1. The Tractate of Khons

A copy of this tractate, designed for the propagation6 of the cult of the Egyptian God Khons of Thebes, has been preserved on the Bentres Stele, which dates from about 500 b.c. In a town called Bchtn (= Ecbatana?) there lived a princess possessed by a demon. ‘Khons, the beautifully resting one’, the God of Thebes, despatched ‘Khons, the executor of plans’, to her assistance; the demon was expelled and the princess was healed. It is probable that, conscious of the baneful tendency of this and similar propaganda of Egyptian paganism to encourage apostasy among his fellow exiles in Egypt, our author conceived the idea of writing a rival tractate to illustrate Jahveh’s sole sovereignty over supernatural as well as human beings, and His ability to protect and assist in dangers, sickness, and exile all who fulfilled his moral and ceremonial requirements. H. Schneider1 has endeavoured to prove that Tobit is a direct ‘remodelling’ of this tractate. The author seems at least dependent upon it for one place-name and for the ideas of demon-possession, supernatural assistance sent from afar to relieve the maiden of high position, the father’s unwillingness to allow the instruments of his daughter’s deliverance to depart from his roof, his loading them with riches, if not also for the mention of Egypt in connexion with the expulsion of the demon. Such borrowing from a pagan source, with a view to disprove a pagan god’s pretensions by ascribing his attributes and work to Jahveh, is more than paralleled among the Jews in Babylon, e.g. by P’s use of the Babylonian Tablets of Creation in praise of Marduk in order to work up their contents into a dogmatic statement of Monotheism, of Jahveh’s creation of the world, and of the duty of Sabbath observance in Gen. 1–2:4a. But our author’s work is more complex than the Tractate of Khons in the weaving and working out of its plot, and richer in details, while he abandoned many of the detailed characteristics2 of the Egyptian story in favour of other sources equally well known to pagan and Jew, but less subversive of the Jewish Faith.

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

3. The story and wisdom of Aḥiḳar.1

A. Antiquity of Aḥiḳar.—G. Hoffmann2 was the first scholar to point out the striking resemblances between this work and our book. To-day its value as a primary source of a portion at least of Tobit, as well as the multiplicity of problems it raises on its own account and in relation to the Jewish colony at Yeb, is generally recognized. Still read in the Arabian Nights and Aesop’s Fables, it was widespread in the ancient world. Quite apart from the numerous versions which survive, it has left an indelible impression on the literature and thought of the past. It was well known to the Greeks and Romans, and it has been argued that this is proved apart from its appearance in Aesop’s Fables, by numerous parallels in the fragments of Menander,3 S. Clement of Alexandria’s reference4 to its alleged use by Democritus,5 as well as by the statement of Diogenes Laertius (5:30) that Theophrastes (371–264 b.c.) composed a work entitled Ἀκίχαρος, and the allusion of Strabo6 to Ἀχαΐκαρος. The use of Aḥiḳar is unmistakable in the Qoran.7 The Talmud8 is not entirely free from its influence, and some Christian writers knew it at second hand.9 At the beginning of the Christian era Aḥiḳar was still somewhat popular in Palestine: this much is clear from the New Testament.10 It is consequently by no means surprising that certain of the latter parts of the Old Testament itself are to some extent dependent upon Aḥiḳar. Dr. Rendel Harris points out the parallels in thought and language between Aḥiḳar, e.g. in Ps. 141:4, 5, 10 (in both the Massoretic text and the LXX), in Dan. 2:2, 11; 4:10; 5:7, 16. In the case of Sirach, with which Tobit is intimately connected in sentiments and date (see 4 below), the dependence on Aḥiḳar is beyond dispute.11 Thus before the beginning of the second century b.c.—how much earlier we cannot tell—Aḥiḳar must have been reverenced in Palestine, and even regarded there as sacred if not actually inspired, and its vogue had declined considerably before New Testament times on account of its partial incorporation in Tobit. In Egypt, however, we have contemporary evidence from the Elephantine papyri12 that between the fifth and sixth centuries b.c. the Jewish community there read, in Aramaic, some portions at least both of the history (see p. 186, footnote 9) and of the parables and fables. Consequently Hoffmann’s supposition that an author later than Tobit wrote the legend to explain the references to Aḥiḳar in Tobit, and Mr. E. H. Dillon’s that Aḥiḳar, though earlier than Tobit, was only composed in the third century b.c., are finally1 disproved. The interpolatory hypotheses (see § 9) are seen to be almost as unjustified as Ginzburg’s scepticism as to the identity of the Aḥiḳar of Tobit with the Aḥiḳar of this legend or Plath’s doubts (op. cit., p. 391) as to whether our author had written or only oral acquaintance with Aḥiḳar.

