Judith: By the Hand of a Woman

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish writer, probably in Hebrew. Only Greek, Latin and later versions survive.

When: Probably the late 100s or early 00s BC, in the years after the Maccabees won back the Temple.

Where it fits: It is set in no real time. Its first line makes Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon the king of Assyria in Nineveh, a city destroyed before he took the throne. The book is a story told against the empires.

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Protestant Bibles moved it to the Apocrypha, and most later dropped it.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Nowhere quoted. It echoes Jael, who killed an enemy general in her tent (Judges 4–5), and Judith is praised as blessed … above all the women upon the earth (Judith 13:18), as Jael was and as Mary would be (Luke 1:42).

How close it stays to me: Close on the God of the weak and on the welcomed outsider. Far in winning by deceit and the sword.

If you only read three chapters: Judith 8, Judith 9 and Judith 13.

Words to Know

Holofernes — the general of Nebuchadnezzar’s army in this story.

Bethulia — the town Holofernes besieges. No town of that name is known. It may be a made-up name, perhaps from the Hebrew for house of God or for virgin.

Achior — a leader of the Ammonites who warns Holofernes not to attack Israel, and later joins Israel.

Judith — her name means Jewish woman, or woman of Judah.

The Book in Brief

In chapters 1 to 3 Nebuchadnezzar, ruling from Nineveh, defeats a king of the Medes and then sends his general Holofernes with a vast army to punish every western nation that refused to help him. City after city surrenders.

In chapters 4 to 7 the Israelites decide to resist. In Holofernes’ camp, Achior, the leader of the Ammonites, tells him the history of Israel and warns him that if this people has not sinned against its God, its God will defend it. Holofernes is furious and hands Achior over to the Israelites of Bethulia, a hill town guarding the way to Jerusalem. Then he besieges Bethulia and cuts off its water. After thirty-four days, the people beg their leaders to surrender, and the leaders promise to give in if God does not save them within five days.

In chapters 8 and 9 Judith, a rich, devout widow, rebukes the leaders for putting God on a deadline, and prays.

In chapters 10 to 13 she takes off her widow’s clothes, dresses in her finest, and walks with her maid into the enemy camp, where she tells Holofernes she has come to help him. On the fourth night he holds a banquet, drinks himself unconscious, and is left alone with her. She cuts off his head with his own sword, puts it in her food bag, and walks back to Bethulia.

In chapters 14 to 16 Achior believes in the God of Israel and is circumcised. The Assyrians find their general dead and flee, and Israel plunders their camp. Judith leads the women in a song of victory, lives on as a widow to a hundred and five, frees her maid, and dies honored.

In the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who reigned over the Assyrians in Nineveh, the great city (Judith 1:1).

Every Jewish child knew who Nebuchadnezzar was. He was the king of Babylon who burned Jerusalem. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, a different empire, and it had been destroyed before Nebuchadnezzar ever took the throne.¹

Putting him on the throne of Nineveh is like starting a story with In the days when Napoleon was emperor of Rome. It tells you at once that this is not a history. It is a story about every empire, rolled into one: the Assyrians who took the north, the Babylonians who burned the Temple, and the Greek king who, not long before this book was written, had tried to stamp out my people’s religion.

And against all of them, the book sets one widow.

The great king and the little town

The story begins big. The great king sends his general with a hundred and twenty thousand foot soldiers and twelve thousand horsemen. His orders are to make every nation of the west prepare earth and water, the old sign of surrender, because I will go out in my wrath against them, and will cover the whole face of the earth with the feet of my army (Judith 2:7).

Then the story shrinks to one hill town, Bethulia, with its water cut off. Their young children were discouraged. The women and the young men fainted for thirst. They fell down in the streets of the city (Judith 7:22).

The people go to their leaders and beg them to surrender, and the leaders make a bargain with heaven: hold out five more days, and if God has not saved us by then, we give up.

The widow who rebuked the leaders

That is when Judith comes in. She has been a widow for three years and four months, living in a tent on her roof, in sackcloth, fasting every day except the holy days (Judith 8:4–6). She sends for the town’s leaders, and they come to her.

She tells them they are wrong. Now who are you that you have tempted God this day, and stand in the place of God among the children of men? (Judith 8:12). You cannot understand the heart of a man, she says. How will you search out God … and know his mind, and comprehend his purpose? (Judith 8:14).

You cannot put God on a deadline. That is good teaching, and it is a woman, a widow, alone in her house, who gives it to the men who run the town.

Then she prays, and her prayer has the best line in the book. For your power stands not in multitude, nor your might in strong men: but you are a God of the afflicted. You are a helper of the oppressed, an upholder of the weak, a protector of the forlorn, a savior of those who are without hope (Judith 9:11).

That is my mother’s song before I was born. He has put down princes from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly (Luke 1:52). It is the God of the poor, and Judith knew him.

Go deeperWhy the date points to the Maccabees

If the book is set in no real time, how do scholars date it? By what its world takes for granted.

Its villain wants the nations to worship the king as a god (Judith 3:8). Its hero is devout in the way of the Pharisees and their neighbors: she fasts, keeps the food laws even in an enemy camp, and washes before prayer. Its hill country of Judea, guarded by a town on the road north of Jerusalem, is run by a high priest and a council in Jerusalem (Judith 4:6–8; 15:8), which is how the land was governed in the 100s BC, after the Maccabees, not in the days of the kings. And its central story, a small Jewish people standing up to a great army sent to destroy its religion, is the story of the Maccabean revolt of 167 to 164 BC, told again in a different costume.²

That is why most scholars place the book in the generation after that revolt, in the late 100s or early 00s BC. Some go further and see Holofernes as a version of a real Greek general. Others see Judith herself as a figure for Judah, the people, small and alone, beheading an empire.

