Asmodeus Killed Seven Grooms Before Tobiah Arrived

Seven times her father had given her in marriage. Seven times the husband had died before he could be called her husband in any real sense. Seven wedding nights, seven grooms, seven mornings with a body to explain.

Sarah, daughter of Reuel of Agbatanis in Media, was not a murderer. She was a prisoner. The demon Asmodeus, king of the demons, had claimed her for himself and was killing every man who came near her. The maidservants knew this and used it against her. The text of the Book of Tobit, chapter three, written down around the second century BCE in a form preserved in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, records what the servants said to her face: It is not meet to call thee Sarah, but Zarah -- trouble. For she had been given to wife to seven husbands, and not one of them had approached her. Why do you kill your husbands? they asked. It would be better for your parents if you simply died and spared them the shame.

Sarah went up to her father's upper chamber and wept and prayed. She was pure, she told God. She had not defiled herself or her family's name. She was an only child, with no one to inherit her father's house if she died. Seven husbands were dead. What was the point of staying alive?

Asmodeus is one of the most consistently described figures in the entire body of Jewish demonology. The Legends of the Jews, Ginzberg's encyclopedic compilation from the early twentieth century drawing on Talmudic and midrashic sources reaching back centuries, describes him as the king of demons, a creature of enormous cunning who served under divine constraints he could not escape. When Solomon later captured Asmodeus by tricking him drunk on wine and binding him with a chain engraved with the Name of God, the demon submitted, because he had no choice: the Name was upon him. But until that chain went around his neck, he operated freely within whatever God permitted him.

What God permitted in the case of Sarah's husbands is never fully explained. The tradition in the apocryphal texts suggests that Asmodeus had a claim, of some kind, that was answered by the correct marriage and the correct prayer and the correct use of the remedies Raphael would teach Tobiyyah to use. The fish's heart and liver, burnt in the bridal chamber, would produce a smoke that Asmodeus could not endure. He would flee to the furthest part of Egypt, and the angel Raphael would go after him and bind him there.

The Legends of the Jews place Asmodeus within a wider taxonomy of demonic activity: he is a creature of lust and of the subversion of righteous unions. He does not kill randomly. He kills specifically, in the space between marriage and its consummation, targeting the moment of vulnerability when two people are most exposed to the forces that resist genuine love and genuine covenant.

What defeats him is not power. Tobiyyah is not a warrior. He is a young man on a business trip who has been talked into the marriage by an angel he thinks is a hireling traveler, a man named Azariah. Tobiyyah is terrified when he hears about the seven dead grooms. The angel tells him to take the fish's organs into the bridal chamber and burn them, and to pray before touching Sarah, and the demon will not be able to harm him. And then the angel adds something that has nothing to do with the technique: for they over whom the demon hath power have set their hearts on lust, and have shut God out of their hearts and minds.

The protection is not the smoke from the fish. The protection is the prayer first. Tobiyyah and Sarah praying together before anything else, acknowledging that they are children of the same God and that they are entering the covenant in full awareness. The demon's power is in the space where God has been excluded. When God is present, explicitly, by deliberate invitation, Asmodeus has nothing to grab onto.

He fled to Egypt. He was bound there by Raphael. Raphael later revealed himself as one of the seven holy angels who stand before the throne of God, appointed over healing, over prayers that reach the throne. He had been there from the beginning, hidden in plain sight, the stranger on the road who knew about fish and demons and the specific path between two broken people that would heal them both.

Sarah had been a prisoner. What freed her was not cleverness or strength or the absence of the demon. What freed her was a man who prayed before he was her husband and a God who had been arranging this particular answer for longer than any of them knew.