Typological Composition and Historia ex vaticinio: The Assyrian Prophecies of Isaiah and the Book of Judith

Josephus claims that it is the Greeks who invent their histories from their own conjectures and are therefore not ashamed to give contradictory accounts of the same events. This is caused by a lack of a practice of keeping public records, itself resulting from their recent acquisition of writing. The predisposition to invention, conjecture, and contradiction further springs from their perpetual need to distinguish themselves in writing and to make an impression (epangelma), which brought some of them to create unlikely myths (muthologein). In the opening words of his Jewish War, Josephus declares that his purpose in writing his account is to counteract the flatteries and fictions (kolakeiai and plasmata) that Greeks and Romans were being subjected to. Without a doubt there is a certain degree of rhetoric in these claims that can be found in the Greek and Roman accounts as well: the opponents of every historian are also claimed to be writing fiction and myth, while the present writer is claimed to produce nothing but the truth. But we must be open to the possibility that Josephus meant what he said: that he imagined that the Judaean archives were perfectly accurate, that he was not modifying or falsifying the original documents in any way even when he supplemented them with insights from other sorts of documents or texts, and that he imagined his accounts to be utterly unlike myth or fiction. Further, it is entirely likely that Josephus was not alone in his views. He is perhaps the best witness to the internal disposition of Jewish readers in the Roman period and may be supposed to give some indication of the mentality of readers from earlier times. Judaean readers without equivalent education in Greco-Roman culture would likely have been more predisposed to accept the truthfulness of their reading matter presented as deriving from Judaean traditions. And so there is, from this perspective at least, little reason to suspect the existence of a community of readers prepared to accept the impossibility of the works they were reading, even works not as authoritative as the scriptures (however these were defined in various periods). For this reason alone, we should be wary of classifying Jewish works from the Second Temple Period, including those composed in Greek, as “fiction.”

The argument for the existence of Second Temple Jewish fiction has hinged on the disposition of the writer rather than the reader, and to this I will now turn. It is, of course, impossible to assess what writers intended about their writing. We are left with the evidence of the texts themselves. It has always been easy to suggest that texts that differ from biblical events and precursors are invented fabrications with “non-biblical” details. Nevertheless, it is necessary to be open to the existence of scriptural prompts that guided the creation of such stories.

One such prompt can be found in the practice of typology among Jewish Greek works, a form of intertextuality in which literary types or precursors from earlier narratives help shape and provide an outline for their avatars in subsequent works. Originally used to designate the (alleged) prophetic foreshadowing of the life of Jesus in Old Testament works, the concept has been applied to similar sorts of intertextual resonance in other contexts, including biblical and early Jewish texts (Newman 1999; Wyrick 2011). It is easy to see how a typological focus was able to spur the creation of new works, even in a literary tradition comfortable with creating works in a historical or historicizing vein and that (as we have seen from the example of Josephus) scorned notions of originality, fabrication, and literary ornament as worthwhile literary features. Consistent with the testimony of Jewish storytelling in the rabbinic period, the creation of works in a typological mode was apparently not viewed in the Second Temple Period as exemplifying hubris or inappropriate license. To the contrary, the very process of projecting a time-honored narrative or character into a new time and setting involved an avoidance of invention.

There are several problems with the typological analysis of a work like the book of Judith as it has been previously explored. First, there is a tendency among scholars to assume that the essence of the typology is metaphorical and structurally analogous rather than metonymic and narratologically contiguous, as if the new text represents a rewriting of or allegorical commentary on the prior text. Second, I would advocate against excessive structuralist interpretation of the new work in relation to its typological precursor, in recognition of the fact that the new narrative itself might not derive from a single typological precursor, as I will show with the example of the book of Judith. However, we should not dismiss a suggested typology on the grounds that not all key elements in the precursor episode are present in the updated version. As I will show, a text like the book of Judith tends to use a typological precursor as a thematic aid in accomplishing a sustained task; the type as it appears in its new context may be only partly analogous to the circumstances involved in the original context. In presenting a new circumstance (especially in the advancement of an exegetical agenda prompted by an even more pressing intertext), the type is used to flesh out new characters and narrative episodes called for by the new literary context. The new story in this way attains an acceptable or conventionally valid literary quality and simultaneously avoids the hubris involved in the invention of a new character or narrative twist out of thin air. In this sense, the type becomes a compositional device similar to the notion of “theme” as defined by Albert Lord: a group of ideas regularly used in telling a tale in the formulaic style of traditional song (Lord 1976:68).

