Catholic Commentary
Tobit and Anna's Anguish Over Tobias's Delay
1Tobit his father counted every day. When the days of the journey were expired, and they didn’t come,2he said, “Is he perchance detained? Or is Gabael perchance dead, and there is no one to give him the money?”3He was very grieved.4But his wife said to him, “The child has perished, seeing he waits long.” She began to bewail him, and said,5“I care about nothing, my child, since I have let you go, the light of my eyes.”6Tobit said to her, “Hold your peace. Don’t worry. He is in good health.”7And she said to him, “Hold your peace. Don’t deceive me. My child has perished.” And she went out every day into the way by which they went, and ate no bread in the day-time, and didn’t stop bewailing her son Tobias for whole nights, until the fourteen days of the wedding feast were expired, which Raguel had sworn that he should spend there. Then Tobias said to Raguel, “Send me away, for my father and my mother look no more to see me.”
Tobit 10:1–7 describes Tobit and Anna's anguished wait for their son Tobias, who has delayed beyond the expected return date from his journey. While Tobit rationalizes the delay with hopeful explanations, Anna grieves inconsolably and keeps vigil by fasting and weeping, unaware that Tobias is joyfully celebrating his wedding feast at Raguel's house.
When joy is hidden from those who wait, grief and faith both become forms of prayer—and waiting itself becomes an act of love.
Commentary
Tobit 10:1 — The Counting of Days The chapter opens with Tobit performing a quietly agonizing act: counting every day. The Greek verb used implies not a casual awareness but an active, anxious tallying—the behavior of someone whose whole attention has narrowed to a single hope. Tobit had sent his son on a dangerous journey to Rages in Media to collect a debt from Gabael (Tob 4–5), and he calculated the expected duration of the trip. That the days have "expired" without return is not merely an inconvenience; it triggers a crisis of paternal faith. The narrative tension is carefully constructed: the reader, following Tobias through the preceding chapters, knows the joyful reason for the delay (the wedding feast at Raguel's house, Tob 9:6), but Tobit does not. This dramatic irony transforms the parents' suffering into something almost liturgical — they grieve for what is, in fact, a joy they cannot yet see.
Tobit 10:2 — Tobit's Rationalizations Tobit's mind moves through two logical hypotheses: either Tobias has been detained (a hopeful reading), or Gabael has died and the transaction has become impossible. Neither hypothesis considers Tobias's death directly; Tobit cannot yet bring himself there. This protective instinct of paternal love — generating explanations that preserve hope — is deeply human. Yet the text notes that even these rationalizations fail to comfort him: "He was very grieved" (v. 3). The grief is not masked by the reasoning; it only underlies it.
Verses 4–5 — Anna's Inconsolable Mourning Anna's response is strikingly different in kind. While Tobit rationalizes, Anna moves immediately to the worst conclusion: "The child has perished." Her declaration is not pessimism but the raw logic of a mother's love, which cannot endure suspense and reaches instinctively for the worst in order to begin mourning. Her lament in Tobit 10:5 — "I care about nothing, my child, since I have let you go, the light of my eyes" — is one of the most emotionally precise lines in the deuterocanonical books. The phrase "light of my eyes" echoes the blindness of Tobit himself (Tob 2:10); Tobias has been, figuratively, his parents' sight and hope in their darkness. Anna's grief is not merely emotional; it is existential. She has let go of what gave her world its light.
Tobit 10:6 — Tobit's Rebuke and Its Fragility Tobit urges Anna to "hold your peace" and insists their son is "in good health." This is faith asserting itself against evidence — an act of will, not a calm confidence. Commentators from Origen onward note that Tobit's insistence reads less as certainty and more as a prayer spoken aloud, a refusal to surrender to despair even as he is "very grieved." His faith is real but strained; his reassurance to Anna is also, implicitly, a reassurance to himself.
Tobit 10:7 — Anna's Vigil Anna's rejection of Tobit's comfort — "Hold your peace. Don't deceive me" — is not faithlessness but honest grief. The verse's spiritual climax is her vigil: going out every day to watch the road by which Tobias departed, eating no bread by day, weeping through entire nights. This is the posture of one who has made her grief into a form of waiting — a mourning that is also, paradoxically, a watching. The detail that she kept this vigil "until the fourteen days of the wedding feast were expired" is narratively brilliant: the reader knows that Tobias has been feasting and celebrating in joy while his mother has been fasting and weeping in anguish. The typological resonance is powerful — the joy hidden from those who wait, revealed only at the proper time.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition reads the Book of Tobit as a text saturated with typological significance, and this passage is no exception. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the Old Testament is not merely history but a pedagogy — a preparation through which God educates his people in trust, prayer, and hope (CCC 122). Tobit and Anna embody precisely this pedagogy.
Anna's vigil — watching the road, fasting, weeping through the night — is structurally identical to the biblical pattern of watchful prayer that reaches its fullness in the Church's liturgy of Holy Saturday, the vigil of the Resurrection. St. Ambrose, in De Officiis, cites maternal grief of this kind as an image of the Church itself mourning over lost or endangered souls with a love that refuses to abandon hope. Anna watching the road is the Church watching for her Lord's return.
Tobit's rationalizing faith — imperfect, strained, yet resistant to despair — exemplifies what the Catechism calls the "dark night" of faith: "Faith involves an assent of the intellect and will to the revelation God has made of himself through his deeds and words" (CCC 176). Tobit cannot see God's purpose; he can only refuse to deny it. This is the "hope against hope" of Romans 4:18.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (§37–40), writes that suffering endured in waiting love is itself a purgative and redemptive act when united to God's will. Anna's sleepless nights and her refusal of food are involuntary asceticism — suffering she did not choose but which the narrative consecrates as holy vigil.
The dramatic irony of the passage — joy hidden behind apparent tragedy — prefigures the Paschal Mystery, in which the disciples mourned a death that was already, unknown to them, the threshold of Resurrection.
For Today
Contemporary Catholics live in a culture that pathologizes uncertainty and offers endless technological means of dissolving it — real-time tracking, instant communication, 24-hour news. Tobit and Anna had none of these, and their anguish is the anguish of genuine unknowing. This passage invites the modern Catholic to reflect on what it means to wait without data, to love without confirmation.
Anna's vigil is a model for intercessory prayer in its most costly form: she does not merely petition God and move on; she stations herself in grief as an act of solidarity with the one she loves and cannot reach. Parents of children who have left the faith, spouses of those who are ill or absent, anyone who loves someone beyond their reach — Anna is their patron.
Tobit's response offers its own lesson: do not perform a peace you do not feel, but do not surrender your trust either. His "he is in good health" is a creed spoken under duress, which is precisely when creeds matter most. Catholics are called not to toxic positivity but to a hope anchored not in evidence but in God's fidelity — a distinction worth recovering in an age of both cheap optimism and easy despair.
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