In the late seventh century b.c., a dying man instructs his son to pack their household goods and flee. The air in the Assyrian capital sits heavy with impending collapse. A blind elder lays on his deathbed. His body remains worn out from decades of forced labor and political exile. Deep physical exhaustion fills the room as he speaks his final warnings. The family prepares for a grueling trek across the Zagros Mountains into Media. Consolation arrives only in the promise from the Most High that his protection will outlast the thick stone walls of their captors.
Tobit breathes his last at one hundred and twelve years old. He commands his son Tobias to take his children and leave Nineveh immediately. The Assyrian empire faces absolute annihilation by Median forces. Remaining in the city among the Gentile idolaters means certain death. Tobias buries his father in the rocky soil. He later buries his mother in the same earth. He then gathers his inherited silver—worth decades of a laborer's wages—and moves his family to Ecbatana. The basic law of survival dictates fleeing a condemned empire before the siege engines arrive.
The freshly dug burial plots mark the definitive end of a long captivity. Leaving behind familiar stone streets and sealed tombs requires a brutal calculation of survival over sentimentality. Men do not abandon the graves of their fathers unless the approaching armies guarantee their own slaughter.
A wise builder moves his foundation before the walls collapse.
Nineveh burned to ash in 612 b.c. under the Median army. The exiles who fled into the high mountain passes survived among Gentile populations to hear the news of its permanent destruction.