Names and places:

Handout, October 22, 2003

RS-2B03: Women in the Biblical Tradition

A. Y. Reed

Symbolism in the Book of Judith

"Judith the character is usually identified as a representation of or a metaphor for the community of faith. Although her name, widowhood, chastity, beauty, and righteousness suggest the traditional representation of Israel, the text's association of these traits with an independant woman and with sexuality subverts the metaphoric connection between character and androcentrically determined community... Judith appears at first to be a classic metaphor both for the nation and for all women. Not only does her name mean 'the Jewess' but also she 'is a widow,' for the Jewish nation is living at the time of grave danger and affliction, like a forlorn widow... While Judith's widowhood conforms to the traditional representation of of Israel as a woman in mourning and, while both she and Bethulia are draped in sackcloth, Judith's particular representation-- her status, rhetoric, wealth, beauty and even her geneaology--aborts the metaphor. This widow is hardly the forlorn female in need of male protection."

-- Amy-Jill Levine, "Sacrifice and Salvation: Otherness and Domestication in the Book of Judith" in Feminist Companion to the Bible 7 (Sheffield University Press, 1995)

"Jael is very much a truncated version of Judith. Her role is brief -- two verses -- because the national heroine here is Deborah, and the military hero Barak. Between them, they divide the functions that Judith performs entirely by herself... Deborah is not morally ambivelent like Judith, because Jael does the dirty work for her... Esther is a domesticated type of the queen of heaven, yet politically -- both in the public sphere and in sexual politics -- anodyne by comparision to the private citizen Judith. Judith's particularity is the more striking and definitive because only this biblical heroine is so ambiguous, and therefore resistent to stereotype... Feminists have often complained, and rightly, of the supports to patriarchy and misogyny that have been provided by the Bible. With one hand, it gave us the Eves and Delilahs who demonize women, but with the other it gave us a woman of independant mind, clever, rational, ingenious, resourceful, persuasive, courageous, self-reliant, and indominable."

-- Margarita Stocker, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Relational Parallels in the Book of Judith

Nebuchadnezzar	GOD
Holofernes	Judith
The eunuch Bogoas	Judith's female servant

Some Key Names in the Book of Judith

Bethulia - Unknown city with several different possible derivations: hyl) tyb ("House of God;" cf. Bethel); hyl( tyb ("House of Ascent;" cf. Shechem); hlwtb ("virgin"; cf. metaphorical interpretation of the story of Dinah in Jud 9).

Judith - tydwhy = "Jewess" (and/or possibly a veiled reference to Judah Maccabee, contrasting his military activities with his female counterpart's salvation of Israel)

Achior - The Ammonite convert to Judaism, who recounts Jewish history to the general Holofernes in Jud 6. Just as his role parallels Balaam, so his name may derive from Ahikar, a legendary Assyrian wiseman also mentioned -- and also "Judaized" -- in Tobit (1:21-22; 2:10).

Uzziah - hyz( = "YHWH is my strength" - One of the magistrates of Bethulia. Presumably meant to be ironic, since he is depicted as weak and wavering, in contrast to Judith, giving in easily to the peoples' request that they surrender to the enemy.

The Book of Judith and Jewish History

Chronology of the Book of Judith

Jewish History

Maccabean Revolt (164-167 BCE)

In the 12th year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians, conquers Arphaxad, king of the Medes (Jud 1), then undertakes a Western campaign (against Egypt and Judea) and an Eastern campaign (against Media and Ectabana), with the aid of his general Holofernes.

Nebuchadnezzar was neither Assyrian nor ruled in Nineveh -- Nebuchadnezzar rose to power as king of Babylon during the pre-exilic period (605 BCE). During the 12th year of his reign (i.e. 593 BCE), Zedekiah was still king of Judah (Jer 32:1) and Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

Nineveh was indeed the capital of Assyria, but was destroyed (along with the Assyrian Empire) by the Chaldeans in 612 BCE -- seven years before Nebuchadnezzar rose to power. By citing this city, Judith may be alluding to Jonah (note esp. motif of mourning and sackcloth in Jud 4:10; cp. Jonah 3:8, 10).

The name "Arphaxad" is nowhere attested in either secular or religious histories; Ectabana was a Parthian city, conquered in 544 BCE by Cyrus the Persian.

Holofernes is a Persian name.

