Judith 8: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Judith is introduced by her family line, by the death of her husband Manasses during the barley harvest, and by her life as a widow: fasting, sackcloth, and the wealth Manasses left her. She hears of the oath Ozias swore to hand Bethulia over in five days, summons the three elders, and tells them their words are not right, that they must not put God to the test or set terms for him, and that God tests his people as he tested Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Ozias agrees that she has spoken well, says the thirsty people forced the oath on them, and asks her to pray for rain. Judith tells them to stand at the gate that night while she goes out with her maid, and not to ask what she is going to do.

Claim by Claim

1. 8:1
   • At that time Judith heard about what had happened
   • Judith was the daughter of Merari
   • Merari was the son of Ox
   • Ox was the son of Joseph
   • Joseph was the son of Ozel
   • Ozel was the son of Elcia
   • Elcia was the son of Ananias
   • Ananias was the son of Gedeon
   • Gedeon was the son of Raphaim
   • Raphaim was the son of Acitho
   • Acitho was the son of Eliu
   • Eliu was the son of Eliab
   • Eliab was the son of Nathanael
   • Nathanael was the son of Samael
   • Samael was the son of Salasadal
   • Salasadal was the son of Israel
2. 8:2
   • Manasses was Judith's husband
   • Manasses was of the same tribe as Judith
   • Manasses was of the same family as Judith
   • Manasses died during the barley harvest
3. 8:3
   • Manasses stood over those who were binding sheaves in the field
   • The burning heat came upon Manasses' head
   • Manasses fell onto his bed
   • Manasses died in the city of Bethulia
   • They buried Manasses with his fathers
   • The burial field lay between Dothaim and Balamo
4. 8:4
   • Judith remained a widow in her house for three years and four months
5. 8:5
   • Judith made herself a tent on the roof of her house
   • Judith put sackcloth on her waist
   • Judith wore the garments of her widowhood
6. 8:6
   • Judith fasted every day of her widowhood
   • Judith did not fast on the days before the sabbaths
   • Judith did not fast on the sabbaths
   • Judith did not fast on the days before the new moons
   • Judith did not fast on the new moons
   • Judith did not fast on the feasts of the house of Israel
   • Judith did not fast on the days of rejoicing of the house of Israel
7. 8:7
   • Judith was beautiful in appearance
   • Judith was very lovely to look at
   • Her husband Manasses had left her gold
   • Manasses had left her silver
   • Manasses had left her menservants and maidservants
   • Manasses had left her livestock
   • Manasses had left her fields
   • Judith remained in possession of these things
8. 8:8
   • No one spoke an evil word about Judith
   • Judith feared God greatly
9. 8:9
   • Judith heard the evil words the people spoke against the governor
   • The people were faint because there was not enough water
   • Judith heard all the words that Ozias had spoken to the people
   • Ozias had sworn to the people that he would hand the city over to the Assyrians after five days
10. 8:10
    • Judith sent her maidservant
    • The maidservant was in charge of all Judith's possessions
    • Judith summoned Ozias
    • Judith summoned Chabris
    • Judith summoned Charmis
    • Chabris and Charmis were elders of her city
11. 8:11
    • The elders came to Judith
    • Judith told them to listen to her
    • Judith addressed them as rulers of the inhabitants of Bethulia
    • Judith said the words they had spoken before the people that day were not right
    • Judith said they had established the oath they pronounced between God and themselves
    • Judith said they had promised to hand the city over to their enemies
    • Judith said the promise held unless within those days the Lord turned to help them
12. 8:12
    • Judith asked who they were that they had tested God that day
    • Judith said they were standing in the place of God among the children of men
13. 8:13
    • Judith told them they were putting the Lord Almighty to the test
    • Judith said they would never know anything
14. 8:14
    • Judith said they cannot find the depth of a man's heart
    • Judith said they cannot grasp the thoughts of a man's mind
    • Judith asked how then they could search out God, who made all these things
    • Judith asked how they could know God's mind
    • Judith asked how they could comprehend God's purpose
    • Judith called them her brethren
    • Judith told them not to provoke the Lord their God to anger
15. 8:15
    • Judith said that if God does not will to help them within the five days, he has the power to protect them on whatever days he chooses
    • Judith said God also has the power to destroy them before their enemies
16. 8:16
    • Judith told them not to bind the counsels of the Lord their God as a pledge
    • Judith said God is not like a man, that he can be threatened
    • Judith said God is not like a son of man, that he can be swayed by pleading
17. 8:17
    • Judith said they should wait for the salvation that comes from God
    • Judith said they should call upon God for help
    • Judith said God will hear their voice
    • Judith said God will hear them if it pleases him
18. 8:18
    • Judith said no tribe, family, people, or city among them arose in their generation that worships gods made by hands
    • Judith said there is no such tribe, family, people, or city among them today
    • Judith said such worship did happen in former days
19. 8:19
    • Judith said that for this reason their fathers were given over to the sword
    • Judith said their fathers were given over to plunder
    • Judith said their fathers fell in a great slaughter before their enemies
20. 8:20
    • Judith said they know no other god besides him
    • Judith said they therefore trust that God will not despise them
    • Judith said they trust God will not despise anyone of their nation
21. 8:21
    • Judith said that if they are captured in this way, all Judea will be laid waste
    • Judith said their sanctuary will be plundered
    • Judith said God will require the profanation of the sanctuary at their mouth
22. 8:22
    • Judith said God will turn the slaughter of their brethren upon their own heads
    • Judith said God will turn the captivity of the land upon their own heads
    • Judith said God will turn the desolation of their inheritance upon their own heads
    • Judith said this will happen among the Gentiles wherever they are enslaved
    • Judith said they will be an offence and a reproach to those who possess them
23. 8:23
    • Judith said their servitude will not be turned toward favour
    • Judith said the Lord their God will turn their servitude to dishonour
24. 8:24
    • Judith called them brethren
    • Judith said they should show an example to their brethren
    • Judith said the lives of their brethren depend on them
    • Judith said the sanctuary, the house, and the altar rest upon them
25. 8:25
    • Judith said they should give thanks to the Lord their God
    • Judith said God is testing them
    • Judith said God tested their fathers in the same way
26. 8:26
    • Judith told them to remember what God did to Abraham
    • Judith told them to remember how God tested Isaac
    • Judith told them to remember what happened to Jacob in Mesopotamia of Syria
    • Jacob was keeping the sheep of Laban while in Mesopotamia of Syria
    • Laban was the brother of Jacob's mother
27. 8:27
    • Judith said God has not tried them in the fire as he did their fathers
    • Judith said God tried their fathers in the fire to examine their hearts
    • Judith said God has not taken vengeance on them
    • Judith said the Lord scourges those who come near to him
    • Judith said the Lord scourges them in order to admonish them
28. 8:28
    • Ozias answered Judith
    • Ozias said everything she had spoken she had spoken with a good heart
    • Ozias said there is no one who can contradict her words
29. 8:29
    • Ozias said this was not the first day her wisdom had been shown
    • Ozias said all the people have known her understanding from the beginning of her days
    • Ozias said the disposition of her heart is good
30. 8:30
    • Ozias said the people were very thirsty
    • Ozias said the people compelled them to do as they had spoken to them
    • Ozias said the people compelled them to bring an oath upon themselves
    • Ozias said they will not break that oath
31. 8:31
    • Ozias asked Judith to pray for them
    • Ozias said Judith is a godly woman
    • Ozias said the Lord will send rain to fill their cisterns
    • Ozias said they will not faint any more
32. 8:32
    • Judith answered them
    • Judith told them to listen to her
    • Judith said she would do a thing
    • Judith said the thing she would do would pass down through all generations to the children of their nation
33. 8:33
    • Judith told them to stand at the gate that night
    • Judith said she would go out with her maidservant
    • Judith said the Lord will visit Israel by her hand within the days after which they promised to hand the city over to their enemies
34. 8:34
    • Judith told them not to enquire into what she was doing
    • Judith said she would not tell them until what she was doing was finished
35. 8:35
    • Ozias and the rulers answered Judith
    • They told her to go in peace
    • They said may the Lord God go before her to take vengeance on their enemies
36. 8:36
    • They went back from the tent
    • They went to their posts

