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.