By an interpretive emphasis on the sincere disposition of those responsible for these kinds of works, I do not mean to assert that the works themselves are bereft of the kind of literary features that have been discerned by other scholars, such as irony, playfulness, or embellishment. These features are of course present in all kinds of works, regardless of the beliefs of the authors and communities from which they arise. I do however contest the existence of the sly wink of the eye from writer to audience or the historical blunder that was always intended to be discovered by the reader as a key to his or her intended reading experience. My approach instead begins with an attempt to understand Greco-Judaean works as resulting from sincere belief.

In the frequent scholarly conversations about the typological precursors to the book of Judith, little discussed is the strength of its approach to villains and their precursors in the determination of the shape of the narrative. To be sure, scholars have endlessly discussed the historical problems raised by Judith’s villains. Nebuchadnezzar was not king of the Assyrians and did not rule in Nineveh, the commentaries never tire of pointing out. The gesture has sometimes been viewed as a kind of historical blunder that could only have been intended to signal that the work is historical fiction. Such outrageous historical inaccuracies are thought to provide a signal to actual contemporary readers (or at least to the mystical “intended reader” that scholars of ancient literature seem always to be able to discern) that the work has left the realm of history and has entered into the realm of fiction. However, the so-called historical blunder continued to play a role in Jewish legends, without any outright acknowledgement of its utter impossibility. Nebuchadnezzar is referred to as the son of Sennacherib and as a survivor of the defeat of Sennacherib’s forces in rabbinic texts (e.g. B. Sanhedrin 95b; Tosefta-Targum to 2 Kings 19.35 and Isaiah 10.32 make him a son-in-law of Sennacherib, cf. Jerome’s Commentary on Isaiah 10.13). Nebuchadnezzar was no more difficult to imagine as bridging the gap between the time of Hezekiah and the Babylonian exile than Isaiah himself, whose prophecies as found in the current book of Isaiah are (improbably) set in both periods. We are on more difficult ground with the book of Judith’s notion of a Nebuchadnezzar who again invades Israel even after the end of the exile and the re-establishment of the Temple in Jerusalem. But Judith is remarkably focused on a few scenes from the Bible: the conflicts with Shechem, Sisera, and Sennacherib, with some references to the victory over Pharaoh at the Red Sea. I will also argue that it engages in an extended dialogue with the book of Isaiah, and it is from this larger work that it takes its knowledge of the miraculous salvation of Jerusalem from the clutches of Sennacherib (rather than from the parallel account in 2 Kings).

Other Greco-Judaean works from the Second Temple period exhibit interest in the miraculous victory of the Israelites over a succession of villains. An extended list of biblical exemplars (referred to by scholars as the Beispielreihe) that focuses exclusively on villains or on individuals who survive persecution is found twice in 3 Maccabees. The Beispielreihe, typically viewed as a development of the technique found in Odyssey v.118–133, contains a heading with a focal point, lists exempla that illustrate the point, manifests a compressed format, and repeats the wording of the heading to poetic effect (Newman 1999:159–200, citing Dimant 1990:392 and Schmidt 1977:18–19). In a villainous vein, the Beispielreihe in 3 Maccabees 2:2–8 documents the punishments of the giants of Genesis 6, the Sodomites, and Pharaoh. Eleazar’s prayer in 3 Maccabees 6:2–15 lists Pharaoh, Sennacherib, and several examples of individuals saved from persecution. [3] In a variety of closely-linked passages that resemble Beispielreihen, rabbinic legends frequently speak of Nebuchadnezzar as a king who claimed to be God, grouping him together with villains such as Nimrod, the men of Sodom, Pharaoh, Sisera, Sennacherib, and Hiram (e.g., Mekhilta Shirata 2.84; 6.49; 8.31; Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shimon 32.1; Tosefta Sotah 3.10; Breshit Rabbah 9.5; Shemot Rabbah 8.2; and Bamidbar Rabbah 14.1 and 21.23).

