Judith Anne Collins (born 24 February 1959) is a New Zealand politician and lawyer, and is currently Minister of Corrections and Police. Born in Hamilton and as of 2015 residing in Auckland, she graduated in law and taxation and worked in this field from 1981 until 2002, including running her own practice for a decade. She entered Parliament in the 2002 election as an electorate MP for the centre-right New Zealand National Party and became a Cabinet minister when National came into government in 2008. Her initial ministerial portfolios were Police, Corrections and Veterans' Affairs. After the 2011 election, her portfolios changed to Justice (including responsibility for the Law Commission), Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) and Ethnic Affairs. With a fifth-placed ranking, she was the highest ranked woman in the Cabinet. She resigned from Cabinet on 30 August 2014 following email leaks alleging she had undermined the head of the Serious Fraud Office when she was the Minister responsible for that organisation.
The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical book, included in the Septuagint and the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Old Testament of the Bible, but excluded from Jewish texts and assigned by Protestants to the Apocrypha. The book contains numerous historical anachronisms, which is why many scholars now accept it as non-historical; it has been considered a parable or perhaps the first historical novel.
The name Judith (Hebrew: יְהוּדִית, Modern Yehudit, Tiberian Yəhûḏîṯ ; "Praised" or "Jewess") is the feminine form of Judah.
It is not clear whether the Book of Judith was originally written in Hebrew or in Greek. The oldest extant version is the Septuagint and might either be a translation from Hebrew or composed in Greek. Details of vocabulary and phrasing point to a Greek text written in a language modeled on the Greek developed through translating the other books in the Septuagint. The extant Hebrew language versions, whether identical to the Greek, or in the shorter Hebrew version, are medieval. The Hebrew versions name important figures directly such as the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes, thus placing the events in the Hellenistic period when the Maccabees battled the Seleucid monarchs. The Greek version uses deliberately cryptic and anachronistic references such as "Nebuchadnezzar", a "King of Assyria," who "reigns in Nineveh," for the same king. The adoption of that name, though unhistorical, has been sometimes explained either as a copyist's addition, or an arbitrary name assigned to the ruler of Babylon.
Judith is a 1923 Dutch silent film directed by Theo Frenkel.
Judith is a feminine given name derived from the Hebrew name יְהוּדִית or Yehudit, meaning "She will be praised" or "woman of Judea". Judith appeared in the Old Testament as the wife of Esau and in the Apocryphal Book of Judith.
The name was among the top 50 most popular given names for girls born in the United States between 1936 and 1956. Its popularity has since declined. It was the 893rd most popular name for baby girls born in the United States in 2012, down from 74th place in 1960.
Alternative forms of the name Judith include: