems like the majority of them and more or less they're always debating it. They're the third and the second century BC and trying to narrow it down a little bit more because honestly, 500 years is just not very acceptable as far as scholarship is concerned. So unknown authorship, unknown dating, probably in the second to third century. So does that mean that Tobit did not write this?
Because if you read the first three chapters, it's in the first person singular as if Tobit is dropping all this stuff down as a memoir. And that's really, really interesting. And it's kind of a both and a situation where Tobit did, or his son Tobius, Tobit and Tobius probably writing down a bunch of stuff of what happened to them. And that's preserved within their family, within the people of God.
And later on, it became written down in the form that we now have it. This is based on a little note. If you flip to chapter 12 verse 20, if you had your Bible with you right now, great. In chapter 12 verse 20, Raphael gives instructions.
He says, bless the Lord upon the earth and give thanks to God for I am ascending to Him, who sent me right in a book, Everything That Has Happened To You. So what probably based on this particular verse and the fact that chapters one through three are in first person singular, it is probably the case that the story was preserved in some written forms and oral tradition, then gradually over the next couple hundred years, a few years afterwards was composed in its final form as we have it now. But again, that's even complicated because we have a short version and we have a long version. So I think that's probably where I'm going to hang my hat.
Tobit and Tobias, they do write down this extraordinary events that happened to them. They actually did happen. That's going to bring us the literary genre into the moment. It is true history.
They jot it down. It is a phenomenal story of God's love and mercy and providence that's passed down in written and oral forms and then composed as we have it sometime thereafter. Okay. All right.
Well, that actually kind of tees us up for the actual literary genre. Is it actually history? And sure enough, there is a big debate about this. So you got some people saying it is true history.
This is a historical narrative for various reasons that I'm to share with you. And you have other people that say, well, no, it's not. It's kind of like this. This fairy tale, this fable, this, this beautiful story, this moralistic novel.
And that's nothing. And it's kind of peppered with historical data here and there to make it seem like history, but it's really not. It's just a made up story still talking about really good moral lessons. All right.
Well, I'm going to take the position that this is actual real history. It's history first and a moral lesson second. It's there are moral lessons because they're rooted in historical events. I do not take the position that it is a moralistic novel, a religious tale first, and it's historical second.
I'm not going to take that position. I'll tell you straight out. It's history with moral lessons interwoven within it. All right.
Now, the church has not taken a position on this that people want to know what should I believe, what must I believe? Unfortunately, the church has not said anything on that matter. And that's a little short quote that I have for you here from the commentary. The church has taken no official position on the literary genre of Tobit.
And so scholars are free to adopt and defend different positions. And that's what you're going to find, even in the commentaries that I suggest. So you're going to find commentaries like the Ignatius Catholic study Bible, which is phenomenal. I'll use it on all my courses, as well as in the bar Bible.
And the bar Bible does not maintain that it's historical. So you have to be aware of that, but it's not like it's heretical or anything. I think it's problematic for sure. But the church has not said anything one way or another.
So let's look at these two different opinions just really briefly here as to what the arguments are. So for those who maintain that it is actual history, proper history of this family Tobit and how God intervened in history to answer their prayers and to heal them from their infirmities, it actually narrates historical events. There's a historical family set in exile. So that is significant there.
Okay. So here's three ways to look at this. Number one, the Greeks of two agents. So we'll talk about the Greeks of two, a little bit more at the end of this lesson.
It's the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. When they grouped all the books of scripture together, they put Tobit as well as Judith and Esther, because that's going to be really important for the next Bible studies here. Tobit, Judith and Esther are stories of these faithful Jews and Israelites that are set in the context of Israel in the dispersion. Well, the Greeks of two ancient places that write along with the other historical books right after Ezeronimiah because they are part of the history of God's people.
So you've got Joshua and Judges, and then you've got the kings and you've got the divided king united and the divided kingdom and then exile, the return from exile. And you've got these three books that record stories of Israelites while in exile. All right. So that is the tradition of the Jewish people.
So Jewish tradition has consistently maintained it to be historical and Catholic tradition has maintained it to be historical. You really don't have anybody saying that it's just a moralistic tale. Honestly, not that I've looked at every last scholar on this, of course, I haven't. But for my understanding, it's really just a modern phenomenon where they're trying to dismiss the historicity of the story.