Many scholars have noted that Judith's "Assyrians" share much with the Seleucidic Syrians that ruled Judea from 200 BCE until the Maccabean Revolt in 162 BCE.

Like Judith's "Nebuchadnezzar," Antiochus IV undertook a Western campaign against Egypt and Judea (1 Macc 1:16) and an Eastern campaign against Persia and Persepolis (1 Macc 3:31; 2 Macc 9:2-3). If so, "Arphaxad" may represent the Parthian Arsaces.

Judith's "Holofernes" may allude to Nicanor, one of Antiochus' generals. After Antiochus Epiphanes' death in 164 BCE, Nicanor took over the battles with the Judeans, but was defeated in 161 BCE by Judah Maccabee, in his last great victory before his death later in the same year.

Just as Nebuchadnezzar has Holofernes cross the Euphrates and destroy great cities and temples in the Book of Judith (2:24; 3:8), so Antiochus and his general Nicanor tried to do the same (1 Macc 3:37; 6:1-2; 7:33-35)

Holofernes seeks to destroy various national religions and to install sole worship of Nebuchadnezzar: "It was granted to him to destroy all the gods of the area so that all nations should worship Nebuchadnezzar alone -- that every dialect and tribe should call upon him as god!" (Jud 3:8).

From a historical standpoint, the worship of kings as gods originated in the Hellenistic period (i.e. after the conquest of Alexander the Great, when Judea fell to first the Egyptian Ptolemies and then the Syrian Seleucids) and has no corollary in earlier Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian practice -- so much so that the references to Nebuchadnezzar and Darius' apparent practice to the contrary in the Book of Daniel (chs. 3; 6) are usually interpreted as veiled references to the later, infamous Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV.

Like Judith's "Nebuchadnezzar" Antiochus IV Epiphanes claimed that he was a god ("Epiphanes" = "God Manifest") and forced Jews to abandon their traditional worship in 167 BCE (see 1 Mac 1; Dan 7).

*Chronology of the Book of Judith*	*Jewish History*	*Maccabean Revolt (164-167 BCE)*
According to the Book of Judith, the people of Judea "had returned from Exile only a short time before; and all the people of Judea had been reunited, and the sacred utensils, the altar, and the Temple had just recently been rededicated after they had been defiled" (Jud. 4:3). Likewise, Achior's summary of Jewish history explicitly ends in the post-exilic era: "When they abandoned the path that (God) had laid down for them, they were devastated in many battles and were carried off as captives to a foreign land. The Temple of their God was leveled to the ground... But now that they have returned to their God, they have come back from the places where they had been scattered. They have regained Jerusalem, where their sanctuary is..." (5:18:19)	Despite the references to the Assyrians and Nebuchadnezzar, Judith clearly seems to presuppose a post-exilic setting: The fact that it was really the historical Nebuchadnezzar who destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE and sent Jews into Exile suggests that this anachronism is deliberate.	There is no evidence that the Jews militarily resisted the Babylonian invasion under Nebuchadnezzar in 592 BCE. Indeed, according to Jeremiah (32:1), king Zedekiah declined the invitation of his neighbors to revolt against Nebuchadnezzar in exactly 593 BCE. However, the Maccabees' later military resistance to the Seleucids is well known (see 1, 2 Mac). Moreover, the assertion that the Temple had recently been "rededicated" (as opposed to "rebuilt") may allude to the rededication of the Second Temple by the Maccabees in 164 BCE.
The people of Judea do not surrender to the Assyrians, but instead prepares for war, under the leadership of Joakim the high priest (4:6ff).	The name "Joakim" probably refers to "Joiakim son of Jeshu," who was high priest soon after the Jews' return from Exile in Babylon, under Persian rule (see Neh 12:26; Josephus, Antiquities 20.10.2).	Before the Maccabean revolt and the ascendancy of the Hasmonean family to power, no Jewish high priest held both religious and military power.
Holofernes besieges and blockades Bethulia (Jud 7). Surrounded on all sides and losing their water supply, the Jews lose hope and beg their leaders to surrender (7:23-28). Their leader Uzziah asks that they wait 5 more days.	The place-name "Bethulia" is otherwise completely unknown. Since we only have the name in Greek, the exact etymology is even uncertain, although several intriguing possibilities have been suggested by scholars: 1. hyl) tb ("House of God" = an allusion to the Temple and/or Jerusalem; or an allusion to the Bethel of Jacob) 2. hyl( tb ("House of Ascent" = an allusion to Shechem?) 3. hlwtb ("virgin"; see Jud 9:9-10, where Judith associates the seige of Bethulia with the rape of Dinah; also Jerusalem and/or Israel symbolized as a virgin in Lam. 1:15; 2:13; Jer 14:17) Uzziah - His name ("God is my strength" = hyz() may be intended to highlight the irony of the weakness of this male leader in contrast to the widow Judith.	In the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, David Suter suggests that the Book of Judith "may have been written in Hebrew in the Maccabean era and possibly reflects the defeat of the Seleucidic general Nicanor by Judah the Maccabee (161 BCE). The deliberate confusion of names and events from the Persian, Babylonian, and Assyrian eras is probably a device on the part of the author to indicate that the work is intended as fiction. The name 'Judith' means the 'Jewess' and, like a good hero from the period of the Judges, she returns to her home after delivering her people from the enemy (cf. 16:21). Judah the Maccabee and his brothers, on the other hand, seek continuing political power. The story may thus be, in part, a comment by the Hasidim -- the forerunners of the Pharisees and the Essenes and, initially the allies of the Maccabees -- on Maccabean political ambitions."

