§ 7. PLACE OF COMPOSITION AND PURPOSE

The nameless author of Tobit was not a Palestinian Jew.7 The characters of his book, as well as the geographical setting, belong to the Diaspora; his readers are in exile (13:3), and he counts himself among them (13:6), while distance lends enchantment to Jerusalem, the goal of all his hopes (1:4–9, 13:7–18). Moreover, his staunch adhesion to Judaism is accompanied by a belief in demons and magic, side by side with a breadth of culture and a liberal outlook on life unequalled by any Palestinian writer whose work has survived. The widespread use of the Greek Verss., the scarcity and comparative lateness of the oriental Verss., and the almost complete ignorance of the book in the Syrian Church, do not favour theories such as Ewald’s of the Far East, Kohut’s of Persia, or Vetter’s of Assyria or Babylonia, or Professor J. H. Moulton’s of Media. The internal evidence is in fact antagonistic to any such hypothesis. Such surmises are, at the outset, negatived by the author’s ignorance of Eastern geography and his acceptance of the ordinary standards of Greek and Roman geographies. That the Tigris flowed between Nineveh and Media was an idea common among the Greeks; that Ecbatana was situated in a plain was a constant Western fallacy, and is repeated in Diod. 2:13. 6 in a passage dependent on Ctesias.8

The hypothesis that Egypt was the place of composition alone serves to explain all the phenomena, and, at the same time, raises no additional difficulties, and encounters no legitimate objections on the part of the upholders of the Palestinian or Eastern origin of the work. This happy solution of the problem was first stated by Nöldeke, and has been accepted by Löhr, W. R. Smith, André, and others. It has lately received additional support from the discovery of the actual sources upon which the author depended for the plot, outline, literary allusions, and the non-Jewish stratum of his religious and speculative materials. Only Egyptian Jews could need an antidote to the Tractate of Khons. No trace can be found in Palestinian literature of any acquaintance with the Fable of the Grateful Dead. Only in Egypt, so far as is known, did either Jews or pagans read Aḥiḳar’s fortunes at the Assyrian court in exactly the chronological order in which they appear in Tobit.1 The author’s environment in Egypt fostered Magian presuppositions2 and allusions which would be incredible in an author writing in an eastern land such as Persia or Media, where Semitic and Iranian elements first met in deadly antagonism,3 and highly improbable in Palestine. It was in Egypt, too, that the Jews especially indulged in demonological speculations and practices.4 Moreover, while the fish, 6:2(1)–9(8), primarily mythological and probably inspired by the details of The Grateful Dead, symbolizes5 the pagan empire endeavouring to seize what portions it could of the pious Diaspora, the fact, on the other hand, that its inner organs are subsequently employed for medicinal and magical purposes suggests that the author, perhaps unconsciously, identified it with the crocodile of the Nile, on the banks of which he lived. ‘This conjecture is raised almost to certainty when we read in Ḳazwini 1:132 that the smell of the smoke of a crocodile’s liver cures epilepsy, and that its dung and gall cure leucoma, which was the cause of Tobit’s blindness.6 Very similar statements as to the medicinal virtues of the crocodile occur in Greek and Latin writers.’ Again, the binding of Asmodeus in Upper Egypt, though mythological in its origin (8:3, cf. note ad loc.), expresses the author’s conviction that Egypt, where he was compelled to live in exile, was the veritable dumping-ground of wickedness and sin, exactly as Zechariah regarded Babylon, the land of exile he knew best, whence some of his hearers had just returned and where exiles still lived, as the goal of the flying Ephah, wherein Wickedness was imprisoned, Zech. 5:5–11. Consequently our author excludes all unnecessary references to the specifically Egyptian life around him.7 His heroes are made to live out their lives in that distant part of the Diaspora, where Aḥiḳar, like Nehemiah, had held important positions at court. The rustic simplicity and idyllic life of the patriarchs8 fill in the details of the pictures. This, too, is the motive for the author’s careful substitution of Elymais in 2:10 for Egypt, which appears in Aḥiḳar as the country whither the sage journeyed to demonstrate his wisdom; he felt that Aḥiḳar was too good and noble a Jew ever to have been domiciled in Egypt or compelled to participate in the deliberations of the Egyptian court.9

The writer does not, however, forget the practical needs of his readers. The present book, as already pointed out, was a reply to the tractate of the priests of Khons, and was designed to dissuade his co-religionists from apostasy, and convert if possible any pagan who might read it. It is still more pointed in its warning against marriages with non-Jews, and incidentally condemns imitation of the immorality and apostasy of Joseph, the son of another Tobias, an allusion not without point in Egypt, where the scandal had occurred. While the major portion of the Jews in Egypt were probably never deeply influenced by Greek Philosophy, and many of them remained unaffected by the rising tide of Hellenism,10 the writer, aware of these nascent dangers, makes the pertinent and emphatic statement of 4:19.

Lastly, our hypothesis illustrates and gives point to the author’s position with regard to sacrificial and legalistic religion. The fortunes and religious life of the Jewish exiles in Egypt were till lately almost unknown to us. But from the papyri we now know, for instance, that, even before the Exile, Jews had migrated to Egypt, become mercenaries in the Egyptian army, and formed a colony as a permanent garrison at Yeb, where they built a temple to Jahveh; that this temple survived the destruction of the Egyptian ones by Cambyses, but towards the close of the fifth century b.c. was destroyed at the instigation of the priests of Chnum, the ram-headed god of the island; and that an appeal was made to Bagoas, the governor of Judaea. It is not clear, however, whether the temple was rebuilt or not. But two important inferences in connexion with the religious evolution of the Jews in Egypt at the time of this catastrophe seem to Sachau to be justified.1 On the one hand, neither Monotheism nor the Law had there undergone the full development which had resulted from Ezra’s establishment of Judaism and the Law some few years before at Jerusalem. On the other hand, even before the catastrophe, reforms in the interests of Judaism, as established at Jerusalem by the priestly school, may have been initiated at Yeb by a party powerful enough at any rate to enforce the principle, if not the details, of the High-priesthood and the imposition of a tax of two shekels of silver in imitation of Ezra and Nehemiah’s innovation.2 If it had been possible for his book to have been written so early, and if he had modelled his work on some tractate of Chnum instead of Khons, our author might well have been one of these pioneers of progressive, and therefore living, though legal, religion in Egypt.3 But teaching such as our author’s with regard to the duty of Egyptian Jews to the Law and the temple must have been needed still more in later days in that part of the Diaspora. A need of that kind must necessarily have produced efforts like the present one to inculcate such principles.4 This explains the purity of his moral outlook, the true spirituality of his religion, and the depth and reality of his adhesion to the Law. His struggle in Egypt for religious expansion and broad-minded progressiveness, hand in hand with its practical application for the actual lives of his co-religionists, antedated a somewhat different fight in Palestine by only a few years. Because our author’s was less sharp than the latter, it left him without much of the rich theology the Ḥasidim’s plight evoked. But, because its objective was primarily the establishment of a progressive Judaism and only secondarily the preservation of religion against pagan encroachments and was still less in opposition to a Hellenizing liberalism, it left him fortunately without the Hasidim’s narrow bigotry.