And that's not surprising because if you know anything about scriptural scholarship in the past 200 years, modern scriptural scholars, brooded in a liberal and I'm sorry to say Protestant take on it, want to dismantle everything. They want to deconstruct it all and they never put it back together again. They, they'll point, it really begins to look like their MO, their modus operandi is to deconstruct it all in order to undermine the veracity of the teaching of scripture. They don't believe in God, they don't believe in miracles, they don't believe in inspiration of scripture and they start tearing it apart.
So up until the modern era, there really was pretty unanimous consent that this is historical both from the Jewish and Catholic and you should say even the Protestant tradition as well, an early Protestant tradition. Okay. So I already mentioned here it does record actual geographical locations, recorded events, true persons, et cetera. So all of these taken together would maintain the argument that it is a historical event of an actual Israelite family.
Well, there is the other take on the other side of the argument. Like I said, they maintain just a religious tale. A moralistic novel. Why?
Well, because some they say some historical and geographical details seem out of place. And that's true. There are some difficulties in your, when you look at the history of the mentioning of certain King's names and whatnot, it doesn't seem quite to jive as if the author either made a mistake or is not purposely trying to record history. They're just dropping names here and there in order to give it a historical flavor.
Well, I, there's a few examples that we could go through and I'm going to just take you deeper into that, some of those objections as we go through the actual text. For example, from the top of my head right now, there's a problem in the first opening chapters where Tobit is recording what happened to him early in his life and from when he, before exile and after exile. And then one of the Assyrian kings, he just doesn't mention, he just passes right over him. And so some people say, well, see, this is not historical.
Well, he passes over that name for a particular reason, which I will get into in the next lesson. So that's one of the arguments against it. It's not historical or rather historical geographical details are mixed match or out of place. They don't flow.
I think that there's a literary reason and theological reason why he does that. And we'll talk through some of that stuff. We won't get too much into the lead. Otherwise, it'll take too long.
But then also really, the objection is what I've already said. There are miracles in this book and God doesn't perform miracles. God doesn't exist. This angel who takes human form and helps Tobit and exercises this demon with the innards of a fish and all this weird stuff, that clearly seems more like Asop's fables than it does a historical account.
Well, that's just a matter of your own personal beliefs about God. If you think that God exists, God loves us. He does engage in human history, most perfectly, which is the incarnation. The incarnation did happen.
Of course, miracles could happen. Then you're not going to have any problem believing this. But if you already have a preconceived conclusion that God doesn't exist, angels don't exist, miracles don't exist, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you're just reading these books as if they are just some kind of literary genre other than history, then you're going to have problems with these types of stories.
So unfortunately, the Navarre Catholic study Bible does take this position. You're going to see that. Now, the Navarre Bible is awesome. I'm not knocking it because again, you can't believe whether it's kind of a moral fable or historical.
You're not sitting either way. I think though that the tradition speaks of itself. It is history. So for example, even though good, well-meaning Catholic scholars will say it's just a religious tale or a moralistic novel, they still are teaching that it is very important, more or less than nevertheless.
So I put note number eight, I gave you an example of what the Navarre will say. Does the story is designed to encourage the Jews of the time to put their trust in God, to praise Him, to practice works of mercy within their community, and to protect their Jewish identity by marrying people of their own religion. And also in quote, all that's true. But it's true because it is a historical event.
Here's another example, just depending on the Bible that you have, I'm always reading from the revised standard version. Well, the Committee of Translators, the actual footnote within the new revised standard version here is a big old thick paragraph, teensy, eetsy, beady, tiny print. But it says, here's one line. They are, in effect, religious tales with the appearance of historical narrative.
All right. So in my opinion, you can ignore that. It's not religious tales with the appearance of historical narrative. It's historical narrative with religious moral instructions.
All right. I think I've kind of hammered that down plenty sufficiently by now. It is true history, teaching us important theological religious truths. And yes, God can and does send angels to help us all the time.
I can tell you some stories. Let me tell you what. All right. So the historical context now, let's look at the history.
What is going on? Now, right now we are zoomed in on the history of Israel during the time of exile of the northern tribes. So we're focusing on two faithful families, Tobit's family, and then Sarah's family hundreds of miles away. They're from the tribe of Naphtali in the northern kingdom of Israel.
