Jesus Christ came as Bridegroom

by Damien F. Mackey John the Baptist says, “You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ’I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease. John 3:28-30 Introduction Every new disturbance in the world, be it of natural cause such as earthquakes, tsunamis or hurricanes; political, such as Middle Eastern crises, Islamic Jihads and Chinese aggression; or economic, for example the new wave of food shortages sweeping the world, finds its modern-day interpreter with the Book of Revelation in hand. Depending upon one’s political or religious proclivity the Beast of Revelation (Revelation 13:11) can be, now the President of the United States, or, previously, Saddam Hussein rebuilding the city of Babylon, or even the Pope ruling Catholicism. This sort of frenzied speculation became particularly apparent as Year 2000 approached, with the ‘millennium bug’ seriously biting the loony cultist fringe. For the Israeli government then had to deport a group of American ‘Christians’ for fear that they had violent intentions towards the Old City, suspecting them to be amongst fanatics who believe that the ancient Temple of Jerusalem is destined to be rebuilt in the near future. This would mean firstly clearing away - even with a bomb if necessary - the great Moslem shrine, the Dome of the Rock, that now occupies the mount. Meanwhile, certain Protestant and evangelical groups continue to persist with the notion, conceived during the Reformation, that the Pope is Antichrist and that the ‘Roman Catholic Church’ is the “famous prostitute” of Revelation, “riding a scarlet beast which had seven heads and ten horns” (17;2, 3), the seven heads being also “the seven hills” (18:9). This latter, they insist, must be a reference to Rome with its Seven Hills. And they puzzle as to why prayerful, Bible-believing Catholics cannot see this. The Modernist crisis has only reinforced this view in their minds, especially when they learn of ‘Catholic’ bishops denigrating the Bible and supporting Gay Acceptance, etc. No doubt some of these non-Catholic brethren are genuine in their beliefs. They are certainly firm in them. Leo Harris for instance, writing the Foreword to Thomas Foster’s The Pope, Communism and the Coming New World (Acacia Press, Victoria), having acknowledged that: “In the present remarkable days, with the Holy Spirit touching the lives of many people in both the Roman Catholic and main-line Protestant churches, one may feel reluctant to expose the errors found in any church system”, feels constrained nonetheless to add a point that will be taken up more vehemently by Foster himself: “However, it is no light matter that any one man should arise and claim supreme headship over the church as Christ’s sole representative or vicar”. Foster himself will go so far as to identify the Pope as Antichrist (which name, he insists, literally means in the place of Christ). I personally know of Protestants who, whilst likewise being quite uncomfortable with the concept of the Papacy, are prepared nonetheless - in the current climate of ecumenism - not to make too much of an issue out of it, but to accept that there is presently going on throughout the world what they might call a ‘mustering of all people of good will’ (including even Roman Catholics). Perhaps this new outlook is the first stirring of unity; the graces of the ecumenical effort. We Catholics have of course a view quite different from these Protestants regarding the Pope and the Church. We acknowledge the Pope to be the appointed Vicar of Christ on earth (cf. Matthew 16:18), the very foundation of the Church, and infallible in matters of faith and morals. The Church we consider to be pre-eminently Marian (even before it was Petrine). The Blessed Virgin Mary, according to John Paul II, “is the image of the Church whom we likewise call mother” (Homily 18 November 1980. Cf. Lumen Gentium, #63). We therefore shudder at the accusation made by Luther-inspired Protestants that the Catholic Church is to be identified with the loathsome “Harlot” of the Apocalypse, which derogatory title we consider to be a most appropriate label, symbolically speaking, for the Modernist ‘World Wide Church of Darkness’ (cf. Pope St. Pius X). Apocalypse already fulfilled In this article I shall be endeavouring to show - hopefully to assist ecumenical efforts by clearing away misgivings, but especially to provide Catholics with a defence against unwarranted accusations by Protestants - that the mystery Whore, “Babylon the Great”, is not Rome at all (either physical or spiritual) but the ancient City of Jerusalem where Jesus himself was crucified - and where many of the Prophets (beginning with Abel), Apostles and disciples of Our Lord were martyred. In this way I hope to establish that the Whore cannot possibly have anything to do with the Catholic Church. I shall be arguing here that the Book of Revelation has, in the main, already been literally fulfilled; that it was