Book of Tobit

Tobias has not been proven to be a legend drawn from a non­ canonical source. (b) The angelic apparition and all incidents connected therewith are no more difficult to explain than the angelophanies of Genesis 18:19, and Acts, 12:6. (c) The demonology is not unlike to that of the New Testament. The name "Asmodeus" need not be of Iranian origin; but may just as readily be explained as Semitic. The Aramaic word ashmeday is cognate with the Hebrew hashmed, "destruction". And even though it be a mutilated form of some Iranian ancestor of the Persian Aeshma daeva, what more natural than a Median name for a demon whose obsession was accomplished upon Median soil? The slaying of the seven husbands was allowed

by God in punishment of their lust; it is the youth Tobias, not the sacred writer, that suggests (according to AB, Aleph, and Old Latin) the demon's lust as the motive of his kiling all rivals. The binding of the devil in the desert of Upper Egypt, the farthest end of the then known world, has the same figurative meaning as the binding of Satan for a thousand years. (d) The unlikelihood of the many coincidences in the Book of Tobias is mere conjecture. Divine Providence may have brought about these siimilarities of incident, with a view to the use of them in an inspired book. (e) Certain historical difficulties are due to the very imperfect condition