Nebuchadnezzar rules the Assyrians from Nineveh, a throne the king of Babylon never held over a city that had fallen before his reign began. The scrambled map is deliberate: Judith is edifying story rather than sober chronicle, valued and read across the tradition, received as Scripture by Catholics and the Orthodox and set apart from the canon by the Reformers. This first chapter only raises the curtain. In his twelfth year the king marches on Arphaxad the Mede, who has walled Ecbatana with hewn stone, and when the nations of the west spurn his summons to the war he wins alone and swears to take his revenge on every one of them. Ecbatana falls, Arphaxad dies in the mountains of Ragau, and the victors feast a hundred and twenty days while the wrath gathers that will march south, under Holofernes, toward the town of a widow no one has yet named.