Anakalypsis / Unveiling the Word
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⚙ Annotations & References ▾
Historic voices 1 ▾
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1× 2-14
Manuscript witnesses 2 ▾
Codex Sinaiticus Aleph c. AD 330-360 Codex Vaticanus B c. AD 300-325
What is Judith 9 about?

Alone and clothed in sackcloth at the hour of the evening incense, Judith pours out a long prayer to God before setting her plan in motion. She recalls how the LORD had armed Simeon to avenge the defiling of Dinah, and she appeals to Him as the God of the lowly, the helper of the weak, the protector of the forsaken. She asks that He grant her deceiving words strength to wound the enemy who has threatened His sanctuary, and that He shatter their arrogance by the hand of a woman. Her plea grounds all that follows in dependence on God, so that the victory to come will be plainly His and not her own.

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 9
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 9

Judith Chapter 9
9
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What is Judith 9 about?

Alone and clothed in sackcloth at the hour of the evening incense, Judith pours out a long prayer to God before setting her plan in motion. She recalls how the LORD had armed Simeon to avenge the defiling of Dinah, and she appeals to Him as the God of the lowly, the helper of the weak, the protector of the forsaken. She asks that He grant her deceiving words strength to wound the enemy who has threatened His sanctuary, and that He shatter their arrogance by the hand of a woman. Her plea grounds all that follows in dependence on God, so that the victory to come will be plainly His and not her own.