Asmodeus Killed Seven Grooms Before Tobiah Arrived

Seven Wedding Nights, Seven Mornings

Seven times her father had given her in marriage. Seven times the husband had died before the marriage was a marriage in any real sense. Seven wedding nights. Seven mornings with a body to explain. Sarah, daughter of Reuel of Ecbatana in Media, had not killed any of them. 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 they used it against her. They said to her face: it is not right to call you Sarah, which means princess, but Zarah, which means trouble. You have been given to seven husbands and not one of them lasted the night. Why do you kill your husbands? It would be better for your father if you died and spared them all this shame.

Sarah's Prayer in the Upper Chamber

She went up to her father's upper room and wept for three days. She considered hanging herself. Then she thought of her father, who had no other child, and she would not put that grief on him. She prayed instead. She told God that she was pure and had not defiled herself. She named the accusations of the maidservants. She said: either take me away, or have regard for me and pity me and let me hear reproach no more.

This is the prayer of a woman who has been made responsible for deaths she did not cause. Seven men had died in her wedding chamber and the world held her accountable for all seven. She had done nothing. She was an only child in her father's house in Media, faithful in her prayers and her conduct, and a demon was destroying every man who came near her because the demon wanted her for itself.

Asmodeus, King of the Demons

Asmodeus is one of the most consistently described figures in the whole body of ancient Jewish demonology. He appears across multiple sources with the same character: obsessive, possessive, violent toward anyone who interferes with what he has decided to claim. His name appears to derive from the Avestan aeshma daeva, the Zoroastrian demon of wrath, which makes him one of the points where Jewish and Persian religious imagination met during the exile period and produced something new.

In the Tobit tradition he is not merely a demon of wrath but a demon of disordered love, the dark side of desire, the force that destroys the thing it claims to want. He killed seven men who had legitimate claim to Sarah. He could not possess her himself. He could only prevent anyone else from doing so. Seven deaths and he had nothing to show for them except seven graves and a woman he had not touched and could not reach, who was now praying in her father's upper room and asking God to either help her or kill her.

The Match the Demon Could Not Stop

At the same moment, in Nineveh, Tobit's son Tobias was preparing to travel to Media to collect a debt. The angel Raphael had arrived in disguise, calling himself Azariah. He knew the route. He knew about a fish in the Tigris whose heart and liver, when burned, produced a smoke that drove away demons. He knew about Sarah daughter of Reuel, and he told Tobias to marry her, and he told Tobias that the demon Asmodeus would flee when he smelled the smoke of the fish.

Tobias married Sarah. On the wedding night he burned the fish's heart and liver in the incense pan. The smell filled the room. Asmodeus fled to Egypt. Raphael pursued him there and bound him. By the time Reuel rose in the morning and went to dig the eighth grave he had prepared, the grave was empty. His daughter was alive. Her husband was alive. The demon was gone.