Book of Judith

However, due to the large number of Hebraisms in the text, it is generally agreed that the book was written in a Semitic language, probably Hebrew or Aramaic, rather than Koine Greek.

[15] That midrash, whose heroine is portrayed as gorging the antagonist on cheese and wine before cutting off his head, may have formed the basis of the minor Jewish tradition to eat dairy products during Hanukkah.

[12][16] In that respect, the Jewry of Europe during the Middle Ages appear to have viewed Judith as the Maccabean-Hasmonean counterpart to Queen Esther, the heroine of the holiday of Purim.

[23] Jerome, when he produced his Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Vulgate, counted it among the apocrypha,[24] (though he later changed his mind, quoted it as scripture, and said he merely expressed the views of the Jews), as did Athanasius,[25] Cyril of Jerusalem,[26] and Epiphanius of Salamis.

[27] Many influential fathers and doctors of the Church, including Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, Tertullian, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Bede the Venerable and Hilary of Poitiers, considered the book sacred scripture both before and after councils that formally declared it part of the biblical canon.

[41] The New Oxford Annotated Apocrypha identifies a clear chiastic pattern in both "acts", in which the order of events is reversed at a central moment in the narrative (i.e., abcc'b'a').

[44] Other scholars note that Judith fits within and even incorporates the genre of "salvation traditions" from the Old Testament, particularly the story of Deborah and Jael (Judges 4–5), who seduced and inebriated the Canaanite commander Sisera before hammering a tent-peg into his forehead.

As a "Mulier sancta", she personified the Church and many virtues – Humility, Justice, Fortitude, Chastity (the opposite of Holofernes' vices Pride, Tyranny, Decadence, Lust) – and she was, like the other heroic women of the Hebrew scriptural tradition, made into a typological prefiguration of the Virgin Mary.

Her gender made her a natural example of the biblical paradox of "strength in weakness"; she is thus paired with David and her beheading of Holofernes paralleled with that of Goliath – both deeds saved the Covenant People from a militarily superior enemy.

[citation needed] Judith, the protagonist of the book, introduced in chapter 8 as a God-fearing woman, she is the daughter of Merari, a Simeonite,[46] and widow of a certain Manasseh or Manasses, a wealthy farmer.

He is so proud that he wants to affirm his strength as a sort of divine power, although Holofernes, his Turtan (commanding general), goes beyond the king's orders when he calls on the western nations to "worship only Nebuchadnezzar, and ... invoke him as a god".

When the city is besieged by the Assyrians and the water supply dries up, he agrees to the people's call to surrender if God has not rescued them within five days, a decision challenged as "rash" by Judith.

Nicolaus Serarius, Giovanni Menochio and Thomas Worthington speculated that Manasseh was busy fortifying Jerusalem at the time (which also fits with 2 Chronicles 33) and left the matters of the rest of the Israelites to the high priest.

[70] Contemporary sources make reference to the many allies of Chaldea (governed by Šamaš-šuma-ukin), including the Kingdom of Judah, which were subjects of Assyria and are mentioned in the Book of Judith as victims of Ashurbanipal's Western campaign.

[73] This would explain the reinforcement of the cities described in this book and why the Israelites and other western kingdoms rejected "Nebuchadnezzar's" order for conscription, because many of the vassal rulers of the west supported Šamaš-šuma-ukin.

The view that the book of Judith was written during the reigns of Manasseh and Ashurbanipal was held by a great number of Catholic scholars, including Calmet, George Leo Haydock, Thomas Worthington, Richard Challoner, Giovanni Stefano Menochio, Sixtus of Siena, Robert Bellarmine, Charles François Houbigant, Nicolaus Serarius, Pierre Daniel Huet and Bernard de Montfaucon.

Many of these theologians are cited and quoted by Calmet in his own commentary on Judith, the "Commentaire littéral sur tous les livres de l'ancien et du nouveau testament".

Calmet listed all of "the main objections that can be made against the truth of Judith's Story" and spent the rest of his commentary on the book addressing them, stating: "But all this did not bother Catholic writers.

The 1738 Challoner revision of the Douay Rheims Bible and the Haydock Biblical Commentary specifically declare that "Nabuchodonosor" was "known as 'Saosduchin' to profane historians and succeeded 'Asarhaddan' in the kingdom of the Assyrians".

Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin argues the possibility that the book of Judith is a roman à clef, a historical record with different names for people and places.

Modern scholars argue in favor of a 2nd–1st century context for the Book of Judith, understanding it as a sort of roman à clef, i.e. a literary fiction whose characters stand for some real historical figure, generally contemporary to the author.

Shechem is a large city in the hill-country of Samaria, on the direct road from Jezreel to Jerusalem, lying in the path of the enemy, at the head of an important pass and is a few hours south of Geba.

[88] These data point to a site on the heights west of Jenin (Engannim), between the plains of Esdrelon and Dothan, where Haraiq el-Mallah, Khirbet Sheikh Shibel and el-Bârid lie close together.

Theologians Antoine Augustin Calmet, Wilhelm Gesenius and Franz Karl Movers all worked to explain bizarre geographical locations in the book as copyist or translation mistakes.

[91][92] A few more of these disputed locations include: The character of Judith is larger than life, and she has won a place in Jewish and Christian lore, art, poetry and drama.

In medieval Christian art, the predominance of church patronage assured that Judith's patristic valences as "Mulier Sancta" and Virgin Mary prototype would prevail: from the 8th-century frescoes in Santa Maria Antigua in Rome through innumerable later bible miniatures.

The already well established notion of Judith as an exemplum of the courage of local people against tyrannical rule from afar was given new urgency by the Assyrian nationality of Holofernes, which made him an inevitable symbol of the threatening Ottoman Turks.

The account of Judith's beheading of Holofernes has been treated by several painters and sculptors, most notably Donatello and Caravaggio, as well as Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Giorgione, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Titian, Horace Vernet, Gustav Klimt, Artemisia Gentileschi, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Trophime Bigot, Francisco Goya, Francesco Cairo and Hermann-Paul.

English writer Arnold Bennett in 1919 tried his hand at dramaturgy with Judith, a faithful reproduction in three acts; it premiered in spring 1919 at Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne.

English playwright Howard Barker examined the Judith story and its aftermath, first in the scene "The Unforeseen Consequences of a Patriotic Act", as part of his collection of vignettes, The Possibilities.