abstract
| - The Book of Tobit or Tobi (or Book of Tobias in older Catholic Bibles; from the Greek: Τωβίτ, and Hebrew: טובי Tobih "my good", also called the Book of Tobias from the Hebrew טוביה Tobiah "Yahweh is my good") is a book of scripture that is part of the Catholic and Orthodox biblical canon, pronounced canonical by the Council of Carthage of 397 and confirmed for Roman Catholics by the Council of Trent (1546). It is listed in Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Tobit is regarded by Protestants as apocryphal. It has never been included within the Tanakh as canonical by ancient Judaism. However, it is found in the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), and Aramaic and Hebrew fragments of the book were discovered in Cave IV at Qumran in 1952. These fragments are generally in agreement with the Greek text, which exists in three different recensions.
- It should be noted that there are some ancient texts of Tobit that give Midian (the Transjordan region) instead of Media and Bathania instead of Ecbatana; therefore the Rages of these texts would be modern day Damascus. It's probable that these were the original readings because the book would contain geographical impossibilities otherwise. If such is the case then the reading of Ecbatana would have come about from the phrase "ex Batania". One such text is the Heb. Londinii (or HL) version. See Marshall, op. cit., 786; a text found by Gaster in the British Museum, Add. 11,639. A description and translation of the MS, which belongs to the C13th AD, is given by Gaster in PSBA, vol.xviii., 208ff., 259ff., and vol.xx., 27ff.
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