TOBIT'S BLINDNESS AND SARA'S HYSTERIA. 



By PAUL HAUPT. 

 (Read April 23, igsi.) 



In the apocryphal book of Tobit, which seems to have been 

 written by a Persian Jew for the encouragement of his coreligionists 

 in Palestine at the beginning of the Maccabean rebellion about b.c. 

 167, we read that Tobit's son, Tobias, cured his father's blindness 

 with the gall of a fish he had caught in the Tigris, while the liver 

 and the heart of that fish, burned on embers of incense, expelled the 

 demon Asmodeus who had tormented Tobias's bride, Sara, for 

 years. This demoniacal possession may have been hystero-epilepsy : 

 hysterics and epileptics were supposed to be possessed by demons 

 (cf. Mark 9, 17-26). 



The " New Standard Dictionary" says that in Lesage's opera( !) 

 " Le Diable Boiteux " Asmodeus is the name of the demon who 

 conducts Don Cleofas in his nightly adventures. In this satirical 

 novel, which appeared in 1707, Asmodeus is identified with the 

 capricious god of sexual passion, Cupid, and his lameness is said to 

 be due to the fact that he had an encounter in France with the 

 demon of selfishness, Pillardoc. The fight was fought in the aerial 

 regions, and Asmodeus was hurled to earth. Cupido is a personi- 

 fication of desire, passion, concupiscence which is symbolized in the 

 Biblical story of the Fall of Man by the Serpent (PAPS 50, 505).^ 



1 AAJ = Haupt, " The Aryan Ancestry of Jesus " (Chicago. loog) = The 

 Open Court, vol. 23, pp. 193-209. — A'^'P =^ American Journal of Philology. — 

 A.]Sl^ = American Journal of Semitic Languages. — ASKT = Haupt, " Ak- 

 kadische und Sumerische Keilschrifttexte." — BA = " Beitriige zur Assyrio- 

 logie." — AV^Authorized Version. — BK = Brockhaus's " Konversations-Lexi- 

 kon, Neue revidierte Jubilaums-Ausgabe." — BL = Haupt, " Biblische Liebes- 

 lieder " (1907). — BT^ Lazarus Goldschmidt, " Der babylonische Talmud." — 

 CD = Century Dictionary. — DB =: Hastings, " Dictionary of the Bible." — EB 

 ^ Cheyne-Black, "Encyclopaedia Biblica." — EB^i = " Encyclopaedia Britan- 

 nica," eleventh edition. — ET = Expository Times. — GJV = Schiirer, " Ge- 

 schichte des jiidischen Volkes." — JAOS = Journal of the American Oriental 



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