No copy of Judith was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the rabbis did not keep it among the scriptures. Its original language was probably Hebrew; the Greek reads like a close translation of it. Jerome, who made the Latin version, said he translated it from an Aramaic copy in a single night’s work.³

Into the enemy camp

Judith takes off her widow’s clothes. She bathes, anoints herself, braids her hair, and puts on all her jewelry. The book says plainly that she dressed this way to deceive the eyes of every man who saw her (Judith 10:3–4). She is going to deceive.

She walks out of the town gate with her maid and a bag of her own food, and lets the enemy soldiers capture her. She tells Holofernes she is a Hebrew who has fled her doomed people, and that she will show him the way to victory. I will declare no lie to my lord this night (Judith 11:5). Then she lies to him for four days.

On the fourth night he gives a banquet and invites her, meaning to seduce her. Holofernes took great delight in her, and drank exceeding much wine, more than he had drunk at any time in one day since he was born (Judith 12:20). His servants leave them alone. He falls asleep, dead drunk.

She came to the rail of the bed, which was at Holofernes’ head, and took down his scimitar from there … She struck twice upon his neck with all her might, and took away his head from him (Judith 13:6–8).

She puts the head in her food bag, walks out of the camp past the guards, as she has done every night to pray, and goes home. At the gate of Bethulia she pulls it out of the bag and says: The Lord struck him by the hand of a woman (Judith 13:15).

The Ammonite who joined Israel

There is a second hero in this book, and he is easy to miss.

Achior is a foreigner, a leader of the Ammonites, an old enemy of Israel. In Holofernes’ war council he is the only one who tells the truth: if this people has not sinned against its God, let my lord now pass by, lest their Lord defend them (Judith 5:21). For that, the general hands him over to the Israelites to die with them.

The Israelites take him in. And when he sees what God has done through Judith, he believed in God exceedingly, and circumcised the flesh of his foreskin, and was joined to the house of Israel, to this day (Judith 14:10).

The law of Moses says flatly that An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the LORD’s assembly … forever (Deuteronomy 23:3). This book quietly lets one in. An honest outsider, who told the truth at the risk of his life, is welcomed into the people of God.

I told my people the same kind of story, with a Samaritan in it.

Go deeperJudith in art

Few scenes in the Bible, or near it, have been painted more often than a woman with a sword and a man’s severed head. Donatello cast Judith in bronze for the Medici in Florence around 1460; when the Medici were thrown out, the city set her up in front of its town hall as a sign that tyrants fall. Botticelli, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Cranach and Klimt all painted her.⁴

The most famous Judith is by Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian painter of the early 1600s. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes shows two strong women holding a struggling man down on a bed while blood runs across the sheets. Gentileschi had been raped as a young woman by a painter who worked with her father, and had been tortured in court to prove she was telling the truth. Many viewers have seen her own story in the painting, though she never said so herself.⁴

The book has been read in other ways too. Medieval Christians made Judith a figure for Mary crushing the serpent, and for the church overcoming the devil. Some medieval Jewish writers connected her story to the festival of Hanukkah, and in some communities it was the custom to eat cheese at Hanukkah because of a later version of the story in which Judith feeds the general salty cheese to make him thirsty for wine.⁴

A sword in a woman’s hand

Read the book’s best lines again and you see what it is proud of. The Lord struck him by the hand of a woman (Judith 13:15). The Almighty Lord brought them to nothing by the hand of a woman (Judith 16:6).

The general who planned to make my virgins a plunder (Judith 16:5) is undone by the woman he thought he could take. The army of the great king runs from a town of thirsty children because a widow walked out of its gate. The weak defeat the strong. That is good news, and it is told with joy.

Judith is also rich, and the book knows it. She has servants, gold, cattle and land (Judith 8:7). But at the end of her life she frees her maid, the one who walked into the enemy camp beside her, and gives away her property before she dies (Judith 16:23–24). The maid who carried the bag goes free.

Where Judith and I part

And yet I cannot hand you this book as my teaching.

Judith wins by lying, by seduction and by the sword. Her prayer before she goes calls on the Lord God of my father Simeon, into whose hand you gave a sword to take vengeance on the strangers (Judith 9:2). That is Simeon, who with his brother killed every man in a town to avenge their sister (Genesis 34). She asks God: Strike by the deceit of my lips (Judith 9:10).

I understand why my people loved this story. They had been occupied, robbed and killed by one empire after another. A story where the empire’s general loses his head to a widow is a story that lets a beaten people breathe.

But when one of my own friends drew a sword to defend me, I told him: Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). I said don’t resist him who is evil (Matthew 5:39). I did not tell my followers to deceive their enemies. I told them to love them.

Judith shows you the God of the weak. She does not show you how I said the weak should fight.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Judith 1:1, then 2 Kings 25:1.

You will find: Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, made king of Assyria in Nineveh. The book is telling you it is a story.

Then read Judith 9:11 beside Luke 1:51–53, and Judith 14:10 beside Deuteronomy 23:3.

The Short Version

• Judith is a story, not a history. Its first line makes Nebuchadnezzar king of Assyria, a sign to its first readers.
• A widow rebukes the town’s leaders for putting God on a deadline, and prays to the God of the afflicted and the oppressed.
• She goes into the enemy camp, deceives the general, and cuts off his head with his own sword: the Lord struck him by the hand of a woman.
• Achior, an Ammonite whom the law of Moses shut out, tells the truth and is welcomed into Israel.
• It is close to me on the weak and the outsider. It is far in its deceit and its sword.