‘Perhaps the most extreme misreading of the book of Tobit is Søren Kierkegaard's deliberately “imaginary” reading.’ So claims David McCracken in his stimulating article ‘Narration and Comedy in the Book of Tobit.’ Such a remark throws down a challenge which is hard to resist. It would be fascinating, if unfair, to take this as an incentive to trawl the literature for more extreme misreadings. In any case, to pinpoint definitively the ‘most extreme’ would require us to subject the notion of misreading to more scrutiny that it could perhaps bear. We can more profitably ask what leads McCracken to read Kierkegaard this way and how such disagreements over what constitutes a misreading may illuminate our reading of Tobit.

As the title of his paper indicates, McCracken reads Tobit as a comedy. By contrast, Kierkegaard, or, more accurately, his pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, devotes four pages of Fear and Trembling, his astonishing attempt to work out the consequences of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, to a discussion of the plight of Sarah and writes, ‘I have read about many griefs, but I doubt that there is to be found a grief as profound as the one in this girl's life’ (FT, 102). It is de Silentio's insistence that Sarah is a tragic figure that seems to be at the root of McCracken's accusation of misreading. ‘No reader is likely to be in tears,’ claims McCracken, while reading Sarah's story.