Book of Judith

Abstract

Judith is one of the books of the Apocrypha, the Jewish texts that were included in the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments (including Armenian, Syrian, and Ethiopian Orthodox Bibles), but not in the Protestant Old Testament or Jewish scriptures. Judith was placed with the history texts of the Old Testament, and, more specifically, it was located with Tobit and Esther, texts that were probably also seen as entertaining or didactic history. (The question of why Judith was not canonized as part of the Hebrew Bible is raised in Why Wasn’t the Book of Judith Included in the Hebrew Bible? [Atlanta: Scholars, 1992] and Esther not Judith: Why One Made it and the Other Didn’t (Crawford 2002), [Bible Review 18 [2002]: 22–31, 45] both cited under Texts of Judith and Reviews of Scholarship.) That Judith seemed to be inaccurate “history” was noticed in the ancient church, but the genre is now much discussed. It is sometimes taken as didactic or parabolic history, but it (along with Tobit, Esther, Susanna, and Joseph and Aseneth) is compared also with the developing genre of short and long novels (see Das Buch Judit (Haag 1995) [Dusseldorf, Germany: Patmos, 1995] cited under Commentaries and The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (Wills 1995) [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press] cited under Comparative).