Tobit Accused His Wife of Theft and She Answered Back

The Goat That Started Everything

Hannah had been weaving curtains for hire since Tobit lost his sight. On a particular day her client gave her a kid goat as a bonus on top of her wages. She brought it home. The goat cried inside the house. Tobit, sitting in his blindness, heard the sound and said: "Where did this come from? Make sure it is not stolen. Go and restore it to its owners."

It was not stolen. She told him so. He kept pressing. The argument that followed is recorded in the Book of Tobit with the understatement of a text that knows what a marital argument about a goat actually contains.

Everything Else the Argument Contained

What it contained was everything else. The years in Nineveh after the exile. The blindness that had come from sleeping against the wall after burying a murdered Israelite, the sparrows dropping their warm droppings onto his open eyes while he slept. The death sentence Sennacherib had issued against him. The years of his wife weaving curtains to keep them fed while he sat in the dark and prayed and gave almsgiving instructions to a son who was too young to carry them out alone.

Hannah had been carrying the household. She had been carrying it without recorded complaint. And then her husband accused her of stealing the one tangible recognition her employer had given her, the kid goat on top of the wages, the bonus that said: your work is worth more than what I pay you.

What She Named Plainly

She said: "Where are your charities now? Where are your righteous acts? Everything is known about you." That last sentence is the cruelest of the three and also the most specific. The neighborhood knew Tobit's story. The man from Naphtali who had been great in the Assyrian court. Who had buried the dead at night. Who had been condemned and then reprieved. Who was now blind and living on his wife's wages while his reputation for righteousness survived him like a coat he could no longer wear. Everything is known about you. Including the gap between the reputation and the current condition.

She was not saying his righteousness was false. She was saying it had not protected him, had not protected them, and that she had been the one absorbing the difference between what his piety promised and what the world delivered. She was saying it in a moment of anger about a goat, which is the way this kind of truth usually gets said.

Tobit's Response

Tobit did not answer her charge. He began to weep. He prayed. The prayer begins with theology: "Righteous are you, O Lord, and all your judgments are true, your ways are mercy and truth, you are the judge of the earth." He acknowledges that God has dealt truly and he has sinned. He does not argue with the premises of Hannah's accusation. He turns instead toward God and asks, at the end of a long act of theological surrender, to be allowed to die.

He prays for death not because Hannah was wrong but because she was right. The reproach was real and he could not bear it any longer. "It is better for me to die than to live," he says. "I shall no more hear my reproach." His wife's words have reached something that years of blindness and exile had not quite touched, the place where a man who has spent his whole life trying to be righteous finally confronts the possibility that righteousness did not produce what he thought it would.