Judith

What Judith is about

A vast army under a general named Holofernes is sweeping through the region, and the small hill town of Bethulia stands in the pass it needs. The town’s water is cut off. After weeks of siege, the elders announce that if God does not deliver them in five days, they will surrender.

Judith — a wealthy, devout, and much-respected widow — summons them and tells them they have no business putting God on a deadline. Then she prays, dresses deliberately, and walks out of the gates with her maid, into the enemy camp. She tells Holofernes what he wants to hear, is welcomed, and waits. On the fourth night, at a banquet where the general has drunk himself insensible, she takes his own sword and beheads him, carries the head back in a food bag, and the army disintegrates.

The book ends with a long hymn of praise, and Judith lives to a great age and frees her maid.

How to read it

Judith opens by calling Nebuchadnezzar the king of the Assyrians reigning at Nineveh, which he was not, and stacks up further impossibilities from there. Ancient readers were unlikely to have missed this. The anomalies have led many interpreters, including many Catholic and Orthodox scholars, to read Judith as a theological narrative told for its meaning rather than as a chronicle. The town of Bethulia has never been located.

The violence in the story is real and shocking, and the book does not soften it. Judith belongs to a strand of Israelite storytelling that runs from Jael in Judges to David and Goliath: a great power is undone by someone it never considered a threat.

Where it sits

Judith is received as scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and is valued but not treated as canonical by Protestants, whose Bibles print it among the Apocrypha when they include it. Its heroine has been a favourite subject of Christian art for centuries.

Why it is worth reading

For the portrait at its centre. Judith is devout, shrewd, articulate, and completely in command of the story — she gives the longest speech in the book and carries out its decisive act — and there is nothing quite like her anywhere else in this literature.