Scripture Daily

Context No. 688 of 4322 · Tobit

Context · Reflection

Tobit 3:7-17: in context

7The same day it happened to Sarah the daughter of Raguel in Ecbatana of Media, that she also was reproached by her father’s maidservants; 8because that she had been given to seven husbands, and Asmodaeus the evil spirit killed them, before they had lain with her. And they said to her, “Do you not know that you strangle your husbands? You have had already seven husbands, and you haven’t borne the name of any one of them. 9Why do you scourge us? If they are dead, go your ways with them. Let us never see either son or daughter from you.” 10When she heard these things, she was grieved exceedingly, so that she thought about hanging herself. Then she said, “I am the only daughter of my father. If I do this, it will be a reproach to him, and I will bring down his old age with sorrow to the grave.” 11Then she prayed by the window, and said, “Blessed are you, O Lord my God, and blessed is your holy and honorable name forever! Let all your works praise you forever! 12And now, Lord, I have set my eyes and my face toward you. 13Command that I be released from the earth, and that I no longer hear reproach. 14You know, Lord, that I am pure from all sin with man, 15and that I never polluted my name or the name of my father in the land of my captivity. I am the only daughter of my father, and he has no child that will be his heir, nor brother near him, nor son belonging to him, that I should keep myself for a wife to him. Seven husbands of mine are dead already. Why should I live? If it doesn’t please you to kill me, command some regard to be had of me, and pity taken of me, and that I hear no more reproach.” 16The prayer of both was heard before the glory of the great God. 17Raphael also was sent to heal them both, to scale away the white films from Tobit’s eyes, and to give Sarah the daughter of Raguel for a wife to Tobias the son of Tobit; and to bind Asmodaeus the evil spirit; because it belonged to Tobias that he should inherit her. At that very time, Tobit returned and entered into his house, and Sarah the daughter of Raguel came down from her upper chamber.

Tobit is a story of two people at the end of their endurance, and this chapter brings their griefs together. Blind Tobit in Nineveh has just prayed to die. Now the scene shifts to Ecbatana, to Sarah, the daughter of Raguel. She has been given in marriage seven times, and each time the demon Asmodeus killed the husband on the wedding night before the marriage was consummated. Her father's servant girls throw it in her face: you are the one who strangles your husbands. Worn down past bearing, Sarah goes up to her room meaning to hang herself.

What stops her is her father. She is his only child, and she cannot do to his old age what her death would do; she will not send his gray head down to the grave in sorrow. So instead of the rope she goes to the window and prays, laying out her innocence and asking God either to let her die or to lift the reproach. And on that same day, the book says, both prayers, hers and Tobit's, came before the glory of God, and the angel Raphael, whose name means God heals, was sent to answer both at once. Her release will not be death. It will be a marriage, to Tobit's son, and a demon bound. Two people asked to be let out of their lives, and God answered by tying their lives together.

Sarah prayed to die and God sent healing through another's need instead. When I have asked only to be released from something, have I missed that the answer might be a person, not an exit?

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