In this paper, I explore the scenes of departure from and return to family and household in the Book of Tobit (5:17-6:1, 7:1-9, 10:7-13, 11:5-16). I argue that scenes in which Tobias and Sara depart from or arrive at household environments bear ritualistic significance, because these narrative moments of separation from and reunion with family are central to how the social realities of kinship are affirmed, protected, and reconfigured within the Book of Tobit’s story world. These scenes depict prayers, blessings, feasts, and other acts of hospitality, all of which are intended to either safeguard the traveller in the liminal zone between the points of departure and arrival, or to bring them back from such liminality into the social realms of city and household. A ritually informed reading of these passages illuminates the imbrication of themes and plot in the Book of Tobit, for these scenes place characters within imagined communities and geographies, connecting ideas of near/far, safe/dangerous, known/unknown, even as travel displaces the characters and repositions them within social and spatial locations. The Book of Tobit is a particularly interesting case study, for travel in this story is also symbolic of the transition from youth to maturity. For Tobias, the risks of travel thus intersect with the dangers of childhood and the uncertainty of attaining adulthood in antiquity; for Sara, these uncertainties also include the liminality of marriage, and resulting risks of pregnancy and labour. In attending to moments of rupture and return in Tobias and Sara’s journeys between Nineveh and Ecbatana in Media, I place their story within real and imagined travel in the Second Temple period, in addition to considering how travel and its associated rituals can function as metaphors for change in familial structures.