Tobit 3:6-8
New Catholic Bible
6 “So now, deal with me as you wish;
command that my life be taken away from me
so that I may be removed from the face of the earth and once again become dust.
For it is better for me to die than to live,
because I have endured undeserved insults,
and I am engulfed in the deepest grief.
“Command, O Lord, that I be delivered from this affliction;
receive me into the eternal abode,[a]
and do not, O Lord, turn your face from me.
For it is better for me to die
than to endure a life of such unrelieved misery
and to be subjected to these insults.”
Sarah: Innocence Diabolically Offended[b]
Sarah’s Misfortune.[c] 7 On the same day, at Ecbatana in Media, it also happened that Sarah, the daughter of Raguel,[d] had to endure the insults of one of her father’s maids. 8 For she had been married to seven husbands, but the wicked demon Asmodeus had slain each of them before the marriage had been consummated as is customary. The servant girl said to her, “You are the one who has slain your husbands! Behold, you have already been given in marriage seven times, but you have experienced no joy with any of your husbands.
Read full chapterFootnotes
- Tobit 3:6 The author has Tobit use the words of Jonah who wanted to die because God had not destroyed the hated Ninevites (Jon 4:3, 8). In comparable circumstances, Moses (Num 11:15), Elijah (1 Ki 19:4), and Job (Job 7:15) also prayed for death. Eternal abode: a reference to Hades, the abode of the dead from which no one returns (Job 7:9-10; 14:12; Isa 26:14). The fuller revelation of a blessed immortality in the Book of Wisdom was still to come.
- Tobit 3:7 The story of Tobit is brusquely interrupted. In a second sequence, the author introduces a new and unexpected personage.
- Tobit 3:7 In the ancient East, sicknesses and sometimes even death were attributed to the wickedness of a demon, here called Asmodeus, “the destroyer” (even though he is not related to Asmadaeva, the worst demon of Avesta, the sacred book of the Persians).
- Tobit 3:7 Raguel: cousin of Tobit (see Tob 7:2). Ecbatana was the capital of the middle kingdom (the contemporary Hamadan in Iran).
