Significance
The book is also closely related to Jewish wisdom literature; nowhere is this more clear than in Tobit's instructions to Tobias before his departure for Media in chapter 4. The value of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving is particularly praised in this instruction; in the Latin rite, readings from this section are often used in the liturgy. Because of the book's praise for the purity of marriage, it is often read during weddings in many rites.
Doctrinally, the book is cited for its teaching on the intercession of angels, filial piety, and reverence for the dead.
The Sadducees' challenge to Jesus of the example of the woman that had seven husbands serially (e.g., Mark 12:20-22) may have been an allusion to this book’s story, with Tobit’s righteous son Tobias as Sarah’s ultimate husband. Note that Sarah's childlessness is allusive to that of her namesake Sarah, the wife of Abraham.
Read more about this topic: Book Of Tobit
Famous quotes containing the word significance:
“The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)