Given that in Matins Tobit is being read currently, I'll post some legends regarding Tobias, from the Legendes de L'Ancien Testament of De Plancy, if anyone's interested:
XLV. — TOBIAH.
The Arabs place Tobiah among the ranks of the prophets. However, they confined themselves to translating his beautiful and touching story. It is known that, the young Tobiah's fumigations having repelled the demon Asmodeus who possessed his pious fiancée, Sarah, the Angel Raphael took this demon and went to chain him up in the desert of Upper Egypt. Paul Lucas, one of our most marvelous travelers, says he still saw him in that region. He was mocked for this. However, you might have read, about twenty years ago, in the Courrier de l'Égypte, that the inhabitants of the extremities of Egypt still worship the serpent Asmodeus, who has a temple in the desert of Ryanneh. Neighboring tribes even believe that this serpent can be cut into pieces and that a moment later no trace of it remains. They maintain that this is the ancient serpent that pursued Eve.
Some rabbis declare that Asmodeus is the same as Samael, who is the same as Satan. Through this, he would be the chief of the demons.
They also say that it was he who, having stolen Solomon's ring, took his likeness and reigned in his place for a certain time; but that Solomon, upon recovering the ring that gave him his power, chained him up and forced him to work alongside other demons on the construction of the Temple.
Wierus, in his Pseudo-monarchy of Satan, asserts that Asmodeus, in whom he sees one of the highest figures of hell, is in his natural state a monster adorned with three heads, namely: a bull's head, a ram's head, and a man's head, all set upon the body of a serpent; he walks, rather than crawls, on large goose feet, and is not easy to approach due to his fiery breath.
Tobiah was held captive under Sennacherib, whom the Arabs call Senascheriva and Senharib, and whom they make king of Mosul (Nineveh), and who is that king or viceroy of Assyria whose army was defeated by the Exterminating Angel under King Hezekiah. He was killed by his two sons in the city of Nineveh. He was descended, they say, from Esau.
Khwandamir reports that in the year 18 of the Hijra (640 AD), under the caliphate of Umar, during the conquest of Syria by a Muslim, the body of Sennacherib was found in an underground sepulcher, seated on a golden throne, with an inscription that reproached the living for forgetting what tombs nonetheless remind them of: namely, death, and the account it forces them to render to God.
Topic: Favorite legends? (Read 31 times)