Cities Surrendered Everything to Holofernes Then His Own Army Fled

The Surrender Formula

The cities ahead of Holofernes had one option. They sent messengers before he arrived, and the messengers said the same thing in every city along the coast: Behold we have fallen before you to the ground. Do with us as you see fit. All that is ours is yours. Our farmsteads and cities, our cattle and sheepfolds and our tents are before you, to do with as you please.

This was not negotiation. There was nothing to negotiate. The army behind Holofernes had already burned the holy places of nations that tried to resist, had slaughtered populations that looked like they might fight back. The messengers came out from gates that were left standing open, bearing the words like a recited formula, the same cadence repeated town after town until it stopped sounding like speech and started sounding like surrender itself.

The cities that chose surrender gave him everything before he asked. Their walls, their sons, their granaries, their animals. They handed him the complete contents of their lives and called it obedience. There was no holdout, no city that bargained for terms, no elder who came out to ask what would be spared. The roads filled with people coming forward with what they owned, and Holofernes took it without slowing his march.

The General Brings the Coast Under His Hand

Holofernes accepted the surrenders and moved south. He garrisoned every city, putting his own men inside the walls that had opened for him. He conscripted the strongest young men, pulling them out of the surrendered towns to swell the column that already darkened the plain behind him. He brought the sea coast and all the hill country under his hand, town by town, before turning at last toward Judea.

By the time he camped in the valley below Bethulia, no power between the Euphrates and the sea had refused him. The whole region had been folded into his line of march without a single wall breached by force. Every city had simply walked out to meet him and laid itself down.

Judith Gives the Army Its Instructions

She had been back in Bethulia for one night when she told the town what to do next. The gates should open at first light. Every fighting man should take his weapons and go out. They should not go far, only far enough to look like a force moving toward the Assyrian camp. Then they should wait.

Judith did not tell them to attack. She told them to stand in the cold dawn at the edge of the slope, armed, in plain sight, and do nothing but be seen. The men went out as she said and held their line where the watchmen on the wall could still make them out against the grey light, weapons in hand, waiting for whatever she knew was coming inside the camp below.

The Camp Comes Apart at Dawn

Judith had already sent word through Bagoas, the eunuch who had served as Holofernes's household steward. He went to the general's tent at dawn to wake him for the morning report and found the body. He cried out. The Assyrian officers rushed in. The generals saw what had happened and ran.

The camp, which had absorbed every army on the coast without breaking its formation, came apart in the time it took word to spread from tent to tent. Men who had marched in silent discipline from the Euphrates now broke and scattered with no one giving an order, no enemy in the camp, nothing but the cry from a dead man's tent and the sight of the officers running first. The soldiers ran toward Damascus and beyond. The Jews of every surrounding village poured out behind them, down out of the hills the army had thought it owned.

The general who had received total unconditional surrender from every city between the Euphrates and the sea was carried out of his tent in pieces the morning after a widow from Bethulia came to dinner.