Raphael Disguised Himself and the Cure Was Already in the Fish

Nobody told Tobiyyah that his travel companion was an angel.

He was eighteen years old, or thereabouts, setting out from Nineveh on a journey to Media to collect a debt his blind father had placed with a man named Gabael in the city of Rages. He needed a guide who knew the road. A man appeared, gave his name as Azariah, said he was familiar with the route, agreed to the hire. Tobiyyah's father Tobit questioned him carefully about his lineage before the journey began. The stranger answered with calm particularity. He was lying about his name and his nature, but there was nothing false in his answers about where the road led and what the journey required.

The Book of Tobit, composed somewhere between the third and second centuries BCE and preserved in the deuterocanonical literature, names the stranger near the end: Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand before God's throne, whose name means "God heals." The revelation comes after everything has been resolved, after the demon is banished, after the marriage is consummated, after Tobit's blindness is cured. Raphael waited until the work was done before announcing what he was.

The first day of the journey, before they had left the city, a great fish leaped from the Tigris River and nearly took Tobiyyah's foot. Raphael told him to catch it, gut it, and save the heart, liver, and gall. The heart and liver, he explained, could be burned on coals to drive away demons. The gall could cure blindness. Tobiyyah salted the rest of the fish for food and they went on their way.

He didn't ask many questions. He was young and the angel was convincing. The fish organs went into his pack.

In Ecbatana, Raphael told him they would stay at the house of a man named Reuel. Reuel had an only daughter named Sarah. Raphael told Tobiyyah he was going to marry her. This was not a suggestion. The framing in the Book of Tobit is of something preordained: "I know Reuel will not refuse you. You are meant to marry her, according to the law of Moses."

Tobiyyah knew the story of Sarah's previous husbands. Everyone knew. Seven men. Seven wedding nights. Seven corpses. The demon Asmodeus, whose name derives from the Persian and means something like "the destructive one", had killed each of them before the marriage could be consummated. Sarah had spent years under the shadow of this repetition, blamed by servants, mocked for her misfortune, praying for death rather than face another failed marriage.

Raphael was not alarmed. He had already packed the cure.

On the wedding night, Tobiyyah placed the fish heart and liver on the coals of incense. The smoke rose and the demon fled to the remotest part of Egypt, where Raphael bound him. Then Tobiyyah and Sarah knelt together and prayed. Not a quick prayer of relief, but a long, considered prayer that grounded their marriage in the creation of Adam and Eve, in the intention of building a life in uprightness according to Jewish law. Sarah's single word "Amen" at the end carries the weight of seven dead husbands and years of blame and the first night in her life she had any reason to believe things might turn out differently.

While the wedding feast continued, Reuel had already dug a grave out of habit, expecting another corpse, and had to fill it in when Tobiyyah was still alive at dawn. Raphael slipped away to Rages to collect Tobit's silver from Gabael. He told Gabael about the marriage and brought him back to the celebration. Gabael wept and embraced Tobiyyah and blessed the couple. The errand that had started the journey was completed while the wedding feast was ongoing. Raphael had managed both tasks at once.

When Tobiyyah finally returned to Nineveh with his wife and the silver, Raphael guided him through the final healing: smear the fish gall over Tobit's eyes. The white films peeled back. Tobit could see. He saw his son. He saw his daughter-in-law. He had not seen anything for years.

Only then did Raphael reveal himself. "I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and who go in before the glory of the Holy One." He had carried Tobit's prayers to God. He had carried God's answer back down. The cure in the fish, the command to marry Sarah, the binding of Asmodeus, the silver retrieved from Rages. All of it had been coordinated from above, moving through the disguised figure of a travel companion who charged a reasonable fee for his services and kept his nature private until the work was done.

He left before they could try to reward him. He rose, and he was gone.