Tobit 3

Two Prayers Heard on One Day

1Then, sick at heart, I wept, and I prayed in anguish: 2“You are just, Lord. Your every work, your every way, is mercy and truth, and the sentence you pass is true and right forever. 3Remember me; turn your look toward me. Do not exact from me the price of my sins, nor of my failures in ignorance, nor of my fathers’ — the sins they committed in your sight. 4They would not listen to your commandments, and so you handed us over to plunder, to captivity and to death, a byword and a taunt among all the nations where we lie scattered. 5And now your judgments are many, and they are true, to be carried out on me for my sins and my fathers’: we did not do what you commanded, and we did not walk in truth before you. 6So now, do with me whatever seems good in your sight. Give the order that my spirit be taken from me, that I may be let go and become earth. Dying serves me better than living, for I have been made to hear lies about myself, and the grief in me is very great. Give the order that I be released from this hardship now, into the place that lasts; and do not turn your face away from me.” 7On that same day it happened that Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, in Ecbatana of Media, was taunted by her father’s maidservants; 8for she had been given to seven husbands, and Asmodeus, the evil demon, had killed each of them before they could be with her as a man is with his wife. They said to her: “Do you not understand? You are the one who chokes your husbands. Seven of them you have had already, and not one of them has brought you any joy. 9Why take it out on us? If they are dead, go after them! May we never see a son or a daughter of yours.” 10Hearing this she was so grieved that she meant to hang herself. But she said: “I am my father’s only child. If I do this it will be his disgrace, and I will bring his old age down to Hades in pain.” 11So she prayed at the window and said: “Blessed are you, Lord my God, and blessed is your name — holy, held in honor through all ages. May every work of yours bless you forever. 12And now, Lord, I have set my eyes and my face toward you. 13Say the word: let me go from this earth, and let me hear reproach no more. 14You know, Lord, that I am clean of every sin with a man, 15and that I have kept my name and my father’s name unstained in the land of my exile. I am my father’s only child; he has no other child to inherit from him, no brother close at hand, no son of his still alive, for whom I should be keeping myself as a wife. Seven are gone from me already. Why should I go on living? And if it is not your will to take my life, then give the order to look on me and show me mercy, so that I need hear no reproach again.”

Raphael Is Sent

16And the prayer of them both was heard before the glory of the great God. 17Raphael was sent to heal the two of them: to peel the white films from Tobit’s eyes, to give Sarah, Raguel’s daughter, as wife to Tobias, Tobit’s son, and to put Asmodeus the evil demon in chains — for the right to inherit her fell to Tobias. At that very moment Tobit turned back into his house, and Raguel’s daughter Sarah came down out of her upper room.