Books Jesus Read

114

Books Jesus Read

Sarah and Her Trials Now on that same day, far away in Ecbatana of Media, a young woman named Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, was also praying for death, for she had no children. 7 Moreover, the maid servants in her father’s house cruelly teased Sarah. Though she had been married to seven husbands, every one of them died at the hands of the evil spirit, Asmodeus, before she could conceive a child. “How many men have you had, and still you are not pregnant?” quipped the maids. “And how did all those men truly die? Did you not strangle them? And now that they are dead, you beat us! Why not follow after them? May we never see the day you bear a son or daughter!” Sarah was so miserable she thought about killing herself. “No,” she decided, “that would bring more dishonor upon my father than my remaining childless.” Then Sarah prayed, “Blessed are you, O Lord my God, and blessed is your glorious and holy name forever. May all your works praise you. Now, I lay my supplication before you, O Lord, asking you to take me from this world, that I may no longer have to bear with their mocking. You know, O Lord, I have never sinned with any man. Neither have I tarnished my name nor the name of my father in the land of our captivity. I am my father’s only child, and he has no son and no near kinsman whom I could marry. My seven husbands have all died, so why should I live? Have pity upon me,

7 Sarah is modeled after the biblical Sarah (Gen 12:14), Rebekah (Gen 24:16), and Rachel (Gen 29:17). As Irene Nowell explains, “Like them, she is childless and her situation seems beyond hope” (“The Book of Tobit: An Ancestral Story,” in Intertextual Studies in Ben Sira and Tobit: Essays in Honor of Alexander A. Di Lella, O.F.M ., CBQ 38, [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005], 6–8).