So this is well in the split of the kingdoms. So that tribe of Naphtali is in the Galilee region, and it's around the time of the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom. So quick, quick history lesson, and you can study all this much more in depth in the first and second Kings Bible study, especially those latter lessons where we talked about the conquest and exile of the kingdom. But what's going on is in 732 BC, Assyria comes in on their first wave of conquest and exiles many of those country territories of the northern kingdom surrounding Galilee, generally speaking.
The northern kingdom still exists. Samaria is still the capital for just one more decade, but many people were deported in that first wave of exile and defeat in 732. So a decade later, Assyria comes in and completely squishes the northern kingdom like a bug, destroys Samaria, exiles more people, imports a bunch of foreigners to begin to intermarry with the those that remain behind and the interworship with them, and it's just a big gigantic mess. So Tobit is exiled right around the time in between 732 and 722 BC.
And so he lives in Nineveh, he's exiled to Nineveh, and that's where our story is going to begin, a faithful Jewish, and he's not Jewish, because remember, it's specific with our words. A Jewish man is from the tribe of Judah. So he is an Israelite man from Naphtales. So he's a Naphtaleite, if you want to call him that, he's a Naphtaleite man, not a Jewish man, but Jewish people from the tribe of Judah, and then you got from tribe of Dan and Naphtalean, Asher and Gad and all the rest of them.
So we just want to be careful. Sometimes if I accidentally say he's a Jew, I don't mean that, he's not from Judah, he's from Naphtaleite. In any case, so he lives during the time of that northern kingdom destruction of the north by Assyria. So it's the eighth century, but having said that, to be clear, it is therefore before the destruction of Assyria by Babylon.
So time goes on and Babylon destroys Assyria, and then Babylon destroys the southern kingdom of Judah. So this is really, really interesting. Tobit and Sarah and Tobit son Tobias, they are all living in exile, in Nineveh, in the whole capital of, or not capital, but the kingdom of Assyria. When Hezekiah is living down in the southern kingdom of Judah, Hezekiah is trying to do great reform work, and of course his son, Manasseh, was terrible, and you can study all that in Second Kings.
But it's really interesting to reflect upon the fact that while we study the life of Tobit here, and his miracles and what happens to him, Judah is still going strong, and there's these glimmers of hope for Judah of reform, but ultimately it doesn't take. Now we know that this is the case in terms of the context, because if you go to the end of Tobit, chapter 14, before Tobit dies, he's speaking to his son Tobias and his family Sarah and all the rest of them, and he's saying goodbye. And let me just read a couple verses here for you. We'll talk about this more in depth, I believe in the fourth lesson now.
But in chapter 14 verse 4, he says, to his son, go to media, my son, for I fully believe what Jonah the prophet said about Nineveh, that it will be overthrown. So that means Assyria is still the world superpower. Babylon is not yet. But in media, there will be peace for a time.
Our brethren will be scattered over the earth from the good land, and Jerusalem will become desolate. The house of God in it will be burned down, and it will be in ruins for a time. But God will again have mercy on them and bring them back into the land, and they will rebuild the house of God, though it will not be like the former one, etc., etc. So before Tobit dies, he tells his son, get out of Nineveh.
It's going to be destroyed like Jonah said. Then eventually Jerusalem and the temple are going to be destroyed, like the prophets say, but it will be rebuilt and the faithful remnant will come back. This is all fantastic internal indicators telling us when this happened. So it's eighth century Judah down south is still going strong, but not for long.
And this is a great snapshot then of God's faithful remnants in exile from the northern kingdom. Even though the southern kingdom did come back in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, which on our chronology here, it hasn't happened yet. Even though many faithful Jews did come back from captivity from Babylon, very few did in the north. Those were called the 10 lost tribes of Israel.
As Syria was so thorough and squishing the northern kingdom, nobody came back. It was a great crisis of identity, of faith and religion. But you still have a few faithful Israelites. Okay, so there's your historical context.
That's where we're diving into. Now the structure of the book. Hey, this is Doc Neck. Thank you so much for listening to this course sample.
If you enjoyed it and want to listen to the entire lesson, please become a student over at the description and tradition.com where you can listen to this entire course, but also all the other courses that we have available in the S&T audio library where you can listen to them on demand, however, and whenever you want. So thank you so much. God bless you and keep studying your Bible.