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

8:1

The list names fifteen ancestors, ending with Israel, that is, Jacob, from whom all twelve tribes descend. A genealogy like this was how an ancient reader placed a person: before we learn anything else about Judith, we are told she is an Israelite of long and traceable stock. Her name means simply "Jewish woman" or "woman of Judah." The spellings vary between manuscripts, which is why other translations read Oziel, Elkiah, Ahitub and Salamiel where the King James has Ozel, Elcia, Acitho and Samael.

8:2

Marrying inside your own tribe and clan kept inherited land in the family, and it is mentioned here as a mark of a careful, traditional household. Barley ripened before wheat, so barley harvest fell in late spring, when the days were already hot.

8:3

Cut grain was tied into sheaves, bundles stood up in the field to dry. What killed Manasses is what we would call sunstroke. "Buried him with his fathers" means in the family burial plot, the normal and honorable end; to be buried away from your kin, or not at all, was a disgrace. Dothaim and Balamo are towns in the hill country north of Jerusalem. Bethulia itself has never been matched to any known site.

8:4

Three years and four months as a widow who has not remarried. A widow with no husband and no children mentioned had no natural protector in that society, which is why the following verses take care to say that she ran her own property and that no one spoke against her.

8:5

Roofs were flat and used as living space, for sleeping, drying food and sitting in the cool of the evening. A tent pitched up there gave her a room set apart from the rest of the household. Sackcloth was a coarse cloth of goat hair worn next to the skin as a sign of grief; it was meant to be uncomfortable. A widow's clothing was a recognizable dress, so that anyone who met her knew her situation without being told.

