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The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical book included in the Septuagint and the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Old Testament of the Bible but excluded from the Hebrew canon and assigned by Protestants to the apocrypha. It tells of a Jewish widow, Judith, who uses her beauty and charm to kill an Assyrian general who has besieged her city, Bethulia. With this act, she saves nearby Jerusalem from total destruction. The name Judith (Hebrew: יְהוּדִית, Modern: Yəhūdīt, Tiberian: Yŭhūḏīṯ), meaning "praised" or "Jewess",[1] is the feminine form of Judah.
The surviving manuscripts of Greek translations appear to contain several historical anachronisms, which is why some Protestant scholars now consider the book ahistorical. Instead, the book is classified as a parable, theological novel, or even the first historical novel.[2] The Roman Catholic Church has historically maintained that the book's historicity, assigning its events to the reign of King Manasseh of Judah and that the names were changed in later centuries for an unknown reason.[3] The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies Shechem (modern day Nablus) as "Bethulia", and argues that the name was changed because of the feud between the Jews and Samaritans. If this is the case, it would explain why other names seem anachronistic as well.[4]
- ^ Khan, Geoffrey (2020). The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew, Volume 1. Open Book Publishers. ISBN 978-1783746767.
- ^ See, for example, the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article, which though committed to the historicity of the book, admits and lists "very serious difficulties."
- ^ "THE ARGVMENT OF THE BOOKE OF IVDITH - 1610 Douay Rheims Bible".
- ^ "Jewish Encyclopedia - Book of Judith".