This fragment of the Book of Tobit was among the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the Qumran caves in the late1940s and early 1950s. Author Fr. Fitzmyer's task was to translate it from Aramaic, using his knowledge of the language to fill in the gaps. Fragment from Tobit
The Written Word

For centuries, Catholics, for whom the Book of Tobit is canonical (i.e., part of their Bible), have been reading the charming story of Tobit and his son Tobiah in the Latin Vulgate or in vernacular Bibles based on the Vulgate. St. Jerome, who produced the Vulgate in the late fourth century a.d., was not really interested in translating Tobit but was pressured by two bishops to do so. Eventually he acquiesced and found a Jew who could read the Aramaic story and translate it into Hebrew, which Jerome then rendered into Latin as part of the Vulgate. He boasted in a letter that he devoted "one day's work" to it.

In the story, Tobit's dog went along on a trip to Rages with the young Tobiah and the angel Raphael. As they returned to Nineveh, the dog ran ahead, bringing the news of their return and "showed his joy by fawning and wagging his tail" (blandimento suae caudae gaudebat [11:9] ). So runs the story in the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible, based on the Vulgate. Alas, that amusing detail is not found in the earlier versions of the story used in the Bibles that Jerome's edition replaced. Where could Jerome have gotten it?

This is just one of the many questions asked by those who read and study the Bible in its original ancient languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. These biblical scholars, or exegetes, seek to interpret the Bible according to its original meaning. They recognize that they are dealing with the written Word of God inherited by the Church from ancient people who were moved by God's Spirit to record a form of divine revelation.

But the evangelist who composed the Gospel according to Matthew wrote in an ancient form of Greek very different from the language spoken in Greece today, and the person who composed Genesis wrote in a form of Hebrew different from that used in Israel today. Scholars learn to read those ancient languages in order to bring out the meaning of God's inspired Word to humanity.

I have been such a biblical scholar. I studied Latin and Greek in high school; as a seminarian I learned biblical Hebrew and biblical Aramaic and other ancient Semitic languages related to them. I received a doctorate in these languages at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and since 1958 I have been teaching Scripture, mainly New Testament, as well as ancient Hebrew and Aramaic.

In those days I little realized how the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late '40s and early '50s would influence my life's work. These treasures were first discovered in 1947, in what is called Qumran Cave 1. In 1952 Qumran Cave 4 was discovered, and out of it came 40,000 fragments that had to be pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. By 1960, when the puzzle was more or less finished, close to 580 fragmentary texts had been assembled. Some were biblical texts, copies of Old Testament books; others were sectarian writings, rulebooks, hymnbooks, or prayer books of the Essenes, the Jewish community who had dwelled in Qumran.

Among the documents in Cave 4 were fragmentary copies of the Book of Tobit, four in Aramaic and one in Hebrew. The person to whom these texts were entrusted for publication sat on them for nearly 40 years and never published them.

Near the end of 1991 I was asked to prepare the Tobit texts for publication. The Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem sent me ten photographs of the texts, which I spent a year studying and transcribing; I ultimately traveled to Jerusalem for a close inspection of the fragments themselves. My work on these Tobit texts makes up volume 19 of the series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, published by Clarendon Press in Oxford. In it I give for each fragment the transcription of its text, a translation into English, and a brief commentary, which compares the original Aramaic or Hebrew text with the ancient Greek and Latin versions of the story, which have long been known.

It is not easy to assess the importance of the discovery of these Tobit fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls. On the one hand, it means that we now have recovered about a fifth of the Book of Tobit in a Semitic language, some in Aramaic and some in Hebrew, and this version, which dates to around the second century b.c., is a much earlier version than what we had until the discovery of these Qumran fragments. But on the other hand, these fragments of Tobit will modify the Tobit story in revisions of modern Bibles.

Jerome's Vulgate form of Tobit is related to a Greek version preserved in the manuscripts Alexandrinus and Vaticanus, which date from the fourth/fifth centuries a.d. In 1844, however, a German biblical scholar, Constantin von Tischendorf, discovered in the library of the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Mount Sinai an important manuscript of the Greek Old Testament that dates to the fourth century a.d. That manuscript, called Sinaiticus, contained a Greek form of the Tobit story that no one in the Western Church had read for centuries. It was longer than the Greek story in Alexandrinus and Vaticanus and the Latin story in the Vulgate. It was related in length and form to the Vetus Latina (Old Latin Bible), which Jerome's Vulgate had replaced in the Western Church. The importance of the neglected longer form of Tobit in the Vetus Latina was then recognized.

What is striking about the Qumran Tobit texts, both Aramaic and Hebrew, is that they not only agree with the longer form of Sinaiticus and Vetus Latina but are also at times longer than either of them. This has been public knowledge since the 1950s, when preliminary reports were issued about the kinds of biblical texts recovered from Qumran. Since then, vernacular Catholic Bibles, including La Sainte Bible de Jˇrusalem (the Jerusalem Bible in English), began incorporating the longer Tobit story of the Sinaiticus and Vetus Latina. Although Tobit in the Revised Standard Version of 1957 was translated from the short version of the manuscripts Alexandrinus and Vaticanus, the New Revised Standard Version of 1991 presents the longer version of Sinaiticus, supplemented by the Vetus Latina.

Having finished the work on the Qumran Tobit texts, I was asked to revise the English translation of Tobit for a forthcoming revision of the New American Bible. Since the Qumran Aramaic and Hebrew texts are fragmentary, I had to use the full text of the long form of the Sinaiticus and supplement it with verses from the Vetus Latina (because of gaps in the Sinaiticus text). I kept my eye, however, on the Aramaic and Hebrew texts and modified the long version accordingly. So the revision of the New American Bible will be the first Catholic Bible with the text of Tobit governed by these Semitic texts from Qumran.

So where did Jerome get that detail about the dog wagging its tail? We may never know. The Aramaic text he had translated is not known to us; perhaps the wagging tail was a simple stylistic flourish that some writer or translator felt was necessary at that point.

But the whole question is academic in light of the fact that the Qumran fragments have yielded an earlier version of the story, one that is much closer to the source. This is the contribution that the trained exegete can make to the spiritual life of modern Catholics, which is nourished by the written Word of God.

FitzmyerFr. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, is professor emeritus of biblical studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Page maintained by R VandeVelde, vande@math.luc.edu. Updated: Fri., January 17 1997