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 13 about?

As the banquet ends and the servants withdraw, Holofernes lies stupefied with wine upon his bed, and Judith is left alone with him. Praying twice for strength, she takes down his own sword, seizes him by the hair, and with two strokes cuts off his head, then hands it to her maid, who hides it in the food bag. The two women pass out of the camp as though going to pray, as they had every night, and return to Bethulia, where Judith lifts up the head and cries that God has struck down the enemy by the hand of a woman. The people bless the LORD, and the deed that seemed impossible to a starving town is accomplished through His lowly servant.

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 13
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 13

Judith Chapter 13
13
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What is Judith 13 about?

As the banquet ends and the servants withdraw, Holofernes lies stupefied with wine upon his bed, and Judith is left alone with him. Praying twice for strength, she takes down his own sword, seizes him by the hair, and with two strokes cuts off his head, then hands it to her maid, who hides it in the food bag. The two women pass out of the camp as though going to pray, as they had every night, and return to Bethulia, where Judith lifts up the head and cries that God has struck down the enemy by the hand of a woman. The people bless the LORD, and the deed that seemed impossible to a starving town is accomplished through His lowly servant.