The further problems of Aḥiḳar’s exact date and place of composition concern us in so far as it is of interest to discover whether or not this source of Tobit was written in some non-Semitic language and by an author of non-Jewish nationality and religion.2 The fact that the Assyrian kings are alluded to by name but in a somewhat impersonal and general manner, as well as the absence of all indications that the Assyrian empire was still in existence, points to a date of composition subsequent to 608 b.c. The proper names, on the other hand—even to some extent those in the latest forms of Aḥiḳar—preserve their genuine Assyrian Torre to a greater extent than the same and similar words have done within the Old Testament Canon. The author is acquainted with official titles (e.g. רביא, כותא), which might have been no longer understood if the Assyrian empire had long since passed away, while the Persian names, even in the later strata, are very few. Still it is probable that even if the name Aḥiḳar is a very ancient Babylonian one,3 an author writing trader Cyrus would borrow the name of a person famous for wisdom in the ancient days of Babylon. These considerations lead Sachau to suppose that it cannot have been composed earlier than the last decades of the Babylonian empire, and finally he decides that ‘in its present form the book of Aḥiḳar may have been composed somewhere between 550–450 b.c.’.4 Its author would therefore be a contemporary of Deutero-Isaiah and Jonah. Though Halévy and Dr. Rendel Harris have endeavoured to show that on internal grounds the hypothesis of a Babylonian and pagan original cannot be maintained, in Bousset’s judgement ‘there can scarcely be any doubt as to the legend being heathen in origin’.5 Sachau finds nothing specifically Hebrew in the book of Aḥiḳar and surmises ‘that such a work, possibly resting on a more ancient Babylonian pattern, might perhaps have arisen in the circle of the priests of Nebo’, a cult which ‘was one of the most extensive in those days’ (op. cit., p. 23). Reinach, too, urged that the original author was a pagan, and the work, which was polytheistic6 with a mythological motif, 7 was translated and expurgated theologically and ethically by the Jews before our author’s use of it. Nor is it quite improbable that a polytheistic work of this kind composed in Babylon would so quickly find its way to Egypt and having so quickly lost its polytheistic tendency, become a sacred book of the Jews at Yeb. Thus the papyri may fail both to favour and to disprove the hypothesis of a Jewish not a pagan author. The fact that they are written in Aramaic equally fails to solve the problem of the rival claims of Hebrew and Aramaic to be the language of the original work.

B. Alleged divergence in detail.—The Aramaic papyri of Aḥiḳar, in addition to the undeniably complete proof they afford of the use of Aḥiḳar among the Jews prior to the composition of Tobit, are equally useful in removing at least one of the alleged differences between the references to Aḥiḳar in Tobit and the history of Aḥiḳar as it was formerly known to us only from the MSS. of the various versions. In the latter Aḥiḳar lives in the reign of Sennaḥerib, who is represented as the son and successor of Esarhaddon, whereas in Tobit the inverse and correct order appears and the accuracy of Rs is incidentally vindicated. Schürer1 has already pointed out that in the papyri2 we read ‘the history of Aḥiḳar under Sennaḥerib and Esarhaddon in this correct sequence, not the reverse as in our MSS.’ of Aḥiḳar. The papyri, moreover, present in general an earlier form of the text than even those versions and redactions of Aḥiḳar in which the hero is an idolater and only worships the true God when the idols fail to hear him. Still the presentation of Aḥiḳar in our book as a Jew and a nephew of Tobit, may be due to our author’s desire to enhance the fame of Tobit by making so famous a man his relative (Smend, p. 63). The same motive probably dictated the description of Aḥiḳar as a friend and benefactor of Tobit, though in his own legend Aḥiḳar appears simply as a shrewd man. In Aḥiḳar the hero is delivered from prison because he is righteous; in Tobit because he has done alms (Tobit 14:10). Doubtless, even if Dr. Rendel Harris’s arguments3 with regard to the Syriac in this Connexion do not entirely commend themselves to all scholars, the transition from the idea of righteousness to that of almsgiving was easy if not unconscious in view of the widespread expression of the two ideas by one Hebrew word (צדקה) at the time when Tobit was written.4 For the true explanation of the transformation of Aḥiḳar’s journey to Egypt into one to Elymais (Tobit 2:10) see p. 186 and note ad loc.

C. Extent of dependence.—(1) He borrowed directly from the history of Aḥiḳar in 1:21 f.; 2:10; 11:18; 14:10. 15.5 The principal textual divergences and corruptions in the tradition of the proper names are referred to elsewhere (see notes ad loc). Nau (op. cit. p. 11) gives the following table of consanguinity as that presupposed by these references.

In 4:10 ‘suffereth not to come into darkness’ is a pertinent reference to Aḥiḳar’s unhappy plight in prison and Nadan’s ultimate fate mentioned more clearly in 14:10; it is still more generalized in Sir. 29:12. Especially noteworthy is the juxtaposition of the terms Assyria and Nineveh in the earliest recension of Tobit in 14:4 as well as in 14:15, proving conclusively the immediate dependence of Tobit upon the legend of Aḥiḳar where this curious double description of the empire is used.6 It would appear that the legend lay before him in a written form.

(2) The legend of Aḥiḳar seems to have supplied our author with several literary and structural models. With the title 1:1. cf. the Syriac C ‘I write the proverbs, to wit, the story of Aḥiḳar’ and the Armenian ‘the maxims and wisdom of Khikar’. As far as 3:67 our author followed the example set him by Aḥiḳar of representing the hero as recounting his own history. Tobit, too, like Aḥiḳar, gives a brief summary of his previous fortunes (1:3 ff.). Moreover, in addressing two series of exhortations to his son (4:3 ff., 14:3 ff.) and two prayers to God (3:2 ff., 13) he is surely imitating the legend of Aḥiḳar, which, though the details are different, is constructed according to this plan.

(3) Our author has assimilated a not inconsiderable amount of Aḥiḳar’s parenetic sections. The prologue (Tobit 4:5) and the epilogue (4:19) to the ‘teaching’ of Tobit find their prototype in the prologue in the Syriac to Aḥiḳar’s teaching: ‘My son, listen to my speech, follow my opinion, and keep my words in remembrance’, and in the Arabic, ‘O my son, hear my speech and follow my advice and remember what I say’, and in the epilogue to the same in the Armenian, ‘Son, receive into thy mind my precepts, and forget them not’. As 4:12 finds a place within this ‘teaching’, so the same thought appears in the same discourse of Aḥiḳar.1 With 4:15 cf. App. 2:198; with 4:18 cf. Camb. ed., p. 61, No. 12 (3:16 in Nau). In the case of several other verses in ch. 4 a less verbal dependence on Aḥiḳar can be established as the latter appears, for instance, on pp. 60–6 of the Cambridge Aḥiḳar. With 14b, 16, 18 cf. Nos. 9, 11, 12, 43, 73; with 15 cf. Nos. 20, 39, 60. Moreover, unless immediate dependence on Aḥiḳar is presupposed, a few obscure passages cannot be elucidated. Of this 4:17 (see note ad loc.) is an excellent example. Its meaning and phrasing are clear when read in conjunction with Aḥiḳar’s, ‘My son, pour out thy wine on the graves of the righteous, and drink it not with evil men’.2 Again, in 4:14b the precept to be πεπαιδευμένος3 finds its original context in Sachau’s Aramaic Papyrus 53 (Tafel 44) line 2. ויתשים ארחא ברגלו[הי]‍4‍ברא זי יתאלף ויתסר = ‘the son who is trained and disciplined and at whose feet … is laid’. The importance Tobit attaches to the burial of the dead (e.g. 1:20, 2:3–9, 4:3, 5, 14:12) also finds a prototype in Aḥiḳar.5 Finally, as Aḥiḳar orders his last discourses to Nadan to be written down, so Raphael bids Tobit write the record of his acts and maxims (12:20).