Apud Hebraeos liber Judith sensum e sensu, quam ex verbo verbum transferens.
its warrant for affirming disputed texts is deemed less than sufficient.
Although it was written in Aramaic, it is taken to be a moral story/among the historical books. But since this book was counted by the Nicene Council as belonging to the sacred texts, I have acquiesced to your appeal (or should I say demand!): and, my other work set aside, from which I was for-cibly restrained, I have given a single night’s work, translating rather sense by sense than word for word.
I have hacked away at the trium-phant laud make her known in per-petual praises.
For not only for women, but also for men, she has been given as a model by the one who rewards her chastity, who has ascribed to her such virtue that she conquered the unconquered among all men, and surmounted the insurmountable.
3 Patrologia Latina (PL 29, Col. 37–39). The translation here is Lähnemann’s, based on that by Andrew S. Jacobs, University of California Riverside (http://www.ccel.
org/p/pearse/morefathers/jerome_preface_judith.htm, accessed 15 December 2009).
With regard to the plural form of the unnamed addressees, Jacobs explains that Jerome was likely speaking to the brother bishops, Chromatius and Heliodorus, to whom he had dedicated earlier the adjacent book of Tobit. This is an alternative to the position of Tillemont (and others subsequently), who deduced from its being a book named after a woman that it was intended for Jerome’s “beloved fellow-toilers” and companions in Bethlehem, Paula and her daughter Eustochium.
In this document Jerome makes three statements that set the framework for the greater part of the reception history.
Among the Jews, the Book of Judith is considered apocryphal. The Book of Judith is perched rather precariously on the edge of Scripture. The twi-light state of its canonicity is expressed by the three conflicting categories in which it has historically been placed: “apocrypha” (non-canonical, apoc-ryphal books), “historiae” (historical accounts but also stories for moral instruction, including fictitious works), and “sanctae scripturae” (canonical books as part of the Holy Scripture).4 This indeterminacy proved irritating;
most of the medieval manuscripts replace the “apocrypha” classification with “hagiographa” (“holy writing,” used as a technical term for the third canonical part of the Hebrew Bible) to set the book on the firm ground of canonicity. But Jerome’s anecdotal account of his translation process re-enforces the first impression: he says that, as Gera notes (Chap. 2), it was done as a mere “lucubratiuncula” (a night shift set aside for leisurely literary pursuit) and that he employed not the verbatim style, i.e., what befits a canonical book, but a rather more rough and ready mode (“sen-sus a sensu”). It does not matter that the evidence of Jerome’s translation technique belies this claim. What is important is the ambiguous position-ing thus achieved for the Book of Judith between the sacrosanct and the fictional, which opened up a freedom of rendering beyond the strictures demanded by canonical texts.
Receive the widow Judith, a paradigm of chastity. In the shorter second part of the preface, Jerome suddenly shifts the focus away from issues of cano-nicity and translation to the figure of the protagonist herself, the “widow Judith,” whose victory raises her to the pinnacle of moral exemplarity. He thereby passes over the greater part of the scriptural narrative, which Ju-dith enters only at mid point, in favor of its culmination, her defeat of the invincible Holofernes. This contraction is in concordance with Jerome’s own rendering of the overall story-line in the Vulgate, which is a third shorter than the earlier Septuagint version. The foregrounding in the pref-ace of Judith’s climactic feat at the expense of a wider-angled view of the intricacies of the tale and of her multifaceted character would have a long history of repercussions, especially in the visual arts. Jerome’s moralizing effects a further condensation: bringing the book in line with hagiography, 4 The status conceded by Jerome to the Book of Judith is taken up in the later notion of “deuterocanonical” texts for those books which had been later accepted than the
“protocanonical” books and thus formed part of the Septuagint but not of the He-brew Bible. This terminology was formalized by the Council of Trent (1545–1563).
