Tobit Traced His Tribe Through Naphtali and Kept Faith in Exile

The Book of Tobit opens with a genealogy, which seems like an odd way to begin a story about demons and angels and miraculous cures. But the genealogy is the whole point. Tobit traces himself back through seven generations to the tribe of Naphtali, and that lineage carries a weight that the rest of the story is built on.

Naphtali was one of the twelve tribes of Israel. He was the sixth son of Jacob, born to Bilhah, Rachel's maidservant, and his portion when the land was divided was a long strip of territory running north along the Jordan and up into the Galilee highlands, the most fertile and beautiful land in the whole country. The blessing Jacob gave Naphtali in Genesis 49 is brief and luminous: Naphtali is a hind let loose; he gives beautiful words. Moses, in Deuteronomy 33, blessed the tribe with the gift of the sea and the south.

The Book of Tobit, composed sometime around the third or second century BCE and preserved in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew fragments, begins by noting that all the tribe of Naphtali had rebelled against the house of David and refused to go up to Jerusalem. They worshipped at the golden calves that Jeroboam had set up in Bethel and Dan. In this Tobit is presenting his tribe as a cautionary tale: the most beautifully blessed people, the ones who received words of grace and the sweetness of the land, were also the ones most vulnerable to the seduction of easy religion, the calves in their local shrines instead of the long walk to Jerusalem three times a year.

Tobit alone went. He went to Jerusalem at every feast, carrying his first fruits and his tithes, his grain and wine and oil, doing what the law commanded even when every man around him was doing something different and easier. His father's mother Deborah had raised him to keep the Torah because his parents had died young. He was an orphan held to a covenant by the memory of an old woman who is never named again in the text and who was apparently the most important influence of his life.

The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a medieval anthology drawing on traditions going back to the early first millennium, records Naphtali's own deathbed teachings to his children. The old patriarch, son of Jacob, warned his sons not to join with the children of Joseph because he had seen in a vision that the house of Joseph would lead Israel into sin and into exile. He warned them to hold fast to Levi and Judah, to the Torah and the covenant, and to remember who had chosen them when every other nation chose its own angel and none of them named the Name of the Lord.

Naphtali the patriarch saw what Naphtali the tribe forgot. The patriarch said: I warn you not to kick in your fatness and not to rebel against the will of God who satisfies you with the best of His earth. And that is exactly what happened. The tribe that received the sweetest land and the most beautiful blessing was precisely the one that kicked in its fatness and ran after the calves.

Tobit's defiance was therefore not just personal piety. It was a one-man correction of his tribe's collective failure. He could not bring his kinsmen back to Jerusalem. He could not overthrow Jeroboam's calves. He could only go himself, carrying his own first fruits, walking the road to the Temple while everyone around him laughed or ignored him or simply went the other way.

Then Shalmaneser came. The apocryphal account in Tobit and the historical record converge: the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom around 722 BCE, drove the ten northern tribes into exile, and scattered them across Media and Mesopotamia. Tobit ended up in Nineveh. His kinsmen ate the bread of the Gentiles without scruple. Tobit would not defile himself with their food, because he had never stopped being what he was.

This is the hinge on which the whole story turns. Tobit in Nineveh, blind, poor, under sentence of death for burying the bodies of killed Israelites against the king's orders, his wife working at a loom to keep them alive, is not a man who has been rewarded for his faithfulness. He is a man who has been faithful without reward, and has kept going anyway. His righteousness got him nothing but trouble. He buried the dead at night and was hunted for it. He prayed for death because he was humiliated and heartsick.

What Tobit represents in the tradition is not the comfortable assurance that goodness is always rewarded. He represents something harder: the possibility of keeping faith when keeping faith costs everything and produces nothing visible. Naphtali's tribe forgot what it was given. Tobit, alone in Nineveh, remembered. Not because it was easy. Not because it was paying off. Because Deborah his grandmother had taught him and he had never been able to stop.