It is thus reasonable that the Book of Judith has gravitated towards Yael and Deborah in Judges 4–5 as a result of a typology of villains rather than of heroes. In creating Holofernes, the commander for the invading armies of Nebuchadnezzar, the author of Judith was drawn to one of the most memorable enemy commanders from the Bible—Sisera, who attacked Israel on behalf of Jabin, king of Canaan. The example of Yael thus could have been chosen as a heroic model for the heroine of the resistance to Nebuchadnezzar and Holofernes as a result of a prior interest in Sisera (and perhaps from a relevant prophecy of Isaiah that brought to mind a female heroine from the start—see below). As a more pointed example, the character Judith is unlikely to be the avatar of the passive, violated Dinah from Genesis 34, unless somehow as an antitype. Instead, the successful Israelite resistance to Shechem and Hamor, viewed as villains by the book of Judith, could have facilitated a connection between Judith and the violent pair, Simeon and Levi.

Verbal allusions to the Song of the Sea (Ex. 15) might also be attributed to the fact that victory over Pharaoh was to be included in the list of close-calls with villains referenced by Judith, even more than to any developed parallel with Miriam, who also is described as prophesying after the crossing of the Red Sea (Egger-Wenzel 2009). Villainous Beispielreihen, such as the two found in 3 Maccabees, often include Pharaoh as a key exemplar. In the book of Judith, however, the encounter with Pharaoh may be downplayed because it does not fit into the theme of the defense of the land of Israel from external subjugation and attack.

Similarly, the importance of Nebuchadnezzar to the narrative may have been generated by the attempt to locate a typological avatar for another biblical villain: Sennacherib, the Assyrian king of Nineveh who invaded Israel in the days of King Hezekiah of Judah and Isaiah the prophet and was repulsed after an unsuccessful siege of Jerusalem in a miraculous victory brought about by God. Similarities between Sennacherib’s invasion and the Book of Judith are not difficult to spot, but differences too may be found. As indicated earlier, a view of typology that posits the more recent text as an allegory for its typological precursor and that sees differences between the two versions as communicating in coded form the message of the author is not useful in describing the approach to typology found in the Book of Judith.

It seems more accurate to claim that the “avatar narrative” is not in fact a retelling of the original, but rather a redeployment of elements of the original narrative to suit an entirely different setting. Judith can be seen as an avatar narrative based on the victory over Sennacherib, but it does not constitute a retelling involving close midrashic-type exegesis of elements of this episode. The book’s villain is, in effect, an amalgamation of the types of both Sisera and Sennacherib, while its heroine recapitulates roles played by Yael in the book of Judges and Simeon and Levi in Genesis 34. The song that Judith sings in chapter 16 similarly borrows from the literary examples of the songs of Moses (the Song at the Sea), Miriam (whose song is referred to in the same episode), and Deborah (her song of victory in Judges 5). In each of these cases, the book cobbles together references and shadows of characters, songs, villains, scenes of salvation, and feats of daring. The narrative thus erects itself out of a collage of literary structures, fragments, and coloring that derive from a repertoire of biblical exempla deployed to serve the needs of a new challenge: the documentation of a post-exilic victory in fulfillment of the oracles of scripture over the perpetual enemy, the ever-living Pharoah/Sennacherib/Nebuchadnezzar, and their stereotypical general.

This is a completely different matter from a deliberate retelling of a pre-existing biblical narrative that makes use of the original character names, such as Judith’s retelling of the Dinah episode in her prayer in Chapter 9. There, Judith recalls an example from the past in which God similarly came to the aid of his devoted servant. To be sure, the retelling also represents a remarkable interpretation of the episode, claiming that Simeon (and presumably Levi as well) were divinely directed to take vengeance on the Shechemites in righteous recompense for what all the Shechemites (and not just Shechem himself) had done. Such a view contrasts markedly with Jacob’s apparent disapproval of their actions at the end of Genesis 34, as well as with the condemnation of the violence and lawlessness of Simeon and Levi in his dying prophetic utterance in Genesis 49.

