Catholic Commentary
Tobias's Fear: The Seven Dead Husbands
13Then the young man said to the angel, “Brother Azarias, I have heard that this maid has been given to seven men, and that they all perished in the bride-chamber.14Now I am the only son of my father, and I am afraid, lest I go in and die, even as those before me. For a demon loves her, which harms no man, but those which come to her. Now I fear lest I die, and bring my father’s and my mother’s life to the grave with sorrow because of me. They have no other son to bury them.”
Tobit 6:13–14 records Tobias confessing to the angel Raphael his fear of marrying Sarah after learning that a demon killed seven previous husbands in the bridal chamber. His anxiety is compounded by filial duty: as his parents' only son, his death would leave them without an heir to perform their burial rites, an unthinkable catastrophe in ancient Near Eastern culture.
Tobias's fear at the bridal chamber is not cowardice but the beginning of wisdom—he knows his own weakness and turns toward grace instead of away from it.
At the typological level, Tobias standing at the threshold of marriage, paralyzed by fear of a demonic power that has corrupted the bridal chamber, images the human condition before redemption: the domain of love itself—the most intimate sphere of human life—has been invaded and disfigured by evil. Sarah's seven dead husbands figure the repeated failures of unredeemed human effort to reclaim what sin has corrupted. Only Tobias, armed with angelic guidance and the means of grace (the fish's heart and liver, Tob 6:7–8), will succeed—not by his own strength but by faithful cooperation with the divine remedy. This pattern anticipates the spousal theology of the New Covenant, wherein Christ the Bridegroom reclaims the Church-Bride from the dominion of the enemy through His own sacrifice (Eph 5:25–27).
Tobias's fear, ultimately, is not faithlessness but the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10): he acknowledges his own insufficiency and turns to his angelic guide. This is the posture of faith itself.
Catholic tradition reads this passage within the Church's rich theology of marriage, spiritual warfare, and angelic intercession—three doctrinal streams that converge here with unusual force.
Marriage under Demonic Attack. The Catechism teaches that "the whole of man's history has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil" (CCC 409), and that this combat touches marriage in a particular way because matrimony is a sacramental image of the union between Christ and the Church (CCC 1601–1617). The bridal chamber invaded by Asmodeus is an icon of what sin and demonic agency do to the conjugal covenant: they seek to unravel the very fabric of communio that reflects the Trinitarian life. Pope St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body speaks of the "ethos of redemption" restoring the spousal meaning of the body (TOB 49); Tobias's story dramatizes exactly the moment before that redemption becomes operative.
Angelic Protection. The Church has always taught that God assigns guardian angels to accompany his people (CCC 336). Raphael's disguised presence beside Tobias in his moment of maximum vulnerability is a parabolic enactment of this truth. St. Basil the Great (On the Holy Spirit 13) reflects that the angel is not a substitute for human courage but its enabler. Tobias's willingness to voice his fear to Raphael—to pray, in effect, through the medium of relationship—opens the channel through which grace will flow.
Filial Piety as Moral Virtue. Tobias's concern for his parents' grief is praised implicitly by the narrative structure itself. St. Thomas Aquinas (ST II-II, q. 101) treats piety toward parents as a participation in the virtue of justice; Tobias exemplifies this even in his fear. His anxiety is not selfish but other-directed—a mark of genuine virtue even amid weakness.
Contemporary Catholics encounter this passage at a moment when the institutions of marriage and family are under pressures no less real—if differently named—than Asmodeus. The demonic, in Catholic understanding, is not merely mythological; it is an active and cunning intelligence that targets human love precisely because love is the image of God most legible in creation.
Tobias's response to fear offers a concrete model: he does not run from the danger, nor does he pretend it does not exist. He names it honestly to a trusted companion walking beside him. For Catholics today, this companion is preeminently Christ in the sacraments, but also the Church—spiritual directors, confessors, a faithful community—through whom angelic and divine guidance reaches us. The young man or woman discerning marriage is right to feel the weight of the covenant: Tobias's fear is not a defect but an accurate spiritual perception of what is at stake.
Practically: pray for your future or current spouse by name. Invoke the intercession of St. Raphael, the Church's patron of marriage preparation. Bring your fears—about fidelity, suffering, death, abandonment—honestly before God in prayer. The demon's power is real, but so is the remedy the angel carries.
Commentary
Tobit 6:13 — The Weight of the Report
Tobias addresses Raphael as "Brother Azarias," the human name under which the archangel travels incognito (cf. Tob 5:13). This familial address is significant: the angel has become a trusted companion and confidant, and it is precisely within this intimate relationship of trust that Tobias voices what he has heard. The report about seven dead husbands is not rumor but established fact within the story world of the book (cf. Tob 3:8). The Greek parthenos ("maid") used in the Septuagint underscores Sarah's intact virginity despite these seven marriages—a detail the narrative preserves carefully, as it bears on the spiritual purity associated with her person and her ultimate vocation.
The number seven carries profound symbolic weight in biblical literature (completeness, fullness, divine order), yet here it appears under inversion: seven attempts at marriage have ended not in life but in death, as if the created order of matrimony has been grotesquely corrupted by demonic agency. The "bride-chamber" (nymphōn) is not merely a physical space but a symbol of the marital covenant itself—the place where two become one flesh (Gen 2:24) has become a site of destruction.
Tobit 6:14 — Fear as Filial Love
Tobias's admission of fear is candid and disarmingly human. He is, he reminds Raphael, "the only son of my father"—a detail rich with thematic resonance in a book already preoccupied with burial of the dead, continuity of lineage, and faithfulness across generations (cf. Tob 1:9; 4:3–4). His fear is layered: he fears his own death, but more acutely he fears the grief that his death would inflict upon Tobit and Anna. To die childless before one's parents, leaving them no one to close their eyes and bury them, was in the ancient Near Eastern world an almost unspeakable catastrophe—a dissolution of the covenantal family chain stretching from Abraham forward.
The description of Asmodeus as a demon who "loves her" but "harms no man" except those who "come to her" is theologically precise. The text does not present Asmodeus as omnipotently malevolent but as specifically predatory upon the marital union—he is a counterfeit lover, a perversion of eros, who destroys rather than unifies. The Aramaic name Asmodeus is linked etymologically by many scholars to the Hebrew shamed (destruction) or the Avestan Aēšma-daēva (the demon of wrath). Either way, he represents disordered desire weaponized: a hellish inversion of the love that marriage is meant to embody.