I, Tobit, have walked all the days of my life on the paths of truth and righteousness. I performed many charitable works for my kinsmen and my people who had been deported with me to Nineveh, in Assyria. When I lived as a young man in my own country, Israel, the entire tribe of my forefather Naphtali had broken away from the house of David and from Jerusalem. This city had been singled out of all Israel's tribes, so that they all might offer sacrifice in the place where the temple, God's dwelling, had been built and consecrated for all generations to come. All my kinsmen, like the rest of the tribe of my forefather Naphtali, used to offer sacrifice on all the mountains of Galilee as well as to the young bull which Jeroboam, king of Israel, had made in Dan. (Tobit1: 3-5)

Tobit was almost certainly written for a Jerusalem audience five centuries after the events being described. Tobit's tribe, the Naphtali, was one of the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom that separated from Jerusalem in the 930s BC.

The original cause for the division of the united monarchy of David and Solomon was a tax revolt. But the Northern Kingdom soon set out to establish an independent religious tradition. On a high mountain at Dan, in the far north, King Jeroboam of Israel (roughly 930-910 BC) had crafted a Throne of God featuring a gold bull. But over the generations the distinction was lost between honoring the Throne and worshiping the gold bull.

From the perspective of Jerusalem the northern religious tradition became merely idolatrous. It is important to the author that Tobit be born into and surrounded by idolatry. An idolatry that most in Jerusalem perceived resulted in the exile to Nineveh.