Chronology of the Book of Judith

Jewish History

Maccabean Revolt (164-167 BCE)

Judith 8 introduces Judith, "daughter of Merari the son of Ox, son of Joseph, son of Oziel, son of Elkiah, son of Ananias, son of Gideon, son of Raphaim, son of Ahitub, son of Elijah, son of Hilkiah, son of Eliab, son of Nathanael, son of Salamiel, son of Sarasadai, son of Israel ."

Judith - The symbolic implications of the meaning of her name ("Jewess") are stressed by the tracing of her genealogy back to "Israel" -- her connection to Israel/Jacob simultaneously signals her talents for deception and role as "trickster."

The name also evokes the other biblical Judith, who is opposite to this Judith in every way: Esau's Hittite wife (Gen 26:34). For instance, Amy Jill Levine suggests that " Judith the daughter of Merari evokes and rehabilitates Judith the daughters of Beeri, the Hittite wife of Esau who 'made life bitter for Isaac and Rebecca.'"

Also notable is her dead husband's name: Manasseh, the name of the king who is held responsible for the Babylonian Exile (2 Kgs 21:12-15; 23:26-27; 24:3-4). Note also that it is Judith, not her husband, whose geneaology is here traced.

Moreover, in light of the parallel w/Maccabean history, the name "Judith" may simultaneously be intended to evoke the male form "Judah," specifically suggesting comparison/contrast with Judah Maccabee.

Note also the thematic parallels between the account of the Jews' triumph in Judith and 1 Maccabee's account of Nicanor's defeat by Judah Maccabee (7:43-50):

"The army of Nicanor was crushed, and he himself was the first to fall in the battle. When his army saw that Nicanor had fallen, they threw down their arms and fled. The Jews pursued them a day's journey, from Adasa as far as Gazara, and as they followed kept sounding the battle call on the trumpets. And men came out of all the villages of Judea round about, and they out-flanked the enemy and drove them back to their pursuers, so that they all fell by the sword; not even one of them was left. Then the Jews seized the spoils and the plunder, and they cut off Nicanor's head and the right hand which he so arrogantly stretched out, and brought them and displayed them just outside Jerusalem. The people rejoiced greatly and celebrated that day as a day of great gladness... So the land of Judah had rest for a few days."

Parallels between Exodus 17 (Massah and Meribah episode) and Judith 7-13

"Because of the forty days framework in chs. 7-13 one is inclined to compare the Assyrian threat to the Jews in Judith with Israel's forty years in the desert after the flight from Egypt. Several details support the association. The situation of the starving Jews of Bethulia, who blame their leaders for not giving in to Holofernesm is similar to that of Israel complaining against Moses and Aaron and hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt. In 7.25 the inhabitants of Bethulia, lacking in faith, say: 'For now we have no one to help us, God has sold us into their hands to be strewn befor them in thirst and exhaustion'... There is only one episode in the Hebrew Bible where a situation of lack of water is found together with the testing motif. This is the scene in the desert at Massah and Meribah (Exodus 17:1-7; Num 20:2-13; cf. Deut. 33.8-11)."

-- J. van Henten, "Judith as Alternative Leader," in Feminist Companion to the Bible 7 (Sheffield University Press, 1995)