Tobit, Anna and the Kid

 

6/6/2023

Learn something every day.  That old saw proves ever more true as I advance in age (now 72).  Problem is that I forget things soon after I learn them.  That’s why I’m writing these little pieces on religion; I’m more likely to remember if I write them down.

What I learned this morning at 8:00 mass at St. Al’s is that there is such a thing as the Book of Tobit (Tobias) in The Bible.  Actually, The Bible isn’t THE Bible.  There are many versions.  The approved Catholic Bible (from which this morning’s Old Testament reading was taken), has Tobit--and several other books as well.  Orthodox Bibles also have them.  Many Protestant Bibles, including the King James Version (which I own), do not. 

Tobit 2:9-14

Anyway, here’s the reading:

On the night of Pentecost, after I had buried the dead,

I, Tobit, went into my courtyard
to sleep next to the courtyard wall.
My face was uncovered because of the heat.
I did not know there were birds perched on the wall above me,
till their warm droppings settled in my eyes, causing cataracts.
I went to see some doctors for a cure
but the more they anointed my eyes with various salves,
the worse the cataracts became,
until I could see no more.
For four years I was deprived of eyesight, and
all my kinsmen were grieved at my condition.
Ahiqar, however, took care of me for two years,
until he left for Elymais.

At that time, my wife Anna worked for hire
at weaving cloth, the kind of work women do.
When she sent back the goods to their owners, they would pay her.
Late in winter on the seventh of Dystrus,
she finished the cloth and sent it back to the owners.
They paid her the full salary
and also gave her a young goat for the table.
On entering my house the goat began to bleat.
Perhaps it was stolen! Give it back to its owners;
we have no right to eat stolen food!”
She said to me, “It was given to me as a bonus over and above my wages.”
Yet I would not believe her,
and told her to give it back to its owners.
I became very angry with her over this.
So she retorted: “Where are your charitable deeds now?
Where are your virtuous acts?
See! Your true character is finally showing itself!”

Rembrandt 1626:  This early work by Rembrandt, painted in the year he turned twenty, is described by art historian Gary Schwartz as "his first truly accomplished painting”.  [Wikipedia] Young Rembrandt must have been reading one of the brilliant new versions of the Bible—but NOT the KJV.   I love the shaggy little dog in the bottom right, looking right into the “camera eye.”

 My old family Bible is the Douay version, [i]  the New Testament of which was first published in Rheims, France, in 1582.  When my grandparents were kids, it was the approved Catholic version, and so it has the Book of Tobias (Tobit), coming right after 2 Esdras, alias Nehemias. 

I won’t bother comparing the modern version with this old (and more poetic) one, except this last line: 

“See!  Your true character is finally showing itself!”

Which to me seems too modern.  The Douay version has

“It is evident thy hope is come to nothing, and thy alms now appear.”

I had to look up the correct (now archaic) meaning of “alms”

According to Webster’s, it’s simply “charity.”  Wife Anna was being sarcastic in her retort.  Nothing about “Your true character.”

I had to check Ol’ St. Jerome’s Vulgate Latin as well.

22  Manifeste vana facta est spes tua, et eleemosynæ tuæ modo apparuerunt.

The key word here is eleemosynæ, (alms), and it’s not even Latin; it’s Greek.  I had to look it up.

ἐλεημοσύνη:  Mercy, pity, compassion, according to Thayer’s Greek Lexicon.

Back to the Catholic-Protestant conflict of the 16^th-17^th Centuries, the translators of the KJV had this to say at the beginning of their Bible:

“So that if, on the one side, we shall be traduced by Popish Persons at home or abroad, who therefore will malign us, because we are poor instruments to make god’s holy Truth to be yet more and more known unto the people, whom they desire still to keep in ignorance and darkness…”

Not a charitable view of the Catholics, but it shows how important religion was during those times.

Not so much when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s.  Though our parents made some effort to raise us two kids in the Catholic religious tradition, by the time we were in high school none of us even attended Sunday mass regularly.

In my youth, I was barely aware of our old family Douay Bible.  It appears to have been printed in 1911.  It’s the only record we have of my descendants going back to my great-grandparents on my mother’s side. My grandparents Clark and Agnes must have got it about the time they got married in July of 1917, a few months after the U. S. entered World War I.

Bible-as-literature snobs, even avowed atheists, will probably agree that the King James Version, which came out in 1611, is more poetic, in fact a landmark of Western Civilization.

“…prominent atheist figures such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have praised the King James Version as being "a giant step in the maturing of English literature" and "a great work of literature", respectively, with Dawkins then adding, "A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian" [Wikipedia].

That was true for me as well; I requested it a Christmas present from my (still nominally Catholic) folks sometime in my mid-twenties, when admittedly I was a lit-snob. 

To this day, almost fifty years later, I still haven’t read the whole thing, though I refer to it frequently, especially recently when I hear a reading at mass and I want to read and “hear” what English churchgoers, literate or not, might have heard 400 years ago and counting.  (50 is one-eighth of 400, a surprisingly large fraction.)  Now I learn that the Catholics were hearing a bit more.  That’s still true today, even if bits like “See! Your true character is finally showing itself!” were never there in any previous version.  Why they got added to the Catholic readings may be a future topic.

---

[i] “The purpose of the version, both the text and notes, was to uphold Catholic tradition in the face of the Protestant Reformation which up until the time of its publication had dominated Elizabethan religion and academic debate. As such it was an effort by English Catholics to support the Counter-Reformation. “