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 15 about?

Panic sweeps the Assyrian camp when word spreads that Holofernes is dead, and the leaderless host breaks and flees through the hills, pursued and cut down by the men of Israel pouring out from every town. The people plunder the abandoned camp for many days, and Judith is given Holofernes' tent and all his silver and furnishings. Joakim the high priest and the elders come from Jerusalem to bless her as the glory and exaltation of their people, and the women of Israel gather to dance and sing in her honor. What began as a siege that promised slavery ends in deliverance and rejoicing, credited throughout to the God who saved by an unlikely hand.

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 15
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 15

Judith Chapter 15
15
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What is Judith 15 about?

Panic sweeps the Assyrian camp when word spreads that Holofernes is dead, and the leaderless host breaks and flees through the hills, pursued and cut down by the men of Israel pouring out from every town. The people plunder the abandoned camp for many days, and Judith is given Holofernes' tent and all his silver and furnishings. Joakim the high priest and the elders come from Jerusalem to bless her as the glory and exaltation of their people, and the women of Israel gather to dance and sing in her honor. What began as a siege that promised slavery ends in deliverance and rejoicing, credited throughout to the God who saved by an unlikely hand.