La sfida di Anna (Tb 2,11–14)

In Tb 1,11–14 the words that Hannah says to her husband resemble those of Job’s wife (Job 2,9). That of Hannah is the defiance of a lively faith, attentive to people and to the situations of life, more that in complying with the law, in the rites and works of justice. This was the primitive sense of her words; in fact, the author of Tobit constructed her portrait on the original archetype of Job’s wife, that can be seen in Old Greek (OG) and in his addiction in v. 9a–e, by contaminating them. A reworking of Hannah’s image is totally positive in vv. 11–13: there it’s reinterpreted in the light of the new portrait of Job’s wife, reworked with misogynist accents by Jewish tradition and incorporated in the MT and in the ecclesiastical Greek of the LXX, where her words, rather than an exhortation, they are a curse against Yhwh, responsible for Job’s suffering.