2. The fable of the Grateful Dead

It was more probably this cycle of stories—either written or oral—which provided the author with the major portion of the general outline of his story, infused the romantic interest, and furnished several of the most exciting crises in the plot—a fact denied by only a very few scholars.3 The corpse of a debtor, the outline of the fable runs, was rescued from his murderers and buried at great personal self-sacrifice by a traveller or itinerant merchant, whom the dead man’s spirit, appearing in human form, afterwards delivered from mortal peril, bestowing on him a bride and rescuing him from death by drowning; the supernatural being only revealed his own identity at the end of the series of adventures to the surprise alike of the merchant and of the reader. Such legends might well be as widespread in antiquity as at the present day and would be speedily assimilated and conformed by the Jews to their own peculiar religious and aesthetic tendencies: finally only an artistic mind such as our author’s would be required to transform one or more of these fables into the Apocryphal story of Tobit. Simrock in his collection of seventeen variants of the fable,4 was the first to point out their importance in relation to Tobit. Mostly indigenous in their present form to Germany, they have parallels in Holland, France, and Italy. Andersen’s Reisercamarad witnesses to the existence in Denmark of a recension closely akin to No. 10 in Simrock, while Cicero, De Divinatione, 1:27, proves that the kernel of the fable was already in existence in his day. Further parallels are given by Benfey in Pantschatantra and Pfeiffer’s Germania 12. Considerably closer parallels to Tobit appear in the Armenian5 and Russian6 forms of the fable.

Though the parallels are numerous, there are a number of significant differences both in outline and detail. The pertinent question is therefore raised by Schurer7 as to whether, quite apart from the uncertainty as to the antiquity of the fable, these differences are so vital as to make the hypothesis of our author’s dependence on the fable improbable.

In the first place, however, it is likely that the primitive story from which all the modern forms of it are ex hypothesi derived, underwent considerable changes in outline as well as in detail between the date of our author’s use of it and the moment when these modern variants branched off from the main stock. Fortunately Simrock’s seventeen versions, though they all assumed their present literary form in one country and at the same time, themselves provide an excellent example of this peculiar adaptability of the fable to transformations and modifications.8

Secondly, not a few of the important traits peculiar to Tobit and contradictory of all the extant forms of the fable, are explicable as deliberate modifications by the author of Tobit in conscious deference to his own aesthetic tendencies, his Jewish prejudices, his readers’ edification, or his desire at the moment to utilize some other source or copy some other pattern.9