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 16 about?

Judith leads all Israel in a song of thanksgiving, praising the God who camps among His people and who broke the might of Assyria not by young warriors but by the hand of a woman. The nation goes up to Jerusalem to worship, offering sacrifices and dedicating the spoils of Holofernes, and the celebration lasts three months. Judith returns to her estate, renowned and honored, refuses every offer of remarriage, sets her faithful maid free, and lives to the age of a hundred and five, and the land has peace throughout her days and long after. The book closes by giving all the honor to God, holding up a devout widow as the vessel of His saving power over the proud.

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 16
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 16

Judith Chapter 16
16
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What is Judith 16 about?

Judith leads all Israel in a song of thanksgiving, praising the God who camps among His people and who broke the might of Assyria not by young warriors but by the hand of a woman. The nation goes up to Jerusalem to worship, offering sacrifices and dedicating the spoils of Holofernes, and the celebration lasts three months. Judith returns to her estate, renowned and honored, refuses every offer of remarriage, sets her faithful maid free, and lives to the age of a hundred and five, and the land has peace throughout her days and long after. The book closes by giving all the honor to God, holding up a devout widow as the vessel of His saving power over the proud.