The very first verse of the
book “In the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled over the
Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh, in the days of Arphaxad, who ruled over
the Medes in Ecbatana,” (Jdt 1:1) reveals two of the work’s essential
characteristics: the book is pseudo-historical and it is heavily influenced by
the Hebrew Bible. The Median king Arphaxad is otherwise unknown, while
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Assyrians, is plainly a fictional figure, a combination
of the two outstanding royal enemies of the biblical Israelites,
Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians and Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians.
Another element found in this opening verse, the precise dating to the twelfth
year of the fictional Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, points to a third characteristic
feature, the delight which the author takes in specific, if false, detail. Time
and again the reader is presented with patently false or incredible
information. Holophernes and his vast army cover a circular route of five
hundred kilometers in a mere three days (2:21), while Judith’s native town of
Bethulia, said to control an otherwise unknown narrow mountain pass leading to
Jerusalem (4:7), cannot actually be assigned a precise location in Palestine.
Many other places mentioned in the work, including most of the towns
surrounding Bethulia, are equally difficult to identify. Judith is allotted a
genealogy far longer than any given to a biblical woman, some sixteen
ancestors, and her ancestors all bear the names of biblical figures who are
linked to a variety of tribes (8:1). In this fashion, the author both honors
Judith and hints at her fictional, ideal status, for she is presented as a
composite, generic Israelite woman who belongs to all of the tribes. The author
regularly uses exaggerated but evocative details to make it plain to his
readers that his account is not factually true in the narrow sense, but is
nonetheless true in a broader, meta-historical way. His paradigmatic story is
not restricted to a specific time or place: its message on God’s power to
defend the Israelites and defeat any aggressive enemy who may arise is timeless
and universal. (Deborah Levine Gera, “The Book of Judith,” in The Oxford
Handbook of The Apocrypha, ed. Gerbern S. Oegema [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2021], 139)
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