Remarkable as well in Judith’s retelling is the notion of a sword put by God into Simeon’s hand to take revenge on the Canaanites. When Judith invokes Simeon in her prayer, she cries out, “Lord, God of my father Simeon, into whose hands You gave a sword for vengeance upon the strangers who loosed the virgin’s zone to defilement…” (Judith 9:2). The divine sword motif is found also in the Testament of Levi 5.1–3, in which God almost miraculously equips both Simeon and Levi with a sword and shield. That Simeon and Levi are provided with a sword is already found in Genesis 34:25. The biblical origin of a divinely created sword found in Judith and the Testament of Levi is more difficult to determine, although it has been suggested that it derives either from the fact that they are described as entering the camp of the Shechemites beṭaḥ ‘in confidence, safe’ (Gen. 32:25). Alternately, it may originate from the phrase, “instruments of violence were their weapons (mĕkērotêhem)” in Jacob’s oracle about Simeon and Levi (Gen. 49:5). Hebrew mĕkērotêhem ‘their weapons’ sounded like Greek makhaira ‘sword’ or ‘dagger’ (Kugel 1992:5, citing Midrash Tanhuma, Vayyehi 9 [end], which in fact states that the word is Greek in origin). The divine sword granted to Simeon is no doubt relevant to the scene in the book of Judith in which she finds Holofernes’ sword lying near him in his tent and uses it to decapitate him.

A substantial minority of scholars of the book of Judith have been convincing in making a case for the Greek composition of the book (see Joosten 2007; Rakel 2003:33–40; Schmitz 2009; Gera 2010:25–26). In fact, the existence of a Hebrew original had always been rather weak, its main argument being the statement of St. Jerome from his preface to the Latin translation of the book that appeared to suggest that Jerome had consulted a “Chaldaean” (Aramaic) original.

Jerome states that Judith is read “among the Apocrypha,” perhaps acknowledging that the book is located among those Greek books not found in the Hebrew Bible itself. The fact that Jerome describes himself as working from multiple codices militates against his having translated from an Aramaic text. He could easily have consulted a variety of Septuagint manuscripts of the book, but he is unlikely have had access to multiple copies of an Aramaic original, which would probably not have been extant in the form of a codex in any event.

The second reference to “Chaldaean” in Jerome’s preface may be understood to refer to Jerome’s view of the ultimate origin of this text, rather than his immediate textual source: “only those things, which I was able to discover with sense unimpaired (intelligentia integra) in Chaldaean words (in verbis Chaldaeis), I have expressed in Latin [words] (Latinis).” It was Jerome who supposed that an Aramaic original lay behind his Greek manuscript, perhaps extrapolating from the existence of the Aramaic text of the Apocryphal book of Tobit. He apparently used his supposition of the existence of such an Aramaic original to understand (if not to edit) the book of Judith and to make sense of its Semitizing Greek. Finally, Jerome’s description of a translation that took the course of a single night seems only reasonable with regard to a Greek original; a Hebrew or Aramaic original would have occasioned consultation with native speakers, especially considering his rudimentary knowledge of Aramaic. In fact, Jerome describes such a process with regard to his translation of Tobit:

A single day’s translation of a comparable Aramaic text required for Jerome the use of a native informant; he would not have undertaken a similar translation so speedily without such aid, notwithstanding his other pressing labor.