fulfilled with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman armies under Titus in 70 AD, corresponding to the burning of “Babylon” in Apocalypse ch.s 17-18. Its relevance for us today is allegorical and symbolical (e.g. the above-mentioned likening of the Harlot, which is a city, with Modernism, which is a system of thought with a corresponding praxis). Indeed this view accords perfectly with John Paul II’s statement to a C20th audience that the Book of Revelation is ‘symbolical and figurative in meaning’. Essentially Revelation is about the divorce of one ‘woman’ (one formerly just ‘woman’ who had gone bad), and the marrying of a new, faithful one. The scroll of Revelation 5:1 is actually a bill of divorce; the divorce being completed in the most emphatic manner with the annihilation of the harlot city, “Babylon”. I am indebted to Kenneth Gentry (Jr.) in “A Preterist View of Revelation” for spelling this out. E.g. [pp. 51-2]: When viewed against the backdrop of the theme of Jewish judgment, personages (a harlot and a bride), and the flow of Revelation (from the sealed scroll to a capital punishment for “adultery” to a “marriage feast” to the taking of a new “bride” as the “new Jerusalem”), the covenantal nature of the transaction suggests that the seven-sealed scroll is God’s divorce decree against his Old Testament wife for her spiritual adultery. In the Old Testament God “marries” Israel (see esp. Ezek. 16:8, 31-32), and in several places he threatens her with a “bill of divorce” (Isa. 50:1; Jer. 3:8). (In C. Marvin Pate’s Four Views on the Book of Revelation, Zondervan, 1998. The word “preterist” is based on a Latin word præteritus, meaning “gone by”, i.e. past). Also I want to clear up the serious problem (one of commentators own making) whereby the Apostles, expecting (according to such commentators) Christ’s final coming (Parousia), in their own day, were thus mistaken because that did not come about - still has not. Such an interpretation would suggest that Our Lord had passed on to his intimate friends the wrong time-table. This is, of course, quite unacceptable. My argument here will be that the Apostles were referring first and foremost to Christ’s victorious coming in 70 AD, thus freeing the early Church from her Judaïc (now corrupted and nationalistic) connections. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD may not mean a lot to us now in the C20th -especially we who have grown up with Western-based education that tends to eschew (or not understand) everything Semitic - but it meant a heck of a lot to those of the Apostolic era, who were mostly Jews, and who continued to worship in the Jerusalem Temple and the synagogues virtually to the very end. The emphasis here will be on the historico-literal. Some Illustrations of this Interpretation The historico-literal level of biblical interpretation is the most basic one, and Popes and Saints have urged that Scripture scholars firstly identify that level. Saint Thomas Aquinas himself was utterly convinced of its importance; for, according to Monsignor G. Kelly, in his refutation of Fr. Raymond Brown and co. (The New Biblical Theorists, p. 13): “St. Thomas Aquinas is usually cited as a leading Church doctor who knew the importance of discovering the literal sense”. Obviously there can be only one historico-literal fulfilment of anything. The ancient prophet Hosea was actually commanded by God to pantomime the tragic situation of Israel’s infidelity to God, by taking for his wife an adulteress from the harlot nation of Samaria (northern Israel). ‘Go, marry a whore, and get children with a whore, for the country itself has become nothing but a whore by abandoning Yahweh’ (Hosea 1:2). God knew that this woman, a product of her environment, would be unfaithful to the prophet, but He nevertheless urged Hosea to take her back after her infidelity, as a sign to Israel that God was patient and long-suffering and was also prepared to take back unfaithful Israel (3:1-3). The bad wife/good wife scenario is in fact the whole tension of the Book of Apocalypse. The pantomime that Hosea had played out in c.700 BC would now be approximately re-enacted by Jesus Christ himself, the Saviour, in his divorce of the unfaithful earthly Jerusalem (Judaïsm) and his marriage with his new Bride, the heavenly Jerusalem. This time there will be no taking back of the adulteress, Jerusalem - even though He had passionately longed to do so: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem ... How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you refused!’ (Luke 13:34). His patience with her had at last run out, so to speak. The ‘Holy Family’ of the Old Testament The prophet Isaiah’s outspokenness before young king Ahaz would not have endeared him to that proud monarch who went on to become one of Jerusalem’s most evil kings. Though Scripture does not spell it out, there is the implication that Isaiah and his family eventually had to flee Jerusalem to escape king Ahaz’s wrath. This would make Ahaz a forerunner of Herod (cf. Matthew 2:13-14). Here is the reasoning behind such an assumption: Immanuel we are told, would, before he reached the age of reason, “feed on curds and honey” (Isaiah 7:15). What does that signify? It suggests that the family must have been obliged to head north, away from Jerusalem, to the region that had already been devastated and depopulated by the Assyrian armies, where briars and thorns had taken the place of abundant vineyards, and where “all who are left in the country will feed on curds and honey” (vv.22, 23). Now St. John the Evangelist, in the Book of Revelation, picks up this theme of Immanuel and his mother fleeing into the wilderness to escape the wrath of the ‘king’: The woman brought a male child into the world, the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron sceptre, and the child was taken straight up to God and to his throne, while the woman escaped into the desert, where God made a place of safety ready, for her to be looked after in the 1260 days (12:5-6). This “male child”, the victorious One, who rides the white horse, is the Christ, victorious in his Passion and Resurrection (cf. 5:5). Pope Pius XII stated unequivocally: “He is Jesus Christ” (as quoted in Opus Dei’s The Navarre Bible: Revelation, p. 70). This is actually quite obvious from Revelation’s further description of Him (19:12-16): ... the name written on Him was known only to Himself, his cloak was soaked in blood. He is known by the name, The Word of God. From his mouth came a sharp sword .... He is the one who will rule [the pagans] with an iron sceptre, and tread out the wine of Almighty God’s fierce anger. On his cloak and on his thigh there was a name written: ‘The King of Kings and The Lord of Lords’. He is also Immanuel, “God-with them” (21:3). As to Revelation’s “Woman”, the “Marian Dimension” of this has already been ably explained by others. The Woman also, of course, represents the Church; and, in literal terms, the fledgling Church of St. John’s day, the new Bride, which was forced to flee into the desert for the duration of 1260 days (i.e. 42 months or 3 and a half years - see below); no doubt in obedience to Our Lord’s Olivet command to his faithful to leave the city of Jerusalem on the eve of her destruction (Matt. 24:15-17,20-22; cf. Mark 13:14): So when you see the disastrous abomination, of which the prophet Daniel spoke, set up in the Holy Place (let the reader understand), then those in Judæa must escape to the mountains .... Pray that you will not have to escape in winter or on a sabbath. For then there will be great tribulation such as, until now, since the world began, there never has been, nor ever will be again. That this “great tribulation” refers literally to a pre-70 AD scenario - and not to any later time, including the C21st - is obvious from the mention of the “sabbath” restricting the movements of peoples in Palestine. All that Jewish legalism went right ‘out the window’ after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Jesus Christ challenges “the reader” to “understand” about the “Abomination that makes desolate”, from which the faithful must flee. But what might have been a riddle then for his contemporaries is really made easy for us by St. Luke, who, removing all the mystery, tells us that this refers to the pagan armies that will encompass Jerusalem (Luke 21:20). These are the Gog and Magog of Revelation 20:8 - the idea for which St. John borrowed from Ezekiel 38 and 39 - the multi-nation armies of the ruling empire that would attack Judæa and Jerusalem. “Armageddon” (Revelation 16:16) apparently refers to Jerusalem’s strong northern fortress of Har Magedo (Megiddo). St. John picks up this, Our Lord’s command to flee, when he writes: “A new voice from heaven; I heard it say, ‘Come out, My people, away from [Babylon] so that you do not share in her crimes and have the same plagues to bear. Her sins have reached up to heaven ...’.” (Revelation 18:4, 5; cf. 18:2). The 1260 days (i.e. 42 months or three and a half years) pertain to the period of the Jewish war in the era 66-70 AD. Now the Virgin Mary did not flee into the desert at this time in history, and for that precise duration of time; for She was no longer on earth, having taken her place beside her Son in heaven. So, just as in the case of Isaiah’s young wife, the literal details cannot be made to fit Mary. And yet the Woman of Apocalypse, in the far-sweeping gaze of the Holy Spirit, does symbolise Mary, as does Isaiah’s “maiden”. Fr. Kramer was therefore quite wrong in his blanket assertion in The Book of Destiny (p. 276) that: “The woman of chapter twelve is not the Blessed Virgin Mary”. Opus Dei, on the other hand, is most emphatic about this Marian connection, based on Pope St. Pius X (ibid., p. 26): As in the case of the parables, not everything in the imagery necessarily happens in real life; and the same image can refer to one or more things - particularly when they are closely connected, as the Blessed Virgin and the Church are. So, the fact that this passage is interpreted as referring to the Church does not exclude its referring also to Mary. More than once, the Church’s Magisterium has given it a Marian interpretation. For example, St. Pius X says: ‘Everyone knows that this woman was the image of the Virgin Mary ...’