It's all gone quiet for a while. Sorry about that. Family problems, together with all these rumours floating around. It might take me a while to get properly back on track, but here is the final part of Judith.
Judith sings a song in praise of God. Like Miriam, Moses’ sister, she glorifies God for overcoming a mighty enemy. There’s some confusion about exactly who the enemy is - she sings about the Medes and the Persians, but the text has been calling them the Assyrians.
Nebuchadnezzar, of course, was Babylonian, and as for Holofernes, that’s a Persian name. Taking the confusion further, is Judith a real person, or is she the perfect Jude, or Jew?
The story strikes me as being too one-dimensional to be true. Judith is perfect, her enemies are stupid. The army is vast, the other nations’ capitulation is abject. Judah’s bravery is noble, but seems hopeless. Everything is painted in extremes, like a cartoon, or like propaganda.
So I’m not worrying about whether it actually happened. I’m enjoying a story that the Jews told themselves which reinforces their belief that though they are small, a bit strange, and very out of step with the world at large, nevertheless they have God on their side.
It’s a story I like to tell myself, too.
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