Studies of the original language of the book of Judith’s composition have uncovered evidence of another sort in favor of Greek: the book’s use of expressions deriving from the Septuagint (LXX) rather than existing as independent translations of the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) or some other Hebrew manuscript. Two examples from the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) form the core of this argument. In two places, the book of Judith describes God (termed either kurios ‘lord’ or theos ‘God’) as “waging wars” (suntribôn polemous). [4]

The phrase seems to derive from the Septuagint version of Exodus 15:3, acknowledged by many to be an intertext for the book of Judith on other grounds as well:

In contrast, it is almost impossible to derive this wording from the Hebrew original of the verse (as preserved in the Masoretic Text), “Yahweh is a man of war (ʾîš milḥāmâ); Yahweh is his name” (Ex. 15:3). The reason for the translation liberty is clear: the Septuagint translator was attempting to avoid the anthropomorphism implied in the description of God as a man, consistent with a longstanding Alexandrian Jewish eschewal of anthropomorphism of the divine. [5] Another example of Judith borrowing from the Septuagint has also been brought to the fore. The Septuagint’s pairing of phobos kai tromos ‘fear and trembling’ in LXX Exodus 15:16 seems to have served as a model for the identical expression in Judith 2:28 and the reversal of the pair in Judith 15:2 (tromos kai phobos), although the Hebrew original of this expression (ʾêmatâ wāpaḥad) cannot be excluded as an independent source of both passages from Judith.

As many scholars have already shown, the Book of Judith’s use of biblical texts was not merely a matter of incorporating scatted expressions from favored texts; it also took characters and whole episodes as models for the composition of its own corresponding characters and events. For instance, the Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah evidently served as exemplars for the song that Judith herself sings in celebration of the victory of the Israelites over Sisera and the invading Assyrians. But this is, I have suggested, a matter of typological composition and does not inform the substance of the song. I will argue that the book of Judith’s overall purpose, and indeed, most of the troublesome historical inaccuracies themselves (see Johnson 2004:24–29 and 46–48) derive from its close attention to the prophecies relating to Assyria found in the Book of Isaiah and an attempt to create a narrative that would fulfill the prediction of a thwarted Assyrian attack on a newly-pious population of Israel.

If the Book of Judith was composed in Greek, it is reasonable to suppose that it made use of the Bible in Greek, as we have seen from references to LXX Exodus 15 and LXX Isaiah 3. What has not been noticed in the aforementioned discussions of the influence of the Septuagint translation on the book of Judith is the frequency with which the Greek of Isaiah in particular emerges as the source of this influence. This holds true even for the expression from Exodus 15:3 already discussed as a key indicator of the original Greek composition of the book. The future verb form suntripsei polemon ‘he will bring together war’ as a translation of the similar Hebrew expression ʾîš milḥāmôt ‘man of wars’ is used of God in LXX Isaiah 42:13: “The Lord God of the powers will go forth and bring together war…”. [6] Without discounting the significance of Ex. 15 for the book of Judith, it seems appropriate to point out that the near repetition of the phrase in the Septuagint of Isaiah might have heightened its importance to the composer of Judith, who used the phrase twice.

Similarly, Judith’s cry, meth’ hêmôn ho theos ho theos hêmôn ‘with us is God, our God’ in 13:3 might be a reference to the name Immanuel (literally, “with us is God”) found in Isaiah 7:14. The same concept is also fully spelled out in Isaiah 8:8 (meth’ hêmôn ho theos ‘with us is God’) and 8:10 (meth’ hêmôn kurios ho theos ‘with us is the Lord God’). [7] In Isaiah 18:7, Zion is described as “the place of the Name of the LORD Almighty”; in a theologically similar vein, Judith 9:8 describes the tabernacle (skênôma) as a place “of the resting (katapausis) of the Name of Your glory.” Like Isaiah 66:1, in which God asks where will his resting place be (implying that no such place can be built that will contain Him), the point here may be that it is the Name of God only that rests in the Temple. Basileus ho megas ‘the great king’ in Judith 2:5 and 6:4 also seems to relate to Isaiah 36:4 and 13. The only other two uses in the LXX include 2 Kings 18:19, the repetition of the Isaiah passage, and Tobit 13:16, which is unlikely to have served as an intertext for Judith. [8] Further, humnon kainon ‘a new hymn’ in Judith 16:13 may recall the identical expression in LXX Isaiah 42:10. [9]

A case for the significance of the book of Isaiah to Judith, and in particular the Greek Isaiah, is not difficult to make. [10] The Greek translation of the book is theorized to have been among the earliest of the translations (ca. 170 BCE) that came after the translation of the Pentateuch (ca. 250–221 BCE), which would precede the usual dates proposed for the book of Judith, mostly hovering around a date of 150 BCE (see Gera 2009; 2010:26–27), essentially during or soon after the Maccabean conflict.

