Biblicized Narrative: On Tobit and Genesis 22

The book of Tobit is dense with biblical allusions, particularly to the books of Genesis and Job (the latter, according to a Jewish tradition to which the pattern of allusion in the book of Tobit may itself attest, is also set in the patriarchal period).1 While readers have long taken note of many of these allusions, an important one appears to have gone unnoticed. I argue here that Tobit 6, which describes Tobiah's journey from Nineveh to Ecbatana in the company of his kinsman Azariah (in fact the angel Raphael), is patterned after Isaac's journey, in the company of his father Abraham, to the land of Moriah in Genesis 22. After arguing for this allusion in the first part of this essay, I turn in the second part to a discussion of its function in the book. I suggest that this and the other biblical allusions in Tobit should be understood not (or not only) as literary allusions of the sort that we find in literature of all periods but as manifestations of a particular sort of "canon consciousness" originating in the Second Temple period. I. TOBIT 6 AND GENESIS 22 Tobiah's expedition to Ecbatana in Tobit 6 shares certain basic plot elements with Isaac's journey in Genesis 22. In both cases, an only son is led by a kinsman into a life-threatening situation. The fact that Genesis 24, which describes the search by Abraham's servant for a wife for Isaac, serves as a (if not the) fundamental intertext for Tobiah's marriage to Sarah, bolsters the identification of Tobiah with Isaac.2 More pertinent to the argument for allusion than these general similarities are the striking parallels in the staging of Isaac's and Tobiah's respective journeys. In the Genesis narrative, after Abraham "sees the place from afar" (22:4), he orders the servants to remain with the ass and continues forward with Isaac and the sacrificial necessities (22:5-6). In the next scene, we overhear a conversation between Abraham and Isaac: Isaac wonders about the absence of a lamb to accompany the fire and wood, and Abraham assures him that God will provide it (22:7-8). In the first stop during Tobiah's journey, Raphael instructs him to collect the gall, heart, and liver of the fish that they have encountered, because they are medicinal (6:26a).3 Then, as they "approach Media" (6:6b), Tobiah asks Raphael what medicinal properties inhere in the fish organs. Raphael explains that the smoke of the heart and liver expels demons from possessed persons and the gall cures blindness (6:79). This conversation should naturally happen immediately after Raphael asks Tobiah to retrieve the organs, or immediately after Tobiah obeys. Indeed, we might expect Raphael to detail the medicinal properties of the fish in the context of his initial request, without any prompting from Tobiah. The latter sequence of events is in fact attested in medieval versions of the book.4 The reason for having Tobiah initiate a new conversation in a separate scene, as the two interlocutors near their destination, is evidently better to mirror the sequence of events in Genesis 22. There, as here, the young man, after proceeding some distance with his kinsman, wonders about the function of the objects that they took up in the previous stage of the journey, and in both cases the response carries an implicit threat of danger to the young man.5 This structural similarity is enhanced by key linguistic parallels between the two chapters. The most important concerns the phrase "and the two of them went along together." The Hebrew equivalent, ..., occurs twice in Genesis 22, just before and just after the conversation between Abraham and Isaac (22:6; 22:8). The phrase is not a common one in the Hebrew Bible; outside Genesis 22, the only verse in which all three components occur together is Amos 3:3 (... ). Even this verse, however, is an inexact parallel. For what is striking about the phrase ... in Genesis 22 is that, since the reader already knows that two figures are on a journey together, the verb . …