ColossiansOne

household · 2 claims

Marriages Destroyed

Asmodeus kills seven husbands on seven wedding nights, and is driven off by a fish — the most procedural exorcism in scripture.

Attacks on the newly wed

The Book of Tobit gives Sarah seven husbands, each killed by the demon Asmodeus before the marriage is consummated. Raphael, travelling in disguise, tells Tobias exactly what to do: keep the heart and liver of the fish caught in the Tigris, and burn them on the coals in the bridal chamber. The smoke drives the demon into Upper Egypt, where Raphael binds him.

It is an unusually mechanical procedure for a canonical text — an instruction with an ingredient list — and it is the direct ancestor of the Testament of Solomon's format, where every spirit interrogated must name both what it does and the thing that stops it.

Oldest first

Who was blamed, and by which text?

Each card is one text making one attribution, in its own framing. Reading down the column is a transmission history rather than a set of independent witnesses — and where a claim carries a grading, that grading is about how well it is grounded in the passage it cites, nothing more.

Historical depiction of Asmoday

Asmodeus

The Book of Tobit · c. 225–175 BCE

Kills Sarah's seven husbands, each on the wedding night, before the marriage is consummated.

What stops it
The heart and liver of a fish burned on coals; the smoke drives him off, and Raphael binds him in Upper Egypt.

Tobit 3, 6 and 8
Historical depiction of Asmoday

Asmodeus

The Testament of Solomon · c. 100–400 CE

Says his work is to plot against the newly wed so that they do not come together, and to spread madness about women.

What stops it
The angel Raphael, and the smoke of a fish's liver and gall.

Countermeasures

What the texts say stops it

c. 225–175 BCE

The heart and liver of a fish burned on coals; the smoke drives him off, and Raphael binds him in Upper Egypt.

c. 100–400 CE

The angel Raphael, and the smoke of a fish's liver and gall.

Which texts make these claims?

Oldest first. The distance between the earliest and the latest is the thing worth looking at: a claim made in an incantation four thousand years ago and one made in a paperback in 1973 are different kinds of evidence about the same symptom.

All afflictions