. Less satisfactory, though, do I find Opus Dei’s implication that the Holy Spirit’s text has trouble fitting a specific, given scenario (p. 97): The mysterious figure of the woman has been interpreted ever since the time of the Fathers of the Church as referring to the ancient people of Israel, or the Church of Jesus Christ, or the Blessed Virgin. The text supports all of these interpretations but in none do all the details fit. Such a misalignment is, I believe, forced upon those who fail to recognise in the entire Revelation a consistent historico-literal substratum: namely, that of the era of the Apostles. All of Revelation’s prophecies strongly reflect actual historical events in St. John’s near future, though - as is obvious to any sound commentator - they are set in apocalyptic drama and clothed in poetic hyperbole. There will be no problem fitting details once one has the appropriate matrix; the matrix that the Holy Spirit has in mind. Having said that, there is no harm in one’s allegorizing (one of the three spiritual senses) the whole situation of the Woman fleeing into the desert from the great Red Dragon as the current banishment of Marian devotion, by the Modernists, to the desert of oblivion, or the rejection by Catholics of Our Lady of the Rosary (Fatima) and her message. It seems to me that the historico-literal sense is necessary to the spiritual sense in a way analogous to the need of the soul for the body. Admittedly the soul can exist without the body, even in Heaven, but there is an incompleteness there that will be resolved only on the last day. Unmasking the Whore, “Babylon the Great” St. Augustine, in his The City of God, juxtaposed two cities - the camp of the just and that of the evil - from Cain and Abel right down to his own day. Taking a lead from this, but adopting alongside it the perspective relevant to this article, of the good and the evil woman - of divorce and re-marriage - I shall be contrasting Christ’s Bride with the Devil’s Harlot Woman. The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah (Jerusalem) are typified in many Scriptures (e.g. Isaiah 1:8, Lamentations 2:13) as a Woman. In Ezekiel, Israel is likened initially to a helpless girl-child upon whom God (as Father) took pity, nourishing her and watching her grow. Afterwards He dressed her in finery and (as Bridegroom) took her for His spouse; eventually crowning her with queenship so that she became the envy of the nations (16:4-14). But, with the passing of time, she became infatuated with her own beauty; using her fame to make herself a prostitute (v.15); even going beyond the excesses of a prostitute (vv. 21, 33-34). For her punishment, God handed her over to “all the lovers” [i.e., the nations], with whom she had been trafficking, but who had become sick of her filthy ways (v. 28). These were to treat her in the same way as were treated in antiquity “women who commit adultery and murder ... stripped ... stoned and run through with a sword” (vv. 38, 40). 1. Thus did Assyria do to the northern kingdom of Israel which Ezekiel calls Jerusalem’s “sister”. (Fulfilled in c. 720 BC, conventional dating). 2. And so, God warns through Ezekiel, would the Babylonians do to Jerusalem for not having learned from her sister’s mistakes. (Fulfilled in c. 590 BC, conventional dating). For the Lord Yahweh says this: “I now hand you [Jerusalem] over to those you hate, to those in whom you have lost interest. They will treat you with hatred, they will rob you of the fruits of your labours and leave you completely naked. And thus your shameful whoring will be exposed .... As you have copied your sister’s behaviour, I will put her cup in your hand”. The Lord Yahweh says this: “You will drink your sister’s cup, a cup that is wide and deep, leading to laughter and mockery, so ample the draught it holds. You will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow. Cup of affliction and devastation, the cup of your sister Samaria, you will drink it, you will drain it; then it will be shattered to pieces and lacerate your breast. I have spoken - it is the Lord Yahweh who speaks”. (Ezekiel 23:28, 29:31-33, 34). 