As already noted, the Book of Judith was composed in the Hellenistic era, ca. 135–78 b.c.e., in Alexandria or Palestine by an unknown author. The book was produced during a key point in the history of print media and print culture – the transition from the scroll to the codex and the invention of the book as we know it today. As Karen Van der Toorn writes:15
The first Jewish books in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek were written in the Hel-lenistic era. All books written before that time were not books in the modern sense of the term. The Jewish books that began to appear after 300 b.c.e. dif-fer from earlier texts inasmuch as they do seem to resemble the concept of a book as a single work by a single author, aimed at a particular audience.
Hellenism created the conditions under which the new phenomenon could occur. Among the many aspects of this new cultural climate, three have a special bearing on the birth of the Jewish book: the emergence of schools, the foundation of libraries, and the growth of a reading public … 16
The transformation in book production from scroll to codex played a key role in shaping how Christians would use the Book of Judith allegori-cally and typologiallegori-cally. As Roger Chartier explains:
The Codex undeniably facilitates the organization and handling of the text.
It permits pagination, the creation of indexes and concordances, and the comparison of one passage with another; better yet, it permits a reader to traverse an entire book by paging through. From this set of advantages fol-lowed the adaptation of the new form of the book to the textual needs of Christianity: in particular, comparing the Gospels and mobilizing citations of the Sacred Word for preaching, worship, and prayer.17
The inclusion of the Book of Judith in the Septuagint used by early Christians as the Old Testament in the Christian Bibles facilitated the pair-ings of Judith with Mary and Jesus with Moses, and Isaiah’s prophecies to the birth of Jesus. This enshrined Judith within Catholic theology.
The Book of Judith also signals the creation of a new rhetorical genre in the ancient world. Scholars do not agree about how to classify this text. The Book of Judith has been denominated a romance, or even the first Jewish novel, a genre that includes Esther, Daniel, Tobit, and Joseph and Aseneth.
The Book of Judith has also been placed within the genre of Hellenistic 15 See Karel Van Der Koon, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
16 Ibid., p. 23.
17 See Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 19.
romance along with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Pseudo-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance. Recently, Sarah Johnson has defined the genre more narrowly and places Judith within a group of peers characterized by their didactic intent and use of history and fiction.
Johnson calls the genre “historical fiction”:
Each of these texts – The Letter of Aristeas, 2 Maccabees, Esther, Daniel, Judith, and Tobit – contains a significant element of historical fiction, deliberate manipulation of historical material to communicate a particular didactic point. A common attitude toward historical fact – treating it as raw material to be mined and manipulated for the purpose of creating a credible, persuasive didactic fiction – unites the authors of these texts and sets them distinctively apart from the mainstream of Jewish and Greek historiography alike. They belong neither to the mainstream of historiography nor to the genre of the ancient novel but to a nebulous group of unclassifiable ancient fictions beginning to proliferate in the postclassical Greek world.18
The Book of Judith also reflects a new theology that transformed what it meant to be considered a Jew in the Hellenistic era. This is the cru-cial relevance of the secondary plot of the book: the conversion of Achior.
Judith and 2 Maccabees are the earliest references to conversion in Jewish literature. As Shaye Cohen demonstrates, the Book of Judith and 2 Mac-cabees, both fictional accounts written in the Hellenistic period, reflect the refashioning of the practice of conversion. “It was this Hasmonean redefinition of Judaism that permitted Josephus at the end of the first cen-tury c.e. to state that the constitution established by Moses was not only a genus – a nation, a ‘birth’ – but also ‘a choice in the manner of life’.”19 The Book of Judith is thus an important source for understanding an important social and cultural development within Judaism – the addi-tion of belief to birthright in the definiaddi-tion of a Jew during the Hellenistic period. As Cohen sums up his argument:
Some of the seers of the exilic and postexilic periods (sixth to fourth centuries b.c.e.) forecast a utopian future in which the gentiles would recognize God, worship in his temple, and either serve the Israelites or “attach themselves” to them. But in none of these texts, even in the eschatological visions, is there a sense that non-Israelites somehow become Israelites through acknowledging 18 See Sara Raup Johnson, Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2004), p. 50, and Lawrence M. Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
19 See Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncer-tainties (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 133–34.