Judith is branded as “mulier sancta” (holy woman; Jdt 8:29), one who is de-fined by a single virtue, chastity, of which she is made a moral example, for men and women alike. He is highlighting here the well-known emphasis on this virtue that differentiates his Book of Judith text itself from that of the Septuagint; it is the Vulgate that stresses the commitment to chastity of Judith’s domestic seclusion in Bethulia and her steadfast refusal to remarry.
This concentration allows later theological writers to use Judith in similarly reductive ways, as a personification of particular virtues, following their inclinations and the moral fashion of the day.
With triumphant laud make her known in perpetual praise. Judith’s story is presented not only as a model but as a source of exultation and exaltation.
Jerome’s mandates proved to be an incentive for the retelling in different media and genres.
These tropes, which were well developed in patristic scholarship beyond Jerome, became the heart of Judith’s symbolic identities in the Christian tradition: as virtue personified, as type of the Church, and, last but not least, as prefiguration of the Virgin Mary. She was thereby inscribed within an immense network of emblematic associations, most of which served to neutralize the negative dimensions of her tactics: dissimulation, the shrewd exploitation of her adversary’s sexual presumptions, and vio-lence. In this way Judith’s transgression of cultural norms, especially for women, was transmuted into its opposite. Along with her sister heroines of the Old Testament, the chaste widow Judith became a familiar compo-nent of typological and allegorical constructions in art and literature in the mid to late Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance as well. In the sixteenth century, this aspect of her identity assumed new cogency with the polemical revival of Marian typology by the Roman Catholic Church in response to the challenges of the Reformation. Jerome himself was a factor here, contested in his double roles as a founder of Mariology and the author of the Vulgate.
The historical quarrels about the Book of Judith’s canonicity, already an-cient in Jerome’s time and alluded to in his preface, were reanimated: for Catholics, Jerome’s explanation bolstered their ancient, pre-Vulgate prac-tice of including the Apocrypha in the canon, while for most Protestants it justified the contrary position.5 In the Luther Bible and the King James, the 5 See The Parallel Apocrypha. Greek text, King James Version, Douay Old Testament, the Holy Bible by Ronald Knox, Today’s English Version, New Revised Standard Version, New American Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, ed. by John R. Kohlenberger (New York: Ox-ford University Press, 1997) for varied approaches to the Book of Judith’s canonicity, including the Eastern Orthodox.
Apocrypha were placed as a separate text group after the Old Testament;
in the reformed tradition they were eventually excluded. It was in this period of sectarian division that the salience of Judith reached its apogee, as seen in an unprecedented proliferation of representations.6 Much the same might be said of Jerome.
Essential to this phenomenon is the creation by Protestants of their own Judith practices, with Luther’s recommendation of the Book of Judith as
“good tragedy” proving as influential as Jerome’s preface. The Luther Bible ironically added to the supremacy of Jerome’s redaction since the apocry-phal books were added hastily to satisfy the demand for a traditional “full Bible,” and an anonymous helper translated the Book of Judith straight from the Vulgate – the only one in the Luther Bible not to go back to a Hebrew or Greek text. Thus the translation history of the marginalized book seems to repeat itself. This also gave authors the liberty to draw on it without restrictions, as seen in Reformation dramas like Joachim Greff’s “Tragoedia Judith” (1536), which quotes verbatim from Luther. The flourishing trade in dramatizations of Judith furnished arguments for both sides of the de-nominational divide across Europe, well into the seventeenth century.
The reception history of the Christian Judith has long been molded by the obvious fact that the virtues she is made to manifest throughout her saga are not limited to chastity and its analogues, humility, temperance and piety. As a type of both Mary and the Church, her core identity as instrument of divine will and savior of her people expanded to encompass victory over the devil and sin itself. She came to be associated with Fortitude and Justice, for in-stance, and to personify such traits as Wisdom, Magnanimity and Eloquence.
As the victorious defender of her people, she was inevitably marshaled in struggles against tyrants and enemies, especially foreign “heathens,” and indeed in a wide variety of political and civic arenas, as well as in the discourse of gender manifested in such phenomena as the “Querelle des Femmes.” It is clear that her story offered a rich panoply of religious and secular applica-tions. From at least the ninth century, when Hrabanus Maurus dedicated his commentary to her namesake, Queen Judith, they are fused.7 Our papers chart these dynamics, individually and intermingled, in multiple genres.
