When she returned to me: The Greek indicates that Tobit is indoors, that Anna enters the house, more than simply that she returned. The phrase to me, only vaguely suggested by Good News Translation, may be important. Another way to express this clause is “When Anna came into the house to me with the goat.” Anna comes home proud of her work, happy to be paid, thrilled over the bonus of the young goat, and can hardly wait to share her good fortune with her husband. But when she gets home, before she has a chance to speak, the goat bleats. Then before Anna can explain, or even before her blind husband Tobit is aware of her presence, he assumes the worst.

This interpretation assumes that the subject of the verb returned is Anna. The Greek is ambiguous, and it could be that it is the goat that comes into the house. Some translations (such as New Jerusalem Bible) take it that way, but translators are urged to follow the first interpretation.

The goat began to bleat: In some languages the translation will show the sound that a goat makes; for example, “The goat began to go ‘Baa, baa’ ” or whatever sound a goat is supposed to make in a particular culture.

So I called her … It is surely not stolen, is it?: Tobit “called out” (Good News Translation) to her; being blind, he doesn’t know where she is. The two questions he asks are not requests for information, but accusations. The second question is especially loaded, and in many languages will require a positive statement and a question; for example, “You stole it, didn’t you?” (Good News Translation) or simply a statement “You must have stolen it” (Contemporary English Version). Tobit uses a precise term for “stolen goods”; the question is grammatically framed so as to expect a negative answer; but he clearly expects Anna to lie about it.

Return it to the owners: Good News Translation “Take it straight back to its owners” captures the harsh nature of Tobit’s command, although the Greek achieves rudeness by being clipped and short. There may well be irony in the reference to the goat’s owners, since it is the same word used twice in verse 12 to refer to Anna’s employers, who as the reader knows actually did give her the animal.

We have no right to eat anything stolen closely reflects the Greek’s use of the first person plural here. It is as if Tobit is thinking, “You may be a thief and a liar, but I am not going to get involved in anything wrong.”

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Tobit. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2001. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.