8:6

Fasting meant going without food, normally from dawn until dark. Jewish law required only a handful of fast days in the year, so fasting every day for more than three years is extreme private devotion. The Sabbath, from Friday evening to Saturday evening, and the new moon, the first day of each lunar month, were days of celebration on which fasting was not allowed. The "eves" are the days immediately before them, counted as part of the festivity.

8:7

The estate is described as left to her and still in her hands. A woman holding and managing property on this scale in her own right, rather than passing it to her husband's male relatives, was unusual enough to be worth stating.

8:8

"She feared God" is not about being frightened. In the Hebrew and Greek scriptures the phrase means reverence shown in the way a person lives, roughly what we would call being devout.

8:9

The governor is Ozias, one of the three magistrates of Bethulia. In the previous chapter the Assyrian army besieging the town seized the springs outside the walls and cut off its water supply; when the people turned on their leaders, Ozias swore that if God had not rescued the town within five days he would surrender it.

8:10

Her maid is not a household drudge. She runs Judith's entire estate, a post we would call steward or business manager, and she is the one other person Judith takes into her confidence for the rest of the story. The King James "ancients" means elders, the senior men who governed the town; it does not mean they were unusually old.

8:11

An oath sworn "between God and you" puts God forward as both witness and enforcer: if the oath is broken, he is the one who acts on it. That is why Judith treats the five day deadline as dangerous in itself, and why in verse 30 the elders say they cannot simply drop it.

8:12

In the King James, "tempted God" means put God to a test. It does not mean they tried to get God to do something wrong.

8:13

"Try" in the King James means put to the test, not attempt. Judith is turning the elders' own conduct back on them: they have set God a deadline as though he were something they could test, and the one thing they will get from it is nothing.

8:16

The image comes from lending. To bind or pledge something is to hold it as security against a debt, the way a lender keeps a pledge until he is paid. Judith says the elders are treating God's plans as if they could be pinned down and held to terms. "Son of man" is a stock phrase meaning simply a human being, and the Greek behind "wavering" means to be talked round by coaxing.

8:18

"Gods made with hands" means carved or cast images. "As hath been aforetime" points back to the centuries before the exile, when Israelites did worship such images. The argument turns on the claim that this generation has stopped doing so.

8:19

The reference is to the conquest of Judah by Babylon and the deportation that followed, which this speech treats as the standing example of what the worship of images cost the nation.

8:21

The "sanctuary" is the temple in Jerusalem, which this book presents as recently restored after the exile, with Bethulia guarding the road to it. "Require the profanation thereof at our mouth" uses the old legal idiom of blood guilt: to require something at a person's mouth or hand is to charge the responsibility to them and exact the penalty from them.

8:22

"Gentiles" is the standard King James word for all nations other than Israel. It carries no insult in itself and simply means foreigners. "An offence and a reproach" means an object of disgust and a byword, the sort of people others point to as a warning.

8:23

This sentence is compressed in the Greek and hard to construe, which is why translations differ. The sense appears to be that being enslaved would not even win them the mild treatment a beaten people might hope for, but would be counted against them as disgrace.

8:24

"The house" and "the altar" both belong to the temple: the building itself, and the stone altar standing in its courtyard where offerings were burned. The claim that everything rests on Bethulia is geographical as much as anything, since the town sits between the Assyrian army and Jerusalem.

8:25

"Trieth" means tests, in the sense of assaying metal for purity rather than putting someone on trial. The same word carries through verses 26 and 27.

8:26

Abraham was told to leave his country for a land he had not seen, and later to sacrifice his son Isaac, who is the one bound on the altar in that story. Jacob, fleeing his brother, spent twenty years in Mesopotamia herding sheep for his uncle Laban, who cheated him repeatedly over wages and over which daughter he married. "Mesopotamia of Syria" is the region around Harran in the upper Euphrates valley, called Paddan-aram in Genesis. The episodes are in Genesis chapters 12 to 31.

8:27

Refiners melted silver and gold in a furnace so that the impurities burned away, and the image of testing "in the fire" comes from that trade. "Scourge" means to whip. The whipping in view here is the correction a head of a household gives, meant to instruct rather than to punish for its own sake.

8:28

"Gainsay" in the King James means to contradict or speak against. The "gain" in it is an old word meaning against, unrelated to gaining something.

8:30

The difficulty for the elders is that the oath was sworn in God's name. Breaking such an oath was itself understood as an offense against God, so they could not quietly set it aside once the panic had passed.

8:31

Cisterns were pits cut into the rock and lined with plaster, which caught rainwater from the roofs and streets and stored it through the dry season. A besieged town lived off them once its outside springs were taken, and in this region effectively no rain falls between spring and autumn.

8:33

"By mine hand" means through me, by my agency. "Stand this night in the gate" means post themselves at the town gate to open it for her and bar it again behind her; the gate of a walled town under siege was kept shut and guarded around the clock.

8:35

"The Lord God be before thee" is a send-off for a journey: may he go ahead of you on the road, as guide and advance guard.

8:36

"Wards" means guard posts, the stations the watch kept on the wall. The tent they come away from is Judith's shelter on her roof.