Tobit Prayed to Die but God Was Already Answering

He prayed to die. That is not a euphemism or a dramatization. Tobit, lying in the dark in Nineveh, his eyes useless, his savings entrusted to a man he could no longer travel to retrieve, his wife keeping them alive with her weaving, his pride abraded down to nothing by years of exile and dependence, prayed with complete sincerity that God would take his soul from him.

The Kingdom of Hannah passage in the Book of Tobit, composed in the second or third century BCE, gives us the prayer in full: Righteous art thou, O Lord, and thy judgment is upright, for all thy works are might, and all thy ways are kindness and truth, and thou art the judge of the earth. He acknowledges that God has dealt truly and he has done wickedly. He does not argue that he deserves better. He prays for mercy, not for justice, because he knows his ledger is not clean.

And then, at the end of this long act of theological self-surrender, he simply asks for death. It is better for me to die than live, he says. I shall no more hear my reproach.

The reproach was real. His wife had named it plainly the day before, in the argument about the kid goat. The neighborhood knew his story: the man from Naphtali who had been great in the Assyrian court and then fell to nothing, who was now blind and living on his wife's wages, who had spent his whole life doing what the Torah required and had nothing to show for it but suffering. In the ancient world, suffering was commonly read as evidence of divine disfavor. Tobit had heard that reading applied to himself for a long time.

What Tobit does not know, because he cannot see it, is that his prayer is not going unanswered. It is being answered in a way that requires coordination across hundreds of miles. In the city of Agbatanis in Media, a young woman named Sarah, daughter of Reuel, is at that same moment also praying for death. Seven men who were to be her husbands have been killed before the marriage was consummated, one after another, by Asmodeus, king of the demons. She is being mocked by her father's servants, who call her murderer to her face. She prays the same prayer as Tobit: take my soul, Lord, because living like this is worse than dying.

The Book of Tobit says explicitly that the prayer of them both was heard before the throne of glory at the same time. God sent the angel Raphael, the prince who is appointed over healing, to heal them both together: to open Tobit's eyes and to free Sarah from Asmodeus.

The apocryphal literature contains a tradition about answered prayer that runs differently from the way most people expect prayers to work. The tradition does not say that God answers quickly or with obvious signs. It says that God hears, and then orchestrates. The healing that comes to Tobit does not arrive in the form of a divine vision or a booming voice. It arrives in the form of a young man looking for a traveling companion, who turns out to be the angel Raphael in disguise, who leads Tobit's son Tobiyyah to the river where a fish will bite his foot, and the fish's organs, dried properly, will heal blind eyes and drive off the demon that has been killing Sarah's husbands.

This is the theology of the Book of Tobit: God answers prayer not by suspending the ordinary but by arranging the ordinary. The fish in the river was not an accident. The timing of Tobiyyah's journey was not an accident. The fact that Tobit had entrusted money to a relative in Media, giving his son a reason to travel to the exact city where Sarah lived, was not an accident. All of it had been set in motion before either Tobit or Sarah prayed, but neither prayer could have been answered without the other.

Tobit would not die. His eyes would open. He would live to see his son marry and bring home grandchildren and to watch Nineveh fall, as the prophet Nahum had promised it would. He would die at an advanced age, full of years, having told his children: leave Nineveh before the city goes down, because the word of God against it will be fulfilled.

The prayer for death was not answered with death. It was answered with life, and with the marriage that linked two broken households into one, and with an angel who had walked beside them for weeks without once saying who he was, and who left them simply saying: bless the Lord, and write all these things down, and it is time for me to go. I will return to God who sent me.