The Biblical Judith

THE JUDITH STORY FAMILIAR TO US TODAY is from the apocryphal Book of Judith in the Septuagint or Greek Old Testament, which is based on an earlier tale probably from the third century BCE. The key elements of the story are that Judith is a beautiful and chaste widow who saves the besieged city of Bethulia from conquest by the Assyrians under Nebuchadnezar’s rule by going to the enemy camp, accompanied by her maid Abra, and killing their general Holofernes in his sleep. When she brings Holofernes’ head back to Bethulia, her fellow citizens are emboldened to sally forth and defeat the leaderless Assyrians. Judith lives out the rest of her life as a chaste widow. The story calls gender roles and notions of masculinity, femininity, and violence into question, and it is this unsettling potential that has ensured the story’s continuing fascination for writers and artists, particularly German ones, up to the present day.

The potential to unsettle begins with Judith herself. On the one hand, she is a heroic figure, braver than the men of Bethulia, and she triumphs because she uses a man’s weapon against a man and does so successfully. She is the liberator of her people, but at the same time she kills a defenseless and sleeping man. As a widow, she is a sexually experienced woman but has neither a male guardian nor children to tame her sexuality and limit her actions. The Septuagint represents her as strong-minded and eloquent and as using her eloquence to chide the timorous Bethulians for their cowardice and lack of trust in God. She also uses this eloquence to gain access to Holofernes, lying to him by explaining that she has come to betray her people. The Septuagint, too, emphasizes that Judith is beautiful and that she uses her beauty to ensnare Holofernes, dressing in her best clothes and jewels when she sets out for the enemy camp: she “made herself very beautiful, to entice the eyes of all men who might see her” (10:4). It is because he desires her that Holofernes has dinner with her alone in his tent, and it is this that gives her the opportunity to kill him, as Judith herself is well aware: “It was my face that tricked him to his destruction,” she says later (13:16).