The Deuterocanon
A widow's nerve, beauty, a tent at night, and an invading general's head in a bag.
A widow talks her way into an enemy camp and leaves with the general's head in a bag. Judith is a beautifully constructed story of nerve, and its heroine is devout, calculating, and entirely willing to deceive, which has made moralists uncomfortable for centuries. It opens with a historical setting so tangled, calling Nebuchadnezzar king of the Assyrians reigning in Nineveh, that most readers take the errors as deliberate signals that this is a story rather than a chronicle. It has been enormously influential in art, painted by Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi among many others. Received as Scripture by Catholics and Orthodox, Apocrypha for Anglicans and Protestants, absent from the Jewish canon.
If you remember one thing
A widow walks into an enemy camp and walks out with the general's head. The book mixes its history on purpose, which is part of why traditions differ on how to read it.
“Let us give thanks to the Lord our God, who is putting us to the test as he did our ancestors.”
Judith 8:25
Judith 1:1
Nebuchadnezzar called king of the Assyrians reigning in Nineveh, which is historically impossible and is usually read as a deliberate signal that this is a story.
Judith 9 to 13
The heroine prays for success in deception and then deceives and kills. Moralists have been uneasy for centuries, and the book itself shows no unease at all.
Named here rather than skipped. Where Christians read a passage differently, we say so instead of choosing for you.
Scripture for Catholic and Orthodox churches; among the Apocrypha in Protestant traditions.
Everyone here has a write-up, drawn from the same records that explain the names while you read the text.
A widow of the besieged town of Bethulia who walks into the camp of the Assyrian general Holofernes, is welcomed for her beauty, waits until he is drunk, and cuts off his head with his own sword. The army breaks when it is displayed on the walls.
A quiz for Judith is on the workbench. In the meantime, the games for the judges, the kings, and the prophets are open.
