CHAPTER 2
1 Forsooth after these things, when a feast day of the Lord was, and a good meat was made in the house of Tobit, he said to his son,
2 Go thou, and bring some men of our lineage, that dread God, that they eat with us.
3 And when he, young Tobias, was gone forth, he turned again, and told to his father, that one of the sons of Israel lay strangled in the street; and anon Tobit rose up from his sitting place, and left the meat, and came fasting to the body;
4 and he took it, and bare it to his house privily, for to bury him warily [or slyly], when the sun was gone down.
5 And when he had hid the body, he ate bread with mourning and trembling,
6 and remembered the word, which the Lord said by Amos, the prophet, Your feast days shall be turned into mourning and lamentation, either wailing, [or into wailing and sorrowing].
7 And when the sun was gone down, Tobit went, and buried him.
8 Forsooth all his neighbours blamed [or reproved] him, and said, Now for the cause [or because] of this thing thou were commanded to be slain, and scarcely thou hast escaped the behest [or the commandment] of death, and again thou buriest dead men?
9 But Tobit dreaded more God than the king, and he took away the bodies of slain men, and hid them in his house, and buried those in the middle of nights [or in the midnights he buried them].
10 And it befelled, that in a day Tobit was made weary of burying dead bodies; and he came home, and laid himself beside a wall, and slept there;
11 and while he slept, hot turds, or drit, fell down from the nest of swallows upon his eyes; and he was made blind.
12 And therefore the Lord suffered this temptation to befall to him, that the ensample of his patience should be given to after-comers, as also it is of holy Job.
13 For why when Tobit dreaded God ever[more] from his young childhood, and kept his commandments, he was not sorry, or heavy, or grutching against God, for that the sickness of blindness came to him;
14 but he dwelled unmovable in the dread of God, and did thankings to God in all the days of his life.
15 For why as kings upbraided saint or blessed Job, so it befelled to this Tobit, that his elders and kinsmen scorned his life, and said,
16 Where is thine hope*, for which thou didest alms-deeds and buryings?
17 And Tobit blamed them, and said,
18 Do not ye speak so, for we be the sons of holy men, and we abide that life, which God shall give to them that change never their faith from him.
19 And Anna, his wife, went each day to the work of weaving, and she brought home the livelode [or the lifelode] which she might get of the travail of her hands.
20 Whereof it befell, that she took a kid of goats, for her weaving, and she brought it home.
21 And when her husband had heard the voice of this kid bleating, he said, Look ye, lest peradventure this kid be gotten of theft [or it be stolen], but if it so be yield ye it again to his lords; for it is not leaveful, either to eat either to touch anything of theft.
22 At these words the wife of Tobit was wroth, and answered, Now is openly thine hope made vain, and thine alms-deeds have appeared, that is, feigned and void, as done for hypocrisy.
23 And by these and other such words she said shame [or put reproof] to him.
* CHAPTER 2:16 These believed the rewarding of good and of evil is only in present life, as the friends of Job did.