Anakalypsis / Unveiling the Word
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⚙ Annotations & References ▾
Manuscript witnesses 2 ▾
Codex Sinaiticus Aleph c. AD 330-360 Codex Vaticanus B c. AD 300-325
What is Judith 12 about?

Judith remains in the camp but refuses the rich fare from Holofernes' table, eating only the provisions her maid has brought lest she defile herself, and each night she is allowed to go out to the valley to bathe and pray to God. On the fourth day Holofernes holds a private banquet and, inflamed with desire for her, sends his eunuch to invite her, and she comes adorned and reclines before him. She eats and drinks only what her maid has prepared, while Holofernes, delighting in her presence, drinks more wine than he had ever drunk in a single day. His drunken abandon sets the stage for the deliverance that his own appetite has made possible.

Historical backdrop

The book was written in the second century BC, in the years when a small Judea faced the vast machinery of a Hellenistic empire and remembered older deliverances. Its named enemy is deliberately composite: a Nebuchadnezzar who reigns from Assyrian Nineveh, generals with Persian names, an empire assembled from every oppressor Israel had known. The setting is not sober chronicle but a portrait of the one perennial danger, the great power that demands worship and marches on the weak.

The Church Fathers on Judith 12
Deuterocanon (Catholic & Orthodox) · Accepted as canonical Scripture by the Catholic and Orthodox traditions and included in the original 1611 KJV (between the Old and New Testaments). Not in the Protestant 66-book canon. Read with the same care you bring to other Scripture, conscious that Protestants and Catholics weigh its authority differently.

Judith 12

Judith Chapter 12
12
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What is Judith 12 about?

Judith remains in the camp but refuses the rich fare from Holofernes' table, eating only the provisions her maid has brought lest she defile herself, and each night she is allowed to go out to the valley to bathe and pray to God. On the fourth day Holofernes holds a private banquet and, inflamed with desire for her, sends his eunuch to invite her, and she comes adorned and reclines before him. She eats and drinks only what her maid has prepared, while Holofernes, delighting in her presence, drinks more wine than he had ever drunk in a single day. His drunken abandon sets the stage for the deliverance that his own appetite has made possible.