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 6 about?

Holofernes scorns Achior's warning, declaring that Nebuchadnezzar alone is god and that Israel's God will not save them, and he orders Achior bound and cast out to perish alongside the people he had defended. The soldiers leave him tied at the foot of the hills below Bethulia, where the men of the city come down, loose him, and bring him inside. Before the assembled elders Achior tells all that was said in Holofernes' council, and the people fall down to worship God and take heart. By setting the pagan boast against the faith of the besieged, the chapter sharpens the question of whom the living God will vindicate.

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 6
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 6

Judith Chapter 6
6
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What is Judith 6 about?

Holofernes scorns Achior's warning, declaring that Nebuchadnezzar alone is god and that Israel's God will not save them, and he orders Achior bound and cast out to perish alongside the people he had defended. The soldiers leave him tied at the foot of the hills below Bethulia, where the men of the city come down, loose him, and bring him inside. Before the assembled elders Achior tells all that was said in Holofernes' council, and the people fall down to worship God and take heart. By setting the pagan boast against the faith of the besieged, the chapter sharpens the question of whom the living God will vindicate.