3. And St. John is right in line with this Old Testament tradition. In Apocalypse he prepares the Jews for the second destruction of Jerusalem (by the Romans), just as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel had done for the earlier destructions, of Israel (by the Assyrians) and Jerusalem (by the Babylonians). The Book of Revelation is absolutely saturated with references from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Ezekiel; for, according to Fr. Kramer (ibid., 3-4. My emphasis): The Apocalypse is a prophetical book (IV.1), and it ranks St. John with the prophets of the Old Testament (X.11). The “mystery of God” had been declared by His “servants the prophets (X, 7) .... [Apocalypse] is so largely a restatement of the Old Testament prophecies, that some have called it a mere compilation. All the seemingly idiosyncratic imagery used in the Book of Revelation by Saint John the Evangelist (e.g. “wormwood”, “burning mountain”; “blood sun”, “great hailstones”, etc.) turns out upon investigation to be ‘re-cycled’ imagery in the sense that it has already been used - and its meaning established - in the Old Testament. Thus the above graphic image by Ezekiel of Jerusalem as the drunken whore, holding the cup of wrath in her hand, is exactly the same image of Jerusalem that we find in the Book of Revelation (though separated in time from Ezekiel by about half a millennium); the harlot drunk with wine and holding a golden cup in her hand. Thus St. John (17:4-6): The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and glittered with gold and jewels and pearls, and she was holding a golden winecup filled with the disgusting filth of her fornication; on her forehead was written a name, a cryptic name: ‘Babylon the Great, the mother of all the prostitutes and all the filthy practices on the earth’. I saw that she was drunk, drunk with the blood of saints, and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus .... Here the martyrs of the Old Testament (called “saints”) are distinguished from those of the New Testament (“martyrs of Jesus”); but they all suffered their fate in the one same city. This city, this vile ‘woman’, is apostate Jerusalem! She is also called “the Great City” (e.g. Revelation 14:8; 18:10), and, again, “the Great City known by the symbolic names Sodom and Egypt, in which their Lord was crucified” (11:8). Derogatory names like “Sodom”, “Gomorrah” and “Egypt” were indeed code-names - or, rather, labels of contempt - applied by the Old Testament prophets to Israel and Jerusalem turned harlot. Thus Isaiah addressed Jerusalem’s leaders: “Hear the word of Yahweh, you rulers of Sodom; listen to the command of our God, you people of Gomorrah ... What a harlot she has become, the faithful city, Zion, that was all justice!” (Isaiah 1:10, 21; cf. Jeremiah 23:14). And St. John, in turn, picks up this usage for Jerusalem - clearly Jerusalem because she is the only city of which it can be said “in which their Lord was crucified” - and he applies to her the mystery name of “Babylon”, “a cryptic [symbolical] name” (17:5). And, in case we missed it, St. John goes on to tell us of this “Great City” that: “In her you will find the blood of prophets and saints, and all the blood that was ever shed on earth” (18:24). Now the Evangelist’s description could not possibly apply to Rome, despite what even good commentators seem to think. E.g: Opus Dei (op. cit.) on Rev 17:1-19:10: “This first section of the final scene begins with the depiction of the city of Rome (described as the great harlot, the great city, great Babylon), its punishment, and its connexion with the beast (the symbol of absolutist antichristian power personified by certain emperors (cf 13:18). Fr. Kramer (The Book of Destiny, pp. 387-8): “The name of the harlot was written on her forehead. Seneca (“Contro. V.i”) says that Roman harlots wore a label with their name on their foreheads. That would make this verse point to Rome, since this woman is the figure of the great city. St. Peter (I Peter, V.13) writes from Babylon, by which he surely [sic] means Rome. Roman harlots may indeed have worn a label on their foreheads, which was ancient practice, but it was of Jerusalem that Jeremiah shouted: “You had a whore’s forehead” (Jeremiah 3:3). Note that Rome does not figure at all in the Old Testament until we come all the way down to its very last history, I and II Maccabees. Rome is there mentioned, but not at all in terms of John the Evangelist’s condemnatory: “In her you will find the blood of prophets and saints, and all the blood that was ever shed on earth”. Rather, Rome is spoken of most favourably, even eulogised, by the inspired Maccabean writer. Moreover, the Maccabees had actually formed an alliance with Rome (I Maccabees 8:1, 12-16). And obviously, from St. John’s description of “Babylon” in terms of great antiquity, it cannot refer to any modern-day (historically recent) city. No, St. John’s “Babylon” refers to Jerusalem! In fact Our Lord himself told the Pharisees in what great city the blood of all holy men had been shed, and was still being shed (Matthew 23:35-39): ‘... you will draw down on yourselves the blood of every holy man ... from the blood of Abel ... to the blood of Zechariah ... whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar [i.e., of the Jerusalem Temple]. I tell you solemnly, all of this will recoil on this generation. Jerusalem Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! ... Your House [Temple] will be left to you desolate [cf. Abomination that makes desolate], for I promise, you shall not see Me any more until you say: Blessings on Him who comes in the name of the Lord!’ (Matthew 23:35-39). ‘This generation’ There is a lot for us to chew over in this statement alone. For starters, here is mention of that coming of Christ that has so baffled exegetes, that seems emphatically to pertain to that generation. Yahweh God, who had conceded to Israel a 40-year probation in the desert under Moses (c. 1400 BC), would now again in the time of His Beloved Son allow for about 40 years (c. 30-70 AD), a full generation, to enable the Apostles to gather in whomsoever was destined to be saved. And just as Moses, with assistance from his loyal Levite priests, had to carry, cajole and exhort his people during the trying sojourn in the wilderness, so do we find St. Peter, with his loyal team of Sts. John, Paul, etc., doing the same. Thus St. Peter: “You must repent ... every one of you must be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ... Save yourselves from this perverse generation”. (Acts 2:38, 41). And St. John: “I am writing this, my children, to stop you sinning; but if anyone should sin, we have our advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ ...”. (I John 2:1). And St. Paul: “The Holy Spirit says: If only you would listen to Him today; do not harden your hearts, as happened at the Rebellion [Moses’s day], on the Day of Temptation in the wilderness, when your ancestors challenged Me and tested Me, though they had seen what I could do for forty years”. (Hebrews 3:9) St. Paul in fact most eloquently tried to lift the peoples’ minds above the earthly Jerusalem that was passing away, to the heavenly Jerusalem. “What you have come to is nothing known to the senses [as it indeed had been in the case of those at Mount Sinai, with fire, noise etc.] ...” (Hebrews 12:18, etc.). St. Peter again: “... men with an infinite capacity for sinning ....They may promise freedom but they themselves are slaves ... to corruption; because if anyone lets himself be dominated by anything, then he is a slave to it; and anyone who has escaped the pollution of the world once by coming to know our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and who then allows himself to be entangled by it a second time and mastered, will end up in a worse state than he began in. It would even have been better for him never to have learnt the way of holiness, than to know it and afterwards desert the holy rule that was entrusted to him. What he has done is exactly as the proverb rightly says: The dog goes back to his own vomit, and: When the sow has been washed, it wallows in the mud”. (2 Peter 2:14, 19-22). And St. John again: “Write to the angel of the church in Sardis and say, ‘... I know all about you: how you are reputed to be alive and yet are dead. Wake up; revive what little you have left: it is dying fast. ... Repent. If you do not wake up, I shall come to you like a thief, without telling you at what hour to expect Me’.” (Revelation 3:1-4). In this way many were saved, “a huge crowd” (Revelation 19:6). But “the apostasy” of which St. Paul warned (2 Thessalonians 2:3), and from which St. John, too, was trying to hold back the seven churches of Asia (Revelation 1), and from which, too, St. Peter and the other Apostles would have been striving to protect Judæa and Samaria, was ever working its way also - as it had with Moses’s generation as typified at Meribah and Massa in the desert (Psalm 94). The ‘fruits’ of this apostasy would ultimately be mass destruction. Thus I believe the above texts of the Apostles to be all approximately contemporaneous witness and exhortation - not writings separated by decades, before and after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD! The Jewish people (especially) would be given a full generation of 40 years to change, with the Apostles urging them not to fall back. Eventually the destroying angel would pass by those who had been marked with the sign of the Lamb, that is the baptised who had persevered in their faith. But those who wore the mark of the beast (Revelation 14:10), the apostates, would be destroyed, and violently. This is exactly what Jesus Christ had prophetically alluded to prior to his Passion, when he - having had placed before Him by “some people” the examples of (i) those slain by the Roman troops of Pilate, and (ii) others killed by a falling tower – had insisted: ‘Unless you do penance you will all perish as they did [that is, by a violent death]’ (Luke 13:1-5). [Not to mention the danger of spiritual death]. For at the end of the 40 years of probation thousands upon thousands of Jews did die violent deaths at the hands of the Romans, with towers likewise falling upon them, and missiles, stones and fire. Our Lord’s warning applies to all wicked generations, including our own. And we have also had a ‘John and a Paul’ (in John Paul II) telling