What a Woman

The story of Judith shows a very different take on the ideal woman from the modern woman.

The key parts are in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Judith. In the twelfth chapter Judith dresses provocatively and seduces Holofernes. He gets drunk and passes out, apparently not noticing that she was not drinking. Then in the thirteenth chapter, Judith takes Holofernes own sword and cuts off his head. She then puts it inside a sack and carries it back to her besieged city where it is hung from the wall. Holofernes' men discover him dead and decapitated and the siege is lifted.

Judith is portrayed as a pious woman. But her piety does not fit well with most modern notions of a pious woman (she is much more in the model of Jael in the book of Judges), although she does fit the modern movie heroine.

Nebuchadnezzer as God

In the book of Judith, Holophernes, chief general of the armies of Assyria, makes the following argument:

Who is God if not Nebuchadnezzar? He sends his might and he will destroy them from the face of the earth, and God will not save them (Judith 6:2).

A variation on the might make right argument, this one is more might makes not just right but deity. The standard ancient rebuttal was to point out that God could not only destroy but create as well. Any idiot can destroy something. Many of them do so unintentionally. To create, to build, shows more divinity than destruction does.

Apostasy in Judith

The following sentiment is one that we typically associate with the Book of Mormon. It comes, instead from the apocryphal book of Judith in a brief summation of Israelite history:

As long as they did not sin against their God, they had the good things, for God is one who hates iniquity among them; but when they apostatized from the way which he set for them, they were destroyed . . . (Judith 5:17-18).

So, according to this God set for Israel a path, a way, for Israel to go in. As long as they followed the path that he set, they were blessed with good things. This would have included peace, prosperity and posterity. Leaving the path that God had set is termed apostasy. It is a rebellion against his plans. This apostasy brought consequences; they lost both the good that they once possessed and they were destroyed.

The Book of Mormon sees the same pattern applying to the descendants of Israel in its times. Modern apostles say that the same still applies in our day. We should not be surprised to watch it happen.

Apocryphal History

One of the more revealing things about the Apocrypha is how disconnected they are with history. Both apocryphal and biblical books mention historical events, but the biblical books usually line up with actual history, the apocryphal books may not.

Consider the beginning of the book of Judith:

In the twelfth year of king Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled Assyria in the great city of Nineveh, in the days of Arphaxad, who ruled the Medes in Ecbatana. (Judith 1:1)

Nebuchadnezzar, was the king of Babylon, not Assyria and ruled from Babylon, not Nineveh.

Likewise, 1 Esdras scrambles the order of the Persian kings.

This is not to say that there are not historical difficulties with biblical books, but they are nothing like the historical problems of some of the apocrypha.