Book of Judith

The book falls in two halves. The first seven chapters are the threat: a great king sends his general Holofernes west with an enormous army to punish the nations that refused him troops, and city after city surrenders. Only the Jews, lately returned from exile and with the Temple restored, refuse, and fortify the passes. Holofernes asks who they are; the Ammonite Achior tells him the truth, that this people cannot be beaten unless they sin against their God, and is tied up outside the town of Bethulia for saying it. The siege takes the springs, and after thirty-four days the elders agree to surrender in five days if God has not acted.

Judith appears only then, in chapter eight, and immediately rebukes the elders for setting God a deadline. She prays, takes off her widow's clothes, dresses to be looked at, and walks out with a maid and a bag of her own permitted food. In the camp she flatters Holofernes with a prophecy that his victory is assured because the Jews are about to break their law, establishes a nightly habit of leaving the camp to pray, and on the fourth night, alone with him in his tent after a banquet at which he has drunk more than on any day of his life, takes down his own sword and beheads him with two strokes.

She walks out past the guards as usual and is back in Bethulia before dawn with the head. Achior, shown it, converts and is circumcised. The Israelites sortie at first light, the Assyrians find their commander decapitated and rout, and Judith sings a victory hymn, refuses every offer of marriage, frees her maid and dies at 105.

The opening verse says that Nebuchadnezzar reigned over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh. He did not. He was king of Babylon, and Nineveh had been destroyed by an alliance including his own father some years before his accession. The errors compound: the Jews in the story have returned from an exile Nebuchadnezzar has not yet imposed and have rebuilt a Temple he has not yet destroyed; the line of march given for Holofernes is impossible as a route; the central town of Bethulia is unknown and its name looks constructed; the names of several commanders are Persian and belong to a later empire altogether.

These are not the slips of a badly informed historian, because a Jewish writer of any period could be relied on to know who burned the Temple. The dominant scholarly reading is that they are deliberate, the author signalling at the outset that this is a parable about the archetypal gentile tyrant rather than a chronicle, much as the book of Jonah plants a Nineveh of impossible size. On that reading the impossibilities are a genre marker, and testing the story against the Assyrian record misunderstands what kind of book it is.

Composition is usually placed in the Hasmonean period, in the second or early first century BCE, on the strength of its theology, its zeal for the law and for circumcision, its Persian and Greek vocabulary, and its interest in a Jewish polity defending itself successfully. The Greek is thick with Hebraisms and Jerome refers to a Semitic version; the consensus is a lost Hebrew original translated into Greek, though the Greek is the only continuous ancient text there is. Jerome's Latin, made hastily from an Aramaic text, is shorter and differs throughout.

Judith is not in the Tanakh and no ancient Hebrew text of it survives, which is a striking pair of facts given how thoroughly Jewish the book is. It kept a place in Jewish memory by another route. Medieval Hebrew retellings circulated, in several of which Nebuchadnezzar is replaced by Antiochus and the setting moved openly to the Maccabean revolt, and these became attached to Hanukkah: read in some communities on the Sabbath of the festival, and cited as a reason for the custom of eating dairy at Hanukkah, since in those retellings Judith feeds the general salty cheese to make him drink.

In Christian use the book came through the Septuagint and was cited early; Clement of Rome holds Judith up as an example of courage within a century of the Gospels. The Council of Trent defined it as canonical in 1546, and the Orthodox churches receive it. The reformers placed it in the Apocrypha, where the King James translators printed it and from where later Protestant Bibles generally dropped it, so that most English-speaking Protestants now encounter the story only through art.

That afterlife dwarfs its canonical standing. Donatello's bronze Judith and Holofernes was set up in Florence as a republican emblem against tyranny. Botticelli, Mantegna, Cranach, Caravaggio, Rubens and Klimt all took the subject up, and Artemisia Gentileschi painted the beheading twice, with a physical directness, two women pinning a struggling man and working the blade, that has kept the pictures in argument ever since. The image of the woman with the sword and the severed head is far better known than the text that produced it.