us, specifically with reference to Revelation, that Vatican II is most essentially a Council of Advent, of the Coming. But let us once and for all get away from the idea that some modern-day Beast is going to implant 666 micro-computer chips in the foreheads of his followers. More plausibly the ‘mark of the beast’ is - like a Satanic aping of the tau marked upon the forehead by the angel in Ezekiel (9:4) - an invisible, spiritual character that the destroying angel could discern, to kill or to spare. Nor should anyone be living in fear of terrible storms of hail of unnatural size. [Comment: I first wrote this before Sydney’s awesome hailstorm in April of 1999, when some claimed to have seen hailstones even “the size of a bucket”]. The “great hailstones weighing a talent each” of Revelation 16:21 are undoubtedly the same as those of the exact same weight as described by the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, eyewitness to the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD (The Jewish War, 3.7.9, cf. 3.7.10, emphasis added): “... catapults ... threw at once landed upon them with great noise, and stones of the weight of a talent were thrown by the engines that were prepared for that purpose, together with fire .... which made the wall so dangerous that the Jews durst not to come upon it”. They were stones from the Roman catapults, not hailstones from the clouds. Josephus’s description of this doomed generation, fittingly punished, completely backs up Our Lord’s numerous complaints about it being “an evil and adulterous generation”, (e.g. Matthew 13:39; Mark 8:12; Luke 11:29), and even worse than Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:15; 11:24 Mark 6:11; Luke 10:12). Josephus wrote in retrospect (ibid., 5.10.5): “Neither did any other city ever suffer such miseries, nor did any age ever breed a generation more fruitful in wickedness than this was, from the beginning of the world”. Is there an analogous situation with the post-Vatican II generation - again one of history’s worst? Is its time of probation also running out? Those blessed to have the gift of Faith need to be exhorters and encouragers like the Apostles were to their “perverse generation”, to save some at any cost (cf. Romans 11:14; I Corinthians 9:22). “Must Soon Take Place” Revelation is a book of urgency. The events it describes were to happen soon. [When the Bible says “soon”, it means soon, as in the case of the birth of Isaiah’s Immanuel - not in the Third Millennium!]. We learn that lesson when we start reading Revelation at its beginning. Plato, in The Republic, had stated an important maxim: “The beginning is the most important part of the book”, and this principle holds a special significance for the would-be interpreter of Revelation. “Unfortunately”, as Gentry rightly notes (op. cit., p. 40), “too many prophecy enthusiasts leap over the beginning of this book, never securing a proper footing for the treacherous path ahead”. The key to Revelation is found in St. John’s beginning (1:1a, 3): This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants what must soon [Gk. tachos] take place .... Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near [Gk. engys]. Again, in case we missed it, St. John repeats this soon-ness at the very end (22:6): The angel said to me, ‘These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God of the spirit of the prophets, sent His angel; to show His servants the things that must soon take place’ .... Then he told me, ‘Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, because the time is near’. Just as it would have been senseless for Isaiah’s “sign” for king Ahaz to have been something that would not occur until 700 years later, so would John the Evangelist - according to Gentry (op. cit. p. 42) “... be taunting [the churches] mercilessly if he were discussing events two thousand or more years distant. God answers the anxious cry “How long?” by urging their patience only a “little while longer” (6:10-11). Revelation promises there will no longer be “delay” (10:6)”. The angel’s command to St. John not to seal up the scroll is also tellingly in favour of this “soon” interpretation. The prophet Daniel, by contrast, had been commanded by the angel to keep his “words secret and the book [scroll] sealed until the time of the End”, because the things Daniel was shown were not to happen for a long time in the future - in fact several hundred years later, in the time of the Apostles’ generation. For Our Lord himself had, during his important Olivet Discourse when facing the Temple of Jerusalem, referred to the “abomination that makes desolate of which the prophet Daniel spoke” (Matthew 24:15; cf. Mark 14:13). We know from Josephus’s history that the Roman armies of Cestius Gallus, that came up to (and surrounded) Jerusalem in 66 AD, and had all but conquered the city, had suddenly, most strangely, retreated. Even Josephus recognised the hand of Providence in this most unexpected