Prophecies of the book of Isaiah, in particular the references to Assyria involving some undetermined and even eschatological date in the future (“on that day”) may thus represent a key source and origin of this literary project. The narrative seems to have partly arisen in an anti-eschatological or anti-presentist mode (what can be shown to have already been fulfilled in the historical past is no longer available for an end-of-time or contemporary interpretation). Thus, the primary intertext of the book of Judith is not Judges 4–5 or Genesis 34, but rather the succession of prophecies relating to Assyria found in the Book of Isaiah that have a positive rather than a negative outcome.

While Isaiah’s prophecies about Assyria are sometimes today read as having been fulfilled in the invasion by Sennacherib in Isaiah 37–40, readings of the Assyria predictions in the Second Temple period have tended to search for a more contemporary and socially relevant fulfillment of these verses as prophetic utterances. The Isaiah Pesharim found at Qumran (4Q161) are quite interesting in treating references to Assyria in the book of Isaiah as representing the Kittim, a designition that seems to have been a code at Qumran for the contemporary enemies of the sectarians, the Romans (or perhaps in some cases the Seleucids). To give one example of a Pesher on Isaiah 10:

For the author of the Isaiah Pesher, Assyria as it appeared in the book of Isaiah was a code for some future invasion, not a reference to the already completed invasion of Sennacherib described in Isaiah 37–40.

At times, the prophecies about Assyria in Isaiah speak about Assyria as God’s tool, holding the “rod of my wrath and anger” (Isaiah 10:5) with which a variety of cities are to be brought low, including the Israelites themselves, if they are to be understood as the “lawless nation” mentioned in Isaiah 10:

The first three chapters of the book of Judith seem to encapsulate the notion of an Assyria that acts as God’s tool, ruling over nearly the entire earth, as it were, including Mesopotamia and Syria, Put and Lud, Egypt and Arabia. Ambiguity, however, arises with the identification of the “lawless nation” of verse 6. Normally, one might construe this to be the people of Israel itself. The invasion by Sennacherib was one such punishment of Judah, recompense for the sorts of idolatrous practices that Hezekiah eventually eliminates from Israelite worship. But Isaiah 10:6 contrasts the “lawless nation” with “my people.” Further, the Book of Judith is set in a time when the Israelites were no longer lawless.

Moreover, what was to be done with the prophecies of Isaiah that predicted the destruction of Assyria? Perhaps it was not so satisfying to interpreters of Isaiah that Assyria was finally overcome in 605 BCE by the Babylonians. After all, Isaiah had claimed that it would be the Lord that would be their undoing.

Indeed, the foretold destruction is to occur in a time when Israel gives up idols of silver and gold and thus reasonably at the hands of the Israelites themselves. See, for instance, Isaiah 31:5–6:

According to this passage, Assyria is to fall precisely at a time when the Israelites have abandoned their idolatrous ways. And if the Assyrian armies had already been destroyed in the form of the destruction of Sennacherib’s troops at Jerusalem, when did this second, more deserved destruction occur? My claim is that the book of Judith supplies a concrete narrative to fulfill the conditions of the prophecies regarding Assyria in the book of Isaiah that are not fulfilled with Sennacherib’s defeat. Biblical scholars have long recognized the existence of the vaticinium ex eventu ‘oracle from the event’, a prophecy composed after the time of a historical event and yet set in a historical period prior to that event as if it were a prediction (see Oßwald 1963). Instead, we might describe the book of Judith as historia ex vaticinio ‘history from the oracle’: a historical account created in satisfaction of a prophecy could not otherwise be said to have been fulfilled.