the god of the Israelites. None of these texts precisely parallels 2 Maccabees’
story about Antiochus Epiphanes and Judith’s story about Achior.20
Written during the Second Temple period, Ioudith also exhibits pre-Rab-binic Jewish ritual and ascetic practices in the portrayal of Judith’s private religious practice on the roof of her house in Bethulia. Lawrence Wills recent-ly singled out the importance of Judith and Esther for the study of ancient rit-ual and asceticism, writing, “The literary presentation of Jewish identity [in Judith and Esther] combined ritual and ascetic themes, a three-way conver-gence that has been overlooked by scholars of literature, ritual studies, and asceticism when these are studied separately.”21 As we noted in the passages from Ioudith presented above, Judith places herself in prayer in an attitude of self-abnegation (after stripping off her sackcloth). This is a rare representa-tion in Jewish literature of the practice of asceticism in antiquity.
Judith is committed to a private religious (ascetic) practice conducted on the roof of her home. Jewish motifs – such as the wearing of sackcloth, tith-ing, ablutions, private prayer, ritual immersion, food laws, lunar festivals, Sabbath observance, the presence of the high priest, and the observance of the sacrificial cult in Jerusalem – are present in this pre-Rabbinic text.22 Reference to rabbinic ideology and practice – such as the institution of the synagogue, the rabbinate, and the ideology of a life of study of the Torah as described in the tractate of the Mishna, the Pirkei Avos or the Ethics of the Fathers (written hundreds of years later) – do not appear in the book.
Scholars do not agree about when or why the Book of Judith was writ-ten. This question, of course, is undoubtedly linked to the question of why the book was not included in the Hebrew Bible, a subject that Deborah Gera addresses in her introduction to Jewish textual traditions. In Integrat-ing Woman into Second Temple History,23 Tal Ilan provides a thorough review of evidence about the composition of the book and suggests, based on largely circumstantial evidence, that the book may have been written to support the legitimacy of the rule of the Hasmonean queen Shelamzion. In the conclusion to Ilan’s chapter on Esther, Ruth, and Susanna she presents her view of the reason Judith was written:
20 Ibid., p. 132.
21 See Lawrence M. Wills, “Ascetic Theology before Asceticism? Jewish Narra-tives and the Decentering of the Self,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol.
74, no. 4 (December 2006), pp. 902–25 (907).
22 See Hugo Mantel, “Ancient Hasidim,” in Studies of Judaism (1976), pp. 60–80, summarized in Carey A. Moore 1985, p. 71.
23 See Tal Ilan, Integrating Women into Second Temple History (Tübingen: C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999; repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrick Publishers Inc., 2001).
Esther, Judith, and Susanna are contributions to the theoretical debate on the nature of women and their competence as political leaders. The books do not openly promote woman’s leadership, and they are not revolutionary in nature.
Yet they do question some of the suppositions of their day on the “natural order.” Because the Colophon to the Greek Book of Esther mentions the date 78–77 b.c.e., just one year before the coronation of Queen Shelamzion in Jeru-salem, it may be suggested that certainly Esther (and with it Purim) was cre-ated as propaganda for this queen’s reign. Because of formal and ideological similarities between Esther and the books of Judith and Susanna, I have sug-gested here that all three can be seen as serving that purpose.24
In this short tour of contemporary scholars’ writing on Hellenism, early Judaism, and the Second Temple period we can see the importance of the Septuagint Ioudith. Ioudith plays a definitive mediating role for the early Christians linking Jewish Scriptures to Christian theology through pairing Judith and Mary. The book demonstrates an early form of Jewish asceti-cism. It allows modern scholars to understand how Judaism itself evolved from a religion of birthright to a religion of choice and presents an early example of a conversion to Judaism in the ancient world. It contained an important set of literary innovations that constituted a critical chapter in the creation of the modern book as we know it. It is one of the earliest examples of historical fiction and is a precursor to the modern novel. It is one of the most eloquent rhetorical constructions in antiquity promot-ing the leadership capabilities of women, and was perhaps composed as propaganda for a Jewish queen. It also remains one of the most important source texts from antiquity about the social conditions of woman in the Second Temple period.