turnabout. Many Jews, he said, fled the city at the time - no doubt e.g. those obedient to Jesus Christ’s Olivet warning. And Josephus is correct in seeing this intermission as only intensifying the pressure ultimately, so that with the return of the Roman armies the final destruction of Jerusalem, when it came (in 70 AD), would be total. Thus would be fulfilled Our Lord’s prophecy that ‘Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles are fulfilled’ (Luke 21:24). St. John recalls this in Revelation 11:2: “But exclude the outer court [of the Temple]; do not measure it, because it has been given to the Gentiles. They will trample on the holy city for 42 months”. As Gentry has observed (op. cit., p. 66): “... the trampling of the temple in AD 70 (Dan. 9:26-27) after its “abomination” (9:27; cf. Matt. 24:15-16; Luke 21:20-21) ends the Gentiles’ ability to stamp out the worship of God. In Daniel 9:24-27, Matthew 23:38-24:2, and Revelation 11:1-2, the “holy city” and its Temple end in destruction”. But how do the “times of the Gentiles” relate to the forty-two months of Revelation 11:12)? Well, the period would range from the spring of 67 AD - when Emperor Nero sent his general, Vespasian, to put down the revolt of the Jews - to August 70 - when the Romans breached the inner wall of Jerusalem, transforming the Temple and city into a raging inferno: a period of forty-two months. The five months of Revelation 9:5 pertain specifically to the period when the Jewish defenders held out desperately (one might say, fanatically), from April 70 - when Titus began the siege of Jerusalem - until the crescendo at the end of August. According to Gentry (61): “This five months of the Jewish war happens to be its most gruesome and evil period” (cf. Wars, 5.1.1, 4-5; 10:5; 12:4; 13:6). The Setting Palestine, not the world, is the stage for the drama of Revelation, despite translations that tell us of Christ’s judgment bringing mourning upon “all the tribes of the earth” (NIV). Literal translation of the text shows that St. John actually focusses on all the tribes of “the land” (Gk. tês gês), the well-known Promised Land in which the Jews lived. We should probably translate the Greek word hê gê as ‘the land’ rather than ‘the earth’ in the great majority of cases where this occurs in Revelation. According to Gentry (p. 72): After mentioning the redeemed/sealed of Israel in 14:1-5, John turns his attention to further judgements on the land by means of three woes (14:6-21) and the seven bowls (chaps. 15-16). Though the prophecies are crafted in dramatic hyperbole, they refer to historical events. For instance, consider the reaping of the grapes of wrath: “they were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia” (14:20). For compelling reasons, “the city” here appears to be Jerusalem: (1) John defines the city earlier as Jerusalem (11:8); (2) the “harvest” is in “the earth/land” (Gk hê gê; 14:15-19); (3) this judgment falls on the place where Jesus was crucified; “outside the city” (John 19:20; cf. Heb. 13:11-13); and (4) the Son of Man “on the cloud” (Rev. 14:14-15) rehearses Revelation’s theme regarding Israel (1:7). The distance of blood flow is 1,600 stadia, which is roughly the length of the land as a Roman province: The Itinerarium of Antoninus of Piacenza records Palestine’s length as 1664 stadia. This prophecy refers to the enormous blood flow in Israel during the Jewish war. Allow me to document this: In his Wars Josephus writes: “the sea was bloody a long way” (3.9.3); “one might then see the lake all bloody, and full of dead bodies” (3.10.9); “the whole of the country through which they had fled was filled with slaughter, and Jordan could not be passed over, by reason of the dead bodies that were in it” (4.7.6); “blood ran down over all the lower parts of the city, from the upper city” (4.1.10); “the outer temple was all of it overflowed with blood” (4.5.1); “the blood of all sorts of dead carcasses stood in lakes in the holy courts” (5.1.3); and “the whole city ran down with blood, to such a degree indeed that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with these men’s blood” (6.8.5). The Burnings The burning up of a third of the trees of “the land” (Revelation 8:7) reminds of the Romans’ setting villages on fire in conjunction with their denuding the land of its trees. Gentry (ibid.): Note what Josephus writes about the policy of the Romans: “he also at the same time gave his soldiers leave to set the suburbs on fire, and ordered that they should bring timber together, and raise banks against the city” (Wars 5.6.2). The Romans destroyed the trees in Israel for fuel and for building their weapons: “All the trees that were about the city had been already cut down for the making of the former banks” (Wars 5.12.4). “They cut down all the trees that were in the country that adjoined to the city, and that for ninety furlongs round about” (Wars 6.1.1; cf. 3.7.8; 5.6.2). Of Vespasian’s march on Gadara, Josephus writes: “He