Point Judith, Rhode Island

Point Judith is a village and a small cape, on the coast of Narragansett, Rhode Island, on the western side of Narragansett Bay where it opens out onto Rhode Island Sound. It is the location for the principal year-round ferry service that connects Block Island to the mainland and contains the fishing hamlet of Galilee, Rhode Island.

History

Point Judith was named in the seventeenth century after Judith Thatcher who was a passenger on a small vessel with her father when it ran aground on the point and was almost wrecked. Allegedly, Judith rendered great service and as a result the vessel was saved. In remembrance of this the crew called the point after her name. According to Edmund Quincy's 1874 biography of his father Josiah Quincy, Point Judith was named after Judith Hull by her husband John Hull.

During the American Revolution, the British controlled Narragansett Bay and raided and burned the farms on Point Judith and the surrounding areas in the late 1770s under Captain Wallace.

Book of Judith

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.

Historical context

Original language

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 (1923 film)

Judith is a 1923 Dutch silent film directed by Theo Frenkel.

Cast

External links

Judith (given name)

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.

Name variants

Alternative forms of the name Judith include: