Judith Cut Off the Head of Holofernes While He Slept

He drank more than he had ever drunk in his life. That detail is in the text of the Book of Judith, composed in the second century BCE, and it reads like a small note of divine humor. Holofernes, the general who had swept through the entire known world, who had shattered armies and burned sacred groves and made nations send him earth and water as tokens of surrender, was undone by the oldest trap in the world: a beautiful woman and too much wine.

Judith had spent four days at his camp. She had eaten her own food, kept her own hours of prayer, bathed herself in a spring each night and dressed in her finest clothes before going to Holofernes' tent. She was playing a part, and she played it flawlessly. She told Holofernes that she had left Bethulia because the starving people were about to sin against God by eating the consecrated food, and that God would tell her when that had happened, and she would lead the Assyrians into Jerusalem without a fight. It was a lie. Holofernes did not know it was a lie, because Holofernes had no frame of reference for a woman who was smarter than him and who loved God more than she feared death.

On the fourth night he invited her to a banquet. He drank, and his servants went to their beds, and Bagoas shut the tent from outside. Judith was left alone with him. He was passed out on his bed. His sword was hanging from a post at the head of the bed.

The text says she prayed. Then she took down the sword. Then she grabbed him by the hair. Then she struck once, twice, and took his head off. She put the head in her food bag. She and her maidservant walked out of the camp. No one stopped them. They were a widow and her servant. They had been leaving the camp every night at dawn to pray. The guards expected it.

When she reached Bethulia she called out from the gate: God, our God, is still with us, to show his power in Israel and his strength against the enemy, as he has done today.

The Book of Jubilees, written around the same period in the second century BCE and drawing on even older traditions, speaks of the Sabbath as the central sign between God and Israel. Among all the peoples of the earth, only Israel keeps the Sabbath. The day is set apart as holy, as a weekly renewal of the covenant between the people and the One who created them. The Jubilees text says God himself keeps Sabbath, and the angels of the presence keep Sabbath, and Israel was chosen to do the same, to be the only nation on earth that rests as God rests.

What is the connection between Judith's act and the Sabbath? The sign between God and Israel is that when Israel walks in faithfulness, God acts. Not always with armies. Not always in the ways the people expect. The sign is that ordinary obedience, the keeping of food laws and prayer times and the careful separation of the holy from the profane, is the preparation for miracles. Judith did not become a warrior by accident. She became one because she had been faithful every single day, keeping her prayers, keeping her fast days, keeping herself set apart, until the day came when faithfulness required picking up a sword.

The Jubilees text on Sabbath teaches that Israel was chosen before the nations received their inheritance. The Sabbath was written into the fabric of creation before the world was populated. The sign was not earned by merit but given as a gift, and then trusted to be kept. Judith kept everything she had been given. She did not panic when the elders of Bethulia said they would open the gates in five days if God did not act. She told them flatly that they had no right to put a deadline on God. And then she did the thing herself.

Holofernes never woke up. His servants found him in the morning, headless, and the camp dissolved into chaos. The men of Bethulia came pouring down from the hills, and the Assyrians ran. The ones who survived ran all the way back to Damascus.

What the text calls a sign between God and Israel is this: the enemy who believed that military force was all that existed met a woman who understood that the strongest thing in the world is not a sword in a general's hand but a sword in the hand of someone who is afraid of nothing because she has already given everything to God.

The head went into the bag. The tent was dark and still. She walked out carrying what had terrified a continent. And in Bethulia the people who had been dying of thirst were about to learn that help had come in the form they would never have predicted and never forgotten.