3. All my life I have been honest and have tried to do what was right. I have often given money to help needy relatives and fellow-Jews who were deported with me to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria.
4. When I was young, I lived in northern Israel. All the tribes in Israel were supposed to offer sacrifices in Jerusalem. It was the one city that God had chosen from among all the Israelite cities as the place where his Temple was to be built for his holy and eternal home. But my entire tribe of Naphtali rejected the city of Jerusalem and the kings descended from David.
5. Like everyone else in this tribe, my own family used to go to the city of Dan in the mountains of northern Galilee to offer sacrifices to the gold bull-calf which King Jeroboam of Israel had set up there.
6. I was the only one in my family who regularly went to Jerusalem to celebrate the religious festivals, as the Law of Moses commands everyone to do. I would hurry off to Jerusalem with the first part of my harvest, the firstborn of my animals, a tenth of my cattle, and the freshly clipped wool from my sheep. Then I would stand before the altar in the Temple, and give these offerings to the priests, the descendants of Aaron.
7. I would give a tenth of my grain, wine, olive-oil, pomegranates, figs and other fruits to the Levites who served God in Jerusalem. Every year, except the seventh year when the land was at rest, I would sell a second tenth of my possessions and spend the money in Jerusalem on the festival meal.
8. But every third year, I would give a third tithe to widows and orphans and to foreigners living among my people, and we would eat the festival meal together. I did this in keeping with the Law of Moses, which Deborah, the mother of my grandfather Ananiel, had taught me to obey. (I had been left an orphan when my father died.)
9. When I grew up, I married Anna, a member of my own tribe. We had a son and named him Tobias.
10. Later, I was taken captive and deported to Assyria, and that is how I came to live in Nineveh.While we lived in Nineveh, all my relatives and fellow-Jews used to eat the same kind of food as the other people who lived there,
11. but I refused to do so.
12. Since I took seriously the commands of the Most High God,
13. he made Emperor Shalmaneser respect me, and I was placed in charge of purchasing all the emperor's supplies.
14. Before the emperor died, I made regular visits to the land of Media to buy things for him there. Once, when I was in the city of Rages in Media, I left some bags of money there with Gabael, Gabrias' brother, and asked him to keep them for me. There were more than 300 kilogrammes of silver coins in those bags.