THE  BOOK  OF  TOBIT: 

MORE  BIBLE  STUFF 

INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily for this 9^th Monday in Ordinary Time is, The Book of Tobit: More Bible Stuff.”

Today’s first reading is from the Book of Tobit.  This week we have 6 readings from the Book of Tobit. That’s it. And we only get Tobit every other year for our First Reading.  However, I’ve noticed that couples often use Tobit 8: 4b-8 - which has 3 key marriage themes at their wedding. They don’t use “The Tale of the Monster in the Bridal Chamber” - which Tobit uses in Chapter 6: 10-18 - when we hear that Sarah was given in marriage 7 times - and each time the new bridegroom goes into the bridal room, he dies that same night. Scary stuff. Weird horror story.

Whenever we have for the first reading something from the beginning of a new book of the Bible, I like to do a little research - any maybe say something about that book - as sort of a homily.

Hey they are using the book for a reading, so we ought to say something about it. 

So let me mention 5 disconnected things about the Bible - using Tobit as a jumping off point.

FIRST OF ALL: NOT IN THE JEWISH BIBLE

The Book of Tobit is not in the Jewish Bible. It’s in the Septuagint. That’s the Greek Old Testament. That’s the version that Jerome mainly used for his Latin translation of the Bible - called the Vulgate.

The Protestant translation of the Bible came from the Jewish or Masoretic text, so that’s why you won’t find the book of Tobit in the King James Version of the Bible. Check it out.

SECONDLY: 14 CHAPTERS

It’s 14 chapters long - that is the version we have in our Bible. You can read it in a day.

St. Jerome didn’t think it should be in the Bible - that is, that it should not be considered canonical. However, as a favor for his friends, Jerome translated the Book of Tobit from Aramaic into Latin in a day - with the help of an Aramaic translator.

So it’s not that long - and there was an Aramaic copy of Tobit around.

THIRDLY: CAIRO GENIZAH

Last year I read a book on a Genizah in Cairo, Egypt.  

A genizah is a special room in a synagogue where folks dump anything written in Hebrew. There was some law you couldn’t burn or just throw anything Hebrew away.

In our churches there is the sacristy, the sanctuary, the narthex or lobby, so in some Jewish synagogues there is a room for Hebrew writings.

I have noticed as priest that sometimes people dump old prayer books in the rectory side rooms - along with rosaries, scapulars and broken statues. Someone has died. They had prayer books and religious stuff. You can’t just dump them in the garbage.

So a genizah is the place religious stuff. 

And way back in the 1890’s different folks began discovering that the Cairo genizah had some valuable old writings - some of which - specialists had said disappeared from the face of the earth.

Besides the book I read about the Cairo genizah, I noticed another book entitled, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole.

Since the discoveries, they have found fragments of Tobit in the mix and the mess of over 300, 000, Hebrew manuscripts.

They have a computerized inventory of over 301,000 fragments from that room in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo.

For the Book of Tobit they have three 13^th Century fragments.

They don’t know for sure whether this book of Tobit was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek.

FOURTHLY: DEAD SEA SCROLLS

As you know some Arab shepherds - young kids - discovered in a cave near the Dead Sea a library of ancient scrolls.  It’s was 1947. 

These scrolls jumped the oldest biblical scrolls a good thousand years plus. I checked it out this morning in preparing these comments. Yes they found fragments of the Book of Tobit in the midst of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

FIFTH AND LAST: MANUSCRIPT BINDINGS

I also learned something new this morning - that I had not heard before. Since the 1980’s - in the Archives of Perugia in Italy - they discovered ancient documents were used to reinforce bindings of ancient books - which were newer than the documents they were reinforcing.

For example, they found 8 fragments that contain parts of the Babylonian Talmud.  They are part of a copy of the Jewish Talmud - copied in Spain in the 13^th century - then brought to central Italy. It was used as a sacred text and then removed and reused to bind other books. They are very important because they only had at the time one copy in the world of the complete manuscript of that  Hebrew Talmud. It’s in Munich and was copied in the 15^th century - with some other incomplete manuscripts. The reason for the shortage of that Babylonian Talmud was that they were  confiscated and burnt by the Catholic Church and the Inquisition.

That work is only in its infancy and I don’t know if they have any parts of Biblical texts like the Book of Tobit.

CONCLUSION

It’s 2017 and the sun is going to last a few more billion years - so we are going to be around a long, long time, so who knows what else will be discovered and figured out in our world. So there is a lot more research to do - on books like the Book of Tobit, etc.