Asmodeus

The Book of Tobit is a Jewish work of roughly the third or second century BC, set among the exiles of the northern tribes at Nineveh. It survives in Greek in more than one recension, and fragments in Aramaic and Hebrew were found at Qumran, so it circulated widely before the Christian era.

The Orthodox Church receives Tobit as Scripture — it is part of the Septuagint, read by the Church from the beginning, and is included in the Orthodox canon. It is not in the Hebrew Bible, and the Protestant Reformers placed it among the Apocrypha. This makes Asmodeus a useful test case for how this database keeps its registers apart: he is named in Scripture as Orthodoxy counts Scripture, and in no book of the narrower canon at all.

The name is generally connected with the Avestan aēšma-daēva, the demon of wrath — a plausible borrowing from Persian religion into the Jewish literature of the exile, though the derivation is not certain and the book itself shows no interest in it.

The Fathers and the Orthodox tradition read Tobit chiefly as a book about providence, almsgiving, marriage and the angelic ministry, and Asmodeus accordingly appears as an obstacle rather than a subject. What he is permitted to do, he does; what he is commanded, he obeys. He flees at a smoke and is bound at a word, and nothing in the narrative suggests he had any power to resist.

The scene is often read against the marriage itself. Tobias and Sarah do not begin their marriage in fear but in prayer — the young man rises and calls Sarah to pray with him, that they may find mercy and grow old together. The Orthodox marriage service does not quote the passage, but the pattern it describes — a marriage entered as a shared petition and defended by God rather than by the couple’s own strength — is the pattern the service assumes.

The fish’s heart and liver are the detail modern readers stumble over. The Fathers took them as they took the clay Christ made for the blind man’s eyes: a material means used at an angel’s direction, with the power in the sender and not in the substance. Tobit is not a book of remedies, and the Church has never treated the passage as a warrant for any practice of that kind. St. John of Damascus’s rule governs here as everywhere — the demons act only within what God permits, and they can suggest but not compel.

Asmodeus has no commemoration of any kind, as no demon does. The people of his story do: Tobit, Tobias and Sarah are all commemorated among the Holy Forefathers, and the Archangel Raphael with the bodiless powers at the Synaxis on November 8.

Tobit is read as Scripture in the Orthodox Church, and its verses on almsgiving and on the angel who carries prayer before the glory of God have entered the tradition’s ordinary language about the angelic ministry. The exorcism prayers of the Church, and the prayers over a troubled person, address Christ; they take no pattern from the smoke in the bridal chamber, which was an instruction given once, by an angel, to one young man.

There is a real Tobit cycle in Christian art — Tobias walking with the angel and the fish, the healing of Tobit’s eyes, and the marriage — and Raphael accompanied by the boy and the fish is one of the standard ways the archangel is recognised in Orthodox iconography.

Asmodeus is not a subject in it. Where the bridal-chamber scene is depicted at all, the demon appears, if he appears, as a small dark fleeing shape at the edge of the composition — haloless, featureless, and leaving. No icon is written of him, and none could be.

Asmodeus had a long career after Tobit, most of it outside the Church’s reception. The Testament of Solomon, a pseudepigraphal work of roughly the first to third century AD, gives him a speaking part and a place in a hierarchy of bound demons; the later rabbinic tradition tells stories of Ashmedai and Solomon; and medieval and early modern Western demonology gave him a rank, a title and a portfolio of vices, none of which has anything to do with the Book of Tobit.

None of that is Orthodox teaching, and this record does not carry it. It is noted only so that a reader who has met the name in that literature can see where the Church’s account stops — which is at the end of Tobit chapter 8.

The book’s own influence has been of a quite different kind. Tobit shaped the Christian language of guardianship and of the angel who bears prayer upward, and gave the tradition one of its very few extended narratives of an angel sent, at a specific prayer, to specific people.

Every other scriptural record in this section carries protocanonical references. This one does not, and the blank is deliberate: no book of the narrower canon names Asmodeus. His whole account is in Tobit.

The Orthodox Church reads Tobit as Scripture — it stands in the Septuagint, was read by the Church from the beginning, and is part of the Orthodox canon. The Hebrew Bible does not contain it, and the Protestant canons place it among the Apocrypha. So whether Asmodeus is “in the Bible” depends entirely on whose Bible, and this database answers by keeping the two columns apart and filling the one that is true.

Tobias burns the fish’s heart and liver at the explicit instruction of an archangel, and the smoke drives the spirit out. The tradition has consistently read this the way it reads the clay and spittle with which Christ anointed the eyes of the man born blind: a material means, appointed by the one who heals, with no power of its own.

It is not a technique, and the Church has never treated it as one. Tobit records what an angel told one young man to do on one night; it does not prescribe. Orthodox practice in these matters is prayer to Christ, made by the priest, in the life of the Church.

The name travelled a long way. The Testament of Solomon gives him speeches and a place among bound demons; rabbinic legend made Ashmedai a king of demons who contended with Solomon; and Western demonology from the later Middle Ages onward assigned him rank, title and a portfolio of particular sins, complete with the lists and hierarchies such books enjoy.

None of it is Orthodox teaching and none of it is in the account. It is mentioned here only to mark the boundary clearly — the Church’s Asmodeus begins at Tobit 3 and ends at Tobit 8, bound in Egypt, and is not heard from again.

• Tobit 3:7–9 (deuterocanonical) — Sarah, the seven husbands, and the naming of Asmodeus — reproached by her father’s maids.
• Tobit 3:16–17 (deuterocanonical) — Both prayers heard in the same hour, and Raphael sent to heal Tobit and to give Sarah to Tobias, and to bind Asmodeus.
• Tobit 6:13–18 (deuterocanonical) — Raphael’s instruction on the road concerning the fish’s heart and liver, and his charge to Tobias not to fear.
• Tobit 8:1–3 (deuterocanonical) — The smoke, the flight of the spirit into the utmost parts of Egypt, and his binding by the angel.
• Testament of Solomon 5 (extra-biblical) — A pseudepigraphal work of c. 1st–3rd c. AD in which Asmodeus speaks at length. Cited as reception history; it carries no authority and the Church does not receive it.

Orthodox teaching is not one undifferentiated body of claims. What Scripture states, what the Church prays, what the Fathers taught, and what later writers explain are distinct registers — this page keeps them apart so you can see what each statement rests on.