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The story of Judith and Holofernes is an Old Testament account of a Jewish woman who took violent action to save her people from the Assyrian general Holofernes. She gained his trust and killed him while he was drunk, leading to the Assyrians’ retreat. The story is less known than that of David and Goliath due to its apocryphal status and lack of connection to the genealogy of Christ.
The story of Judith and Holofernes is, like the story of David and Goliath, an Old Testament account of the oppressed overcoming the oppressor, or of virtue overcoming vice. For this reason, both David and Judith were considered antecedents of Christ in the type of biblical analysis called typology, in which Old Testament events bear some relation to the New Testament narrative of salvation. Judith, whose name simply means “Jewish woman,” is a rare Biblical heroine, in a story from the Apocrypha in the Bible, who took violent action to save her people.
The meeting between the two is at the center of the Book of Judith, a brief and probably non-historical account of the Assyrian aggression against the Jews. The Assyrian general Holofernes besieged the city of Bethulia, and soon the inhabitants began agitating for surrender. A wealthy widow named Judith, however, conceived a plan. That evening, dressed in her best clothes and perfumed with ointment, she went through the gate with her maid and crossed the valley to the general’s camp. There, she explained to the guards that she wanted to provide them with information on the best means of entering Bethulia.
When admitted into her presence, Judith explained that the siege had caused the Jews to turn away from their religion, and therefore they deserved destruction. She claimed that God Himself sent her on this errand. All this pleased Holofernes very much, as well as the appearance of Judith. They agreed: she would not harm her and she would be allowed to leave the camp at night to pray. This, Judith argued, would allow her to learn from God exactly when the city should be attacked. For three days Judith remained in the camp, eating only the food that her servant prepared and brought with her in a cloth sack.
On the fourth night, Holofernes held a banquet for his servants and invited Judith, whom he had come to admire more and more. She came dressed in her best clothes and also brought with her the fleece on which she had been given to sleep. Happy with her there, Holofernes drank heavily, more than he had ever drunk in her life, and far too much to keep her senses. All but Judith and Holofernes left the tent. Alone with the drunken sleeping general, Judith begged for strength. She then grabbed her sword and, in two strokes, she cut off his head. Her maid, waiting outside the tent, came in with the sack of food. Judith placed Holofernes’ head in the sack and the two women left the camp for what appeared to be their nightly prayer mission.
This time, however, they kept walking. At the Bethulia Gate, he called in, showed his trophy, and told the men to mount an attack on the Assyrian camp the next morning. They did so, and when the Assyrians ran to the general’s tent to wake him up, they found their leader with no head. Horrified, the Assyrians retreated. The Israelites pillaged the camp; all of Holofernes’ best things were given to Judith, who then passed them on to her late husband’s heirs.
Both the story of Judith and Holofernes and that of David and Goliath became important within the Christian imagination of the Renaissance and Baroque. That this story is much less known today has to do with both the source of each story, and the larger meaning of the protagonist in each. The Book of Judith is one of the apocryphal books of the Bible: it is omitted from the Protestant canonical versions, although it remains a part of the Catholic text. The book, therefore, has much less value than the Book of Samuel, a canonical book of the Bible in all Christian sects and the source of the story of David and Goliath.
Furthermore, the fact that King David was an ancestor of the Virgin Mary had great significance in the medieval and later periods, and made all his actions of great importance. Judith, however, was not connected to the genealogy of Christ, and after her great victory she returned to the ordinary life of a widow.
