A look into this period would be incomplete without reference to one of the apochryphal or deutero-canonical books of the Old Testament, highly prized by the Jews as containing a picture of pious home life among the Jews in the captivity. A devout Jew, as the story goes, with his wife Anna and his son Tobias were among those whom Shalmaneser, King of Assyria, had taken captive from the land of Israel and placed in the city of Nineveh when Samaria fell about B. C. 722. Loyal to his religion, Tobit, even in exile, refused to eat the bread of the Gentiles; but by dint of hard work and fidelity he at length became purveyor to the king. By the revolving wheel of fortune, Tobit is at length reduced to poverty. Here Anna his wife, with devoted womanly faithfulness, comes to the rescue with her skilful fingers, weaving and spinning for a livelihood; for her husband was now both poor and blind. One day Anna, wearied and provoked, reproaches her husband for his blindness--such calamities were esteemed a divine curse in Israel, whereupon Tobit prayed that he might die. On the self-same day, a young Jewess, Sara, daughter of Raguel, a captive in Ecbatana of Media, was offering up a similar prayer that the end of her life might come. For her father's maid had charged her with killing her seven husbands, who had died one after another, each on the very first night of the wedding feast, though the strange deaths had been the work of Asmodeus, the evil spirit, who was not willing that the maiden should wed. Now these two widely separated and unrelated prayers were to be brought together into one romantic story by the help of an angel, who becomes a guide to the son of Tobit, young Tobias, who is about to start out in life in quest of a fortune. The angel guides him to Ecbatana, bids him make the eighth to offer marriage to Sara, whose seven husbands had perished on the nuptial night. Though Tobias had never seen the young woman before, he was to her the next of living kin and so should be (according to the Mosaic law) the one to offer his hand to the youthful, much-married widow. Would the young Tobias prove strong enough bravely to face the record of the seven deaths? The angel here comes to the rescue, and calls Tobias's attention to the heart and liver of a great fish which had been caught in the Euphrates as the two had journeyed together from Nineveh to Ecbatana. These, burned with perfumes in the bridal chamber, drove the evil spirit Asmodeus away, and the marriage festivities went on merrily. The life of Tobias had been saved. He takes his newly wedded wife back to his father's house in joy and triumph, cures his father's blindness by the same magic charm which had saved his own life in the bridal chamber, and peace and wealth and long life follow in rich profusion.