Achior Woke to the Head Judith Carried Out of the Camp

The captain woke in a locked house in Bethulia expecting to die at dawn. An army that did not want him had bound him to a tree below the town and left him, and the men of the hill country had cut him loose and carried him up through their own gate. All night he listened for the trumpets that would mean the wall had fallen. The trumpets did not come. Footsteps came instead, and a hand on the door, and a voice telling him he was summoned.

His name was Achior, an Ammonite who had once stood in the war tent of the greatest soldier in the world and told him the truth.

The Captain Who Told the Truth in the Wrong Tent

Holofernes, general of the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, had come west to break every people that had refused the king. He had shut the passes of the hill country, fortified the high places, and dropped obstacles across the open plains, and then he had called a council to learn the shape of the small nation still in his way. He summoned the chiefs of Moab, the captains of Ammon, the governors of the coast, and he put his question to them with the boredom of a man who already knows the answer. "Tell me now, you sons of Canaan," he said, "who is this people that dwell in the hill country, and what is the multitude of their army, and wherein is their power, and what king is set over them?"

Achior answered him. He told where this people came from, how they had gone down into Egypt and been brought up again, how they could not be beaten while they kept faith with their God, and how they fell only when they sinned. It was not flattery and it was not fear, and Holofernes had no use for either. To speak of a god who guarded a town of farmers, in a tent that held the power of an empire, was an insult. The general had Achior dragged out, bound, and set below Bethulia, so that when the town fell he would fall with it. "You shall not see my face again," Holofernes told him, "until I take revenge on this nation." That was the last word between them.

A Widow Walks Out Through the Pickets

While Achior sat tied to his tree, a widow of the town had done the thing no council of governors imagined. Judith had washed and dressed and gone down out of the gate with one servant and a bag of her own food, walked into the pickets of the besieging army, and asked to be brought to the general. She told the soldiers she had fled her doomed people to bring Holofernes the hour his enemy would be defenseless, and they marveled at her face and led her in. For days she ate her own provisions, went out at night to pray, and let the general believe he was hunting her while she was hunting him.

On the fourth night Holofernes feasted, and drank more than he had ever drunk in his life, and had her brought to his tent for himself. The slaves went out. The lamp burned low. The general lay across his bed too heavy with wine to lift his head, and the widow stood over him alone. She took down the sword that hung above the bed. She prayed once, under her breath, and then she struck his neck twice and took off his head, and rolled the great body from the bed, and pulled the canopy down after it. She put the head in the food bag her servant carried, and the two women walked back out through the camp as they had every night, to pray, and no one stopped them until they were inside the gate of Bethulia again.

The Head in a Stranger's Hand

By the time Achior was led into the assembly, the town was awake and packed into the square around the one thing every man wanted to see. Judith held it out of the bag in the lamplight. The face of Holofernes, the face that had filled a war tent and silenced kings, hung now from a fist in a crowd of farmers.

The men brought the Ammonite forward through the press. When he came close enough to see what the hand held, when he understood whose head it was, the strength went out of his legs and he dropped on his face in the dust and fainted dead away. They had to lift him and bring him back to himself. When he could stand, he did not turn to the elders or to the soldiers. He went to the feet of the widow and bowed to the ground before her. "Blessed are you in every tent of Judah," he said, "and in every nation, for they that hear your name will be troubled." And then Achior the Ammonite, who had told the truth in the wrong tent and lived, believed in the God of Israel from that hour, and was circumcised, and was joined to the house of Israel to this day.

The Hand That Was Guided

Word ran up to the watch on the wall, and the people did with the head what Judith told them. They hung it from the battlement where the dawn would catch it, facing the camp, so that the first thing the Assyrians saw when they came to wake their general for the assault was the general himself, looking back at them off the wall of the town he had come to erase. The army came apart. Men ran for the tent, found the canopy down and the body without its head, and the panic went through the lines faster than any order. Israel came down out of the hills behind them.

And the people blessed her, and they did not bless only her. "Blessed is the Lord God," they sang over the widow, "who created the heavens and the earth, who guided you in cutting off the head of the chief of our enemies." Her courage would not depart from the hearts of men, they said, and they would remember the power of God forever, because she had not spared her own life when the nation was crushed but had walked a straight path before their God. The widow stood in the square with the empty bag, and above her on the wall the head of the conqueror kept watch over an army that was no longer there.