Anonymous · 200 BCE · overland

The Book of Tobit, in Catholic and Orthodox bibles and the Apocrypha elsewhere. A blind exile in Nineveh sends his son east to collect a debt, and the guide who turns up at the door is the archangel Raphael in disguise. There is a fish, a demon, a marriage and a cure, and nobody in the story knows who the guide is until the end.

1. 1
   Nineveh

   Tobit is a deportee from Naphtali who buries the dead the king throws out, and goes blind from sparrow droppings in his own courtyard - and prays to die on the same day as a woman he has never met.

2. 2
   Ecbatana

   In Media, Sarah has had seven husbands killed on the wedding night by the demon Asmodeus, and is taunted by her own maids for it - and Tobias arrives, and does what Raphael has told him to do with the fish's heart and liver.

3. 3
   Rages

   The debt is at Rages, further east near what is now Tehran, and Raphael goes to collect it while the wedding feast runs its fourteen days - the errand that started the whole journey, dealt with almost in passing.

4. 4
   Nineveh

   They come home with a wife, a dog and the fish's gall, and Tobit's sight is restored - and the guide tells them who he is and vanishes, which is when everyone falls on their faces.