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 the Hebrew canon and assigned by Protestants to the apocrypha. It tells of a Jewish widow, Judith, who uses her beauty and charm to trick and kill an Assyrian general who has besieged her city, Bethulia. With this act, she saves nearby Jerusalem from total destruction. The name Judith (), meaning "praised" or "Jewess", is the feminine form of Judah. The surviving manuscripts of Greek translations appear to contain several historical anachronisms, which is why some Protestant scholars now consider the book non-historical. Instead, the book may be a parable, theological novel, or perhaps the first historical novel. The Roman Catholic Church has historically maintained that the book is an authentic history from the reign of Manasseh and that the names in the book were changed at a later date for an unknown reason. The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies the real name of "Bethulia" as Shechem and argues that the name was changed because of the feud between the Jews and Samaritans. If this is the case, it would explain why other names seem anachronistic as well. It is not clear whether the Book of Judith was originally written in Hebrew or Greek, as the oldest existing version is from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. It is most generally agreed that the book was written either in Hebrew or Aramaic. When he did his Vulgate translation, Jerome believed the book was composed in a Semitic language, specifically claiming that it was written "in Chaldean words". Carey A. Moore argued that the Greek text of Judith was a translation from a Hebrew original, and used many examples of conjectured translation errors, Hebraic idioms, and Hebraic syntax. The extant Hebrew manuscripts are very late and only date back to the Middle Ages. The two surviving Hebrew manuscripts of Judith are translated from the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate.