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

The eighteenth year brings Nebuchadnezzar's decree of vengeance against every nation that had spurned his call, and he summons Holofernes, chief general of his armies, to carry it out. Holofernes musters a vast host, a hundred and twenty thousand foot and twelve thousand horse, and marches westward, ravaging fields, burning towns, and putting the disobedient peoples to the sword. Terror runs ahead of him as he lays waste the lands from Assyria to the sea. The scale of the menace, magnified deliberately, prepares the reader to marvel that so great a power will be broken by the hand of one devout widow.

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 2
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 2

Judith Chapter 2
2
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What is Judith 2 about?

The eighteenth year brings Nebuchadnezzar's decree of vengeance against every nation that had spurned his call, and he summons Holofernes, chief general of his armies, to carry it out. Holofernes musters a vast host, a hundred and twenty thousand foot and twelve thousand horse, and marches westward, ravaging fields, burning towns, and putting the disobedient peoples to the sword. Terror runs ahead of him as he lays waste the lands from Assyria to the sea. The scale of the menace, magnified deliberately, prepares the reader to marvel that so great a power will be broken by the hand of one devout widow.