Let us turn some of the other correlations between the book of Judith and the oracles of Isaiah that relate specifically to the key aspects of its narrative. First, the conditions of Israelite piety described in Isaiah 31 are exactly those of the Israelites in the book of Judith. According to Isaiah, “on that day people shall disown their handiworks of silver and gold, which their hands have made. Then Assour shall fall” (Isaiah 31:7-8). Confirming that these are indeed the conditions of the present conflict, Judith herself states:

Instead of being stripped of her garments in punishment, she removes the lowly sackcloth of her widowhood and puts on the ornaments of these women to fulfill a divine plan.

In both cases, a favored son is killed by means of a blade, as described in Isaiah 3:25. But could even the vivid detail of Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes, perhaps the most colorful moment of the book, have been prompted by the words of Isaiah? The intertexts of both Judges 4–5 and Genesis 34 may have played a role here. In the case of Yael, the biblical heroine pierces the head of Sisera with a tent peg. Further, as we have seen, Simeon, also a type of Judith, attacks Shechem (according to the book of Judith) with a divine sword. Harmonizing the two scenes, the author of the book of Judith might easily have come up with a heroine that uses a most convenient, almost miraculous sword to eliminate her victim. It might also be useful to bring to bear an important detail from perhaps the older of the two major manuscript traditions of the Septuagint version of Judges: version A in Rahlfs’ edition, which derives from the Codex Alexandrinus and two manuscript traditions associated with the recensions of Origen and Lucian. [12] In the song of Deborah as found in version A, it is stated that Yael beheaded (apetemen) Sisera (LXX Judges 5:26 Version A). (Incidentally, in this same song, Sisera’s mother is invoked as wondering if her missing husband is “dividing the spoil, showing friendship to friends towards a mighty one’s head.”[LXX Judges 5:30 Version A NETS])

Two scenes from the book of Isaiah might also have helped bridge the gap between the decapitating Yael and a future Assyrian invasion. Above all, why was the author of Judith drawn to Yael to begin with, beyond an immediate attraction to the episode’s villain, Sisera? Why have a female hero at all? The answer seems in part to lie in the “oracle” of Isaiah 14:

In the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT), it is “his burden” (subŏlô) which shall “drop” from the shoulders of the Israelites. In contrast, the Septuagint translates “burden” as kudos ‘renown’, implying that it is the renown of the Assyrians that will be forcibly “removed” (rather than that it will drop of their own accord as in the MT). The metaphor of renown being removed from shoulders is made concrete in Judith, by means of her ingenuity and a handy sharp sword. Another oracle that Isaiah pronounces to Hezekiah has a suggestive statement about a daughter of Jerusalem, in this case shaking her own head in mockery at the Assyrians:

In verse 22, the daughter of Jerusalem, depicted as a widow in both Isaiah 47:1 and 47:8 (cf. Lamentations 1), shakes her head dismissively at the blasphemous leader of the Assyrians. Judging from the Hebrew text, it appears that it is her own head that she is shaking in mockery. But Greek ekinêsen (literally “moved”) is easier to read as “set in motion” in a figurative sense (that is, “to have used her head” or planned his destruction). It can even be construed as “removed” (see LSJ, s.v.) in reference to the head of her enemy, as one might be inclined to do if the text were to be read in conjunction with LXX Isaiah 14:25 and the story of Yael (as found in version A of LXX Judges). In any case, the Book of Judith has made the enemy of Assyria a literal woman, if something less than a virgin; nevertheless, Judith’s chastity, though not retroactive, is underscored with some repetitiveness and plays a crucial role in the plot. One might also suggest that daughter Zion’s virginity as predicted in Isaiah 37:22 has been regained by the Israelites as a whole in parallel fashion to Judith herself. They are thus depicted as knowing no idolatry for what might well be the first time in the literary records of the Judaean people.

A further impetus for the search for female heroic types and the basic outline of the events of the book may very well be Isaiah 31, where it is stated that Assyria shall fall “not by the sword of man.”

In short, the decapitation of Holofernes has a biblical basis in the congruence of Yael’s tent peg and Levi and Simeon’s divine swords. Both episodes resonated with the references to the head of the leader of the Assyrians in Isaiah 14 and 37 and were easily reconciled with the “sword not from a man” in Isaiah 31.

