Commentaria in Tobiam
Chapter 2
1. Now after this, when there was a festival day of the Lord, and a good dinner was prepared in the house of Tobias, 2. He said to his son: Go and bring some of our tribe that fear God, to feast with us. 3. And when he was gone, returning he told him that one of the children of Israel lay slain in the street. And forthwith he leaped up from his place at the table, and left his dinner, and fasting came to the body: 4. And taking it up carried it privately to his house, that he might bury him cautiously when the sun was down. 5. And when he had hid the body, he ate bread with mourning and fear, 6. Remembering that word which the Lord spoke by Amos the prophet: Your festival days shall be turned into lamentation and mourning. 7. When the sun was down, he went and buried him. 8. Now all his neighbours blamed him, saying: Once already commandment was given for thee to be put to death because of this matter, and thou didst scarce escape the sentence of death, and dost thou again bury the dead? 9. But Tobias, fearing God more than the king, carried off the bodies of the slain, and hid them in his house, and at midnight buried them. 10. Now it happened one day that being wearied with burying, he came to his house, and cast himself down by the wall and slept, 11. And as he was sleeping, hot dung from a swallow’s nest fell upon his eyes, and he was made blind. 12. Now this trial the Lord permitted to happen to him, that an example might be given to posterity of his patience, as also of holy Job. 13. For whereas he had always feared God from his infancy, and kept his commandments, he repined not against God because the evil of blindness had befallen him, 14. But continued immoveable in the fear of God, giving thanks to God all the days of his life. 15. For as kings insulted over holy Job, so his relatives and kinsfolk mocked at his life, saying: 16. Where is thy hope, for which thou gavest alms and buriedst the dead? 17. But Tobias rebuked them, saying: Do not speak so: 18. For we are the children of saints, and look for that life which God will give to those that never change their faith from him. 19. Now Anna his wife went daily to weaving work, and brought home what she could get for their living by the labour of her hands. 20. Whereby it came to pass that she received a kid, and brought it home: 21. And when her husband heard the cry of the kid, he said: Take heed, lest perhaps it be stolen; restore ye it to its owners, for it is not lawful for us either to eat or touch any thing that cometh by theft. 22. At this his wife being angry answered: It is evident thy hope is come to nothing, and thy alms now appear. 23. And with these and other such like words she upbraided him.
1. “WHEN THERE WAS A FESTIVAL DAY.”—Pentecost, as the Hebrew and Greek have. For on this day above all one should give oneself to works of charity. For these are the works of the Holy Spirit, whose feast is celebrated at Pentecost, Acts 2:4 ff.
lest someone accuse him to the king, and he thus come into danger of life, as he had done in chapter 1, verse 22), “BURY HIM.”
“By the prohibition,” says St. Ambrose, chapter 1, “he was not recalled so much as incited, lest he should seem to desert the office of piety from fear of death: the price of mercy was the penalty of death.” The same, book 1 On Duties, chapter 4: “Tobias,” he says, “expressed the form of piety more evidently when, leaving the banquet, he buried the dead by his custom, and invited the needy to the food of a poor table.” And St. Augustine, book On the Care to be Had for the Dead, chapters 1 ff.: “Tobias,” he says, “is commended as having deserved of God, by burying the dead, as the Angel testifies.” For burial is the last office of mercy, a debt to nature, as it were an honour of the deceased and a consolation of his kinsfolk, and a desire of nature. Hear St. Ambrose here, chapters 1 and 2: “This is a great work. If we are commanded to clothe the naked living, how much more ought we to cover the bodies of the dead? If we are accustomed to accompany the living on a longer way, how much more those who have gone to that eternal house, whence they shall not return? Nothing is more excellent than this office, to confer on him who can no longer repay you, to protect from birds, to protect from beasts a sharer of your nature. Heathens are reported to have given this humanity to dead bodies; shall men refuse it?”
Add that the bodies of the faithful saints are to be buried, that by this we may profess faith and hope of the resurrection, namely that they are not cast away like the carcasses of horses and dogs, whose souls perish with the body, but buried as about to rise again in soul and body to immortal life. Again, by burial great honour is paid to the virtue of the saints and martyrs: hence such care was shown by the first Pontiffs in burying martyrs; indeed St. Nicomedes by burying the body of the martyr St. Felicula, and the priest St. Justin that of St. Lawrence, and many others by the burial of martyrs, obtained the crown of martyrdom.
So Marcian, afterwards, when he had come upon the body of one recently slain and wished to bury it, was seized; but the Septuagint render strouthia, that is, sparrows, for the Hebrew sipporim, that is, birds, as Vatablus translates. But our text, from the circumstances of the place, rightly understood these birds to be swallows; for their dung blinds the eyes; hence another Hebrew text here has deror, that is, free bird, namely the swallow, which flies freely and consorts freely with men and nests in roofs, says R. David. Whence that symbol of Pythagoras: “Have no swallows under the same roof,” that is, beware of the company of prattlers and whisperers, as St. Jerome explains from Aristotle in his Apology against Rufinus, and Clement of Alexandria, Stromata book 5, chapter 5. So also by the Latins any birds are at times called sparrows, as Serarius shows here.
“AND HE WAS MADE BLIND,”—because the dung of swallows is dry, hot and burning, and therefore dries the humour of the eyes, and so naturally blinds. So Francis Valesius, Sacred Philosophy chapter 13. Lyranus therefore less rightly denies this power of blinding to the dung of the swallow. More probably Dionysius and Valesius think that Tobias was not blinded, but only a film and membrane was drawn over his eyes: which surgeons by drawing off with a needle restore the eyes to liberty and sight, of which more in chapter 6, verse 9. Moreover for this cause the young of swallows living among their parents’ dung are blinded, but sight is restored to them again by the parents by the herb called chelidonia. Hear Tertullian, book On Penance, chapter 12: “The swallow, if it has blinded its young, knows how to give them eyes again from its own celandine.” And Pliny, book 8, chapter 27: “Celandine, most wholesome for the sight, the swallows showed, healing with it the injured eyes of their young.” And book 25, as if he had killed him, and was therefore condemned to death; but by the providence of God it came about that the author of the murder was detected, and Marcian was thus freed, says Evagrius, book 2, chapter 1. And by this work Marcian deserved to be raised to the empire, and to become the husband of St. Pulcheria, sister of the Emperor Theodosius, than whom there was no better, no braver, no more pious emperor. So Baronius, year of Christ 450.
10. “NOW IT HAPPENED ONE DAY (in the Greek, that same night which followed the day of Pentecost, of which in verse 4) THAT HE CAST HIMSELF DOWN BY THE WALL.”—The Hebrew adds: I did not go at once into my house, because I was polluted over the dead (by the touch of the dead man he had buried, according to the law, Numbers 19:11 and 16); but I slept, with my eyes open, outside the court by the wall, under the open sky, where swallows build their nests and drop their dung on the ground, and defile everything with it.
11. “AND AS HE WAS SLEEPING, HOT DUNG FROM A SWALLOW’S NEST FELL UPON HIS EYES, AND HE WAS MADE BLIND.”—“Of swallows:” the Greek has chapter 8: “With this (celandine) swallows have restored sight to the eyes of their young in the nest, as some will have it, even when the eyes have been plucked out.”