6 The unparalleled popularity of Judith during the Reformation is a main theme of Margarita Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior. Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998); we adopt here her lan-guage on p. 46.
7 Judith of Bavaria (ca. 800–843) was, by virtue of her marriage to Louis I (the Pious) of France in 819, Holy Roman Empress and Queen of France.
The cultural visibility of later iconic renderings – among them sculp-tures of a harnessed heroine, paintings of a naked or tarted-up seductress, dramas of spectacular bloodshed and musical presentations of a love story gone tragically wrong – has influenced the twentieth-century scholarly dis-cussion of the Judith topic. In the scholarship on literature, for instance, it would seem that the expectation of gore and sex had rendered the early traditions that read Judith as pudicitia or the Virgin Mary disappointing-ly tame and therefore of relativedisappointing-ly little interest. While there are numer-ous literary surveys from early modern to modern times, the patristic and medieval traditions mostly form only a brief prequel in theory-informed studies.8 Also, for a long time there was a tendency in theological research to neglect books that seemed to thwart critical probing, as Judith’s does.
There is, for example, nothing new that can be learned about the early ge-ography of Israel from analyzing the references in Achior’s and Judith’s speeches devoted to Israelite history in the Septuagint, and no earlier Hebrew text has emerged. Only recently has it been acknowledged that the openly fictitious character of the book’s setting actually furnishes illuminat-ing insights into the contemporary Jewish Hellenistic society, as Schmitz and Gera in this volume demonstrate (Chaps. 4 and 5).
There yet remains a lot to be discovered in terms of how the patristic tradition shaped medieval renderings of the story and how these retellings 8 This begins with Edna Purdie, The Story of Judith in German and English Literature (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1927); neither Otto Baltzer, Judith in der deutschen Literatur (Stoff- und Motivgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 7) (Ber-lin: de Gruyter, 1930), nor David Radavich, A Catalogue of Works Based on the Apoc-ryphal Book of Judith. From the Mediaeval Period to the Present (Bulletin of Bibliography 44) (Boston Book Co., 1987), pp. 189–92, added substantially to the earlier catalogue.
The twentieth century is now charted by Theodore Ziolkowski, “Re-Visions, Fic-tionalizations, and Postfigurations. The Myth of Judith in the Twentieth Century,”
The Modern Languages Review, 104 (2009), pp. 311–32. Volker Mergenthaler, Medusa Meets Holofernes. Poetologische, semiologische und intertextuelle Diskursivierung von Enthauptung (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997) jumps from the Septuagint to early modern times when discussing the discourse of beheading under poetological, semiologic, and intertextual aspects. The same applies to James C. VanderKam (ed.), Essays on Judith (Early Judaism and Its Literature 2) (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992), and André Lacocque, Subversives, ou, Un Pentateuque de femmes (Lectio divina 148), (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992), who continue trends in Judith Studies set by Luis Alonso-Schökel (ed.), Narrative Structures in the Book of Judith (Protocol of the col-loquy of the Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture.
The Graduate Theological Union and the University of California at Berkeley 11) (Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley, 1975), and Toni Craven, Artistry and Faith in the Book of Judith (Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 70) (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983).
and their molding of the figure of Judith influenced (early) modern percep-tions of her and her book. All of our volume’s papers that place her within a wider Christian tradition deal with consequences of Jerome’s premises, both formal and interpretive.9 As indicated, the Luther Bible and most other translations derived from it kept to the foreshortened account of the Vulgate, as did all the Catholic Scriptures. With the notable exception of the King James Bible, whose Judith came from the Septuagint, it was only with the Bible revisions of the nineteenth century that the Greek version was available in new vernacular translations. Outside a scholarly context, the Book of Judith generally meant, well into modernity, the account of the Vulgate, and with it the figure of the mulier sancta of Jerome’s making.10