In keeping with this link, I would suggest that other details in Isaiah’s oracles against Assyria, including Isaiah 37, an oracle ostensibly given in the context of the oncoming destruction of Sennacherib’s army at Jerusalem under Hezekiah, were used to produce lengthy portions of the book of Judith. The elaborate historical details found in the book of Judith have previously been explained as adding structure to the work or lending verisimilitude to the book’s historical pretensions (e.g. Moore 1985:39). See, for instance, Isaiah 37:

Nebuchadnezzar quite deliberately lives up to the outrage to be committed by such a figure, as described in Judith 3:8, in which Holofernes requires Assyria’s vassals worship Nebuchadnezzar as a god:

This description accords with the charge of blasphemy leveled against the target of Isaiah 37, despite the fact that Nebuchadnezzar elsewhere in biblical books is merely described as an idolator and polytheist, rather than a competitor to a monotheistic god. In fact, the conclusion that Nebuchadnezzar had made such a claim is actually derived by rabbinic interpreters from one such prophecy in Isaiah: “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:14). This verse is widely understood to be the statement of Nebuchadnezzar himself (in Mekhilta Shirata 2.84, 6.49, 8.31; Tosefta Sotah 3.19; and B. Hullin 89a).

The book of Judith also fulfills mention of the ascent to the utmost limits of Lebanon found in Isaiah 37, where the offending individual declares, “and I built a dam (gephura) and desolated the waters and every gathering of water” (LXX Isaiah 37:25; see also Isaiah 10:13). The entire Assyrian strategy against the town of Bethulia described in the book of Judith is to dry up its springs and to prevent its inhabitants from getting water, in order to encourage them to surrender. The dramatic siege of Ecbatana under the king “Arpaxad” (perhaps taken from Genesis 10) that comprises chapter 1 of Judith also accords with this individual’s boast “to make desolate the nations that are in strong places and those who dwell in strong cities” (Isaiah 37:26).

What then is at stake in the book of Judith’s reading of the Assyria prophecies in Isaiah as having been fulfilled in the days immediately following the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem? Not only did the Book of Judith seek to claim that these prophecies had been fulfilled at this time, its narrative as a whole should be seen as a sincere attempt to accomplish prophecy through historical narrative. Although analogous in some ways to the reading of the Assyrians as kittim in the Qumran Pesher, in other respects it stands in stark opposition. Where the Qumranic Pesharim view Isaiah as referring to the present enemies of the community or to a future time in which the kittim—the enemies of the present day—will receive their just deserts, the book of Judith in contrast dramatizes prophecies about the Assyrians in a thwarted, post-exilic invasion of Judea by Nebuchadnezzar that has already occurred. The impulse to create such a narrative fulfillment of prophecy stands in sharp opposition to both apocalyptic trends in Second Temple Judaism as well as to the presentist interpretations found, for example, throughout the Qumran Pesharim.

I have described a Judith composed of a hodgepodge of biblical references, scenes, types, and events, but structured around the oracles on Assyria from the book of Isaiah. This description does not impose upon Second Temple Jewish literature in general or Greco-Judaean literature in particular historically anachronistic motives and literary goals. It begins from the methodological standpoint that the writers of texts like Judith are sincere believers in their tradition who attempt to address new challenges through narrative, despite their apparent desire to avoid the invention of narratives and characters that are truly new. Accordingly, the book of Judith attempts to conceptualize prophetic utterances of scripture as valid and in their own way relevant to the present day by imagining them to have been already fulfilled in the past. This work creates history out of scriptural prophecy and elaborates on the nature of this history by means of literary building blocks from the Judaean scriptures, conceived of as a character repository containing timeless narratives and treated as ever-applicable to newly-discovered or newly-dramatized contexts.

Lang, Judith. 2012. “The Lord Who Crushes Wars: Studies on Judith 9:7, Judith 16:2 and Exodus 15:3.” In: Géza G. Xeravits, ed., A Pious Seductress: Studies in the Book of Judith. Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter 179-187.