Judith

Contemporary pop culture has embraced superheroes and other larger-than-life figures, male and female, who are uncomplicated by nuance and untroubled by motivation. They are strong and they are good. It is tempting to simplify Judith itself into some kind of Medieval comic book, with Judith, the warrior-virgin wildly underestimated by the forces of darkness who, with superhero cunning, triumphantly brandishes a talismanic “keen-edged sword” (Line 107), decapitates her formidable enemy, and then leads her downtrodden people to an improbable victory in an apocalyptic and very bloody showdown against evil itself.

But Judith is no simple superhero. Her story does not celebrate the heroics of an individual or even the triumph of a long-suffering people. Rather, Judith is an agent. She is weaponized by a righteous and powerful Christian God as part of an unending war against the threat from infidels, atheists, and pagans, a campaign that continued long after Judith held aloft the bloody head of Holofernes and long after the 10th-century Anglo-Saxons, the poem’s intended audience, had survived centuries of terror at the hands of pagan Vikings. Judith is not Judith’s story at all; it is an extended parable designed to reassure a Christian people in crisis, whatever era, that God will not, cannot, abandon them.

The first parts of the poem focus not on Judith or even on the Assyrians encamped dangerously close to the walls of Bethulia. Instead, they direct the reader’s eye upward. Judith begs God to protect her “against the greatest dangers” (Line 4), that her “true faith” (Line 6) will guide her in what she knows she must do. Judith is no warrior. She is a Christian. And the Assyrians’ drunken feast, all orchestrated by Holofernes, is less a banquet and more an abject lesson in the pagan lifestyle of indulgence, intemperate appetites, and unleashed carnality. They drink and drink until “every good [is] gone from them” (Line 33). They are not drunk soldiers. They are sinners.

It can be argued—and has been argued (See: Further Reading & Resources [Guenther])—how difficult it is to square the idea of Judith as Christian with her deliberate two-swing decapitation of a man helpless and passed out. In the poem’s view, it is exactly her being a Christian that makes righteous this otherwise brutal murder of a defenseless man. Judith, as she prepares to heft the unwieldy sword, prays not for victory or for strength but rather for faith: “Grant me, Lord of the skies,” Judith prays, “[s]uccess and soundness of faith, that with this sword I may / Behead this hideous monster” (Lines 91-93). Holofernes’s death then is less an act of war and more a prayer answered.

In Part 3, then, Judith returns to her city not as a conquering hero but rather as a supplicant whose prayer has been answered and whose God is now demonstrably intervening on behalf of His people: “The Master,” she tells the downtrodden people of her city, too ready to surrender to the pagan threat, “is kind to you” (Line 159). Her prayerful words of inspiration raise their spirits, and they throng around the young girl, even before she displays the bloody head of Holofernes, because they feel in their heart the girl as a reflection of God’s power. She is a “handmaid of God” (Line 170), an instrument of His will.

When she dramatically pulls the head from the sack, she does not seek their thanks nor offer herself as the killer of their enemy. Rather, she tells them that “God would not suffer him / Longer to live” (Lines 188-89). In assassinating him, Judith then was simply, humbly seeing to God’s will. Part 3 closes in a similar vein. Judith exhorts the Jewish soldiers of Bethulia to gird themselves for battle at dawn but humbly in the name of the “blessed Creator / The mighty Master” (Lines 202-03).

Part 4 contrasts the quiet, steely commitment of the Israelites, “heroes under helmets from the holy city” (Line 209), to the chaos and confusion of the pagan Assyrians. Without the support and moral guidance of the Christian God, the Assyrians reveal their weaknesses in the clarifying light of God’s breaking dawn. They are hungover from the feast and slow to realize the implications of the approaching Israelites. They panic. They cling to loyalty to their general who, they think, refuses to stir from his tent. They dither about the general’s tent, no one willing to interrupt the general’s drunken defilement of the Jewish virgin. Their confusion and their fright reflect how God withholds dignity and hope from the godless: “[A]ll of Assyria / Was subdued and doomed” (Line 272). And in discovering the headless corpse of their general, the Assyrians react in keeping with the poem’s parable argument that the godless manifest their doom: The soldiers scatter “in flight” (Line 298).

Fittingly, Part 5, which recounts the slaughter of the Assyrians, is the poem’s shortest, reflecting the quick and absolute hand of God’s righteous anger: “[T]he piles of the slaughtered” (Line 321) “[p]ut to sleep by the sword” (Line 330) reflect not the military acumen of the Israelites but rather God’s glory. Had the poem ended with Part 5, the poem might seem a conventional war epic, with the enemy vanquished and the warrior-victors heading back to their city laden with the spoils of their victory, jewels and gems, armor and swords.

In fact, as is often the case with the Israelites in the Old Testament, the relieved citizenry of Bethulia get the wrong message. In Part 6, they attempt to celebrate the leadership of Judith and gift her with the spoils of battle, “bracelets and brilliant gems” (Line 350), and even the armor of the general she singlehandedly killed.

Their gratitude, however, is misplaced, out of sync with the argument the poem has made since the opening lines. In the closing part, it is left to Judith to recenter the Israelites and remind them that their deliverance came from God, not from her. As Ian Pringle (1975) argues (See: Further Reading & Resources), the grand story of the defeat of the Assyrians is like a sermon, and Judith closes with the lesson appropriate to the story. Look upward, Judith tells her celebrating Israelites. Look up with humility and gratitude for God’s continuing mercy. The poem closes then as it begins, with Judith in prayer: “Thanks to the Heavenly Host, from whom came all her success” (Line 353). It is left to Judith to provide the victory on the battlefield with a broader context, a wider perspective. The victory gives “praise to God / […] who shaped the clouds and the winds” (Lines 357-58).