Texts in Conversation
Tobit draws on the marriage law in Numbers 36, where daughters who inherit property have to marry in their own tribe to preserve ancestral land. The parallel emphasizes this marriage practice as a means of maintaining group identity and inheritance.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Numbers 36:6
Hebrew Bible
4 And when the Jubilee of the Israelites is to take place, their inheritance will be added to the inheritance of the tribe into which they marry. So their inheritance will be taken away from the inheritance of our ancestral tribe.” 5 Then Moses gave a ruling to the Israelites by the word of the Lord: “What the tribe of the Josephites is saying is right. 6 This is what the Lord has commanded for Zelophehad’s daughters: ‘Let them marry whomever they think best, only they must marry within the family of their father’s tribe. 7 In this way the inheritance of the Israelites will not be transferred from tribe to tribe. But every one of the Israelites must retain the ancestral heritage.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Tobit 6:12
Deuterocanon
12 And he has no son nor daughter but Sarah alone, and you are nearer kin to her than any man to inherit her, and what things are her father’s it is right for you to inherit; and the maid is wise and steadfast and exceeding honourable, and her father is an honourable man. 13 And he said, It is right for you to take her; and hear me, brother, and I will speak this night to her father concerning the maid, that we may take her to be your bride. And when we return from Rages we will celebrate her marriage. And I know that Raguel can in no wise keep her back from you or marry her to another —to incur liability to death according to the decree of the book of Moses—and because he knows that the inheritance belongs to you to take his daughter before any man. And now, hear me, brother, and let us speak concerning the maid this night and we will betroth her to you; and, when we return from Rages, we will take her and let us lead her q back with us to your home.
Date: 225–175 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Tobias’s claim to marrying Sarah is rooted in the Mosaic stipulation that a woman who stands to inherit her parents’ estate (in the absence of sons) must marry a man from her father’s tribe, a stipulation originally intended to preserve the tribal allotments of land in Israel (Numbers 36:1–9; Tobit 6:12–13; 7:10). The book’s commitment to endogamy (marrying within one’s own people group), to the point that marrying a foreign woman is equated with fornication (Tobit 4:12), promoted the preservation of Jewish identity during a period in which intermarriage was being pursued as a strategy for promoting unity throughout the Hellenistic kingdoms. Tobit tells his son not to regard marriage with a fellow Jew with contempt, a timely word in a period in which many Jews would have seriously weighed the social, political, and economic advantages of marrying into a well-placed Gentile family ..."
David A. DeSilva, The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 92.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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