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 3 about?

The coastal cities, Sidon, Tyre, and their neighbors, send envoys to sue for peace, offering their land, water, and submission rather than face destruction. Holofernes accepts their surrender but garrisons their towns and tears down their shrines and sacred groves, for his commission is that Nebuchadnezzar alone be honored as god and every people call upon him as divine. He advances toward the plain near Dothan, at the edge of Judea, and the mountain country of Israel lies directly in his path. By pressing the demand for worship due to God alone, the narrative frames the coming conflict as a clash between the boast of empire and the LORD who will not share His glory.

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 3
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 3

Judith Chapter 3
3
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What is Judith 3 about?

The coastal cities, Sidon, Tyre, and their neighbors, send envoys to sue for peace, offering their land, water, and submission rather than face destruction. Holofernes accepts their surrender but garrisons their towns and tears down their shrines and sacred groves, for his commission is that Nebuchadnezzar alone be honored as god and every people call upon him as divine. He advances toward the plain near Dothan, at the edge of Judea, and the mountain country of Israel lies directly in his path. By pressing the demand for worship due to God alone, the narrative frames the coming conflict as a clash between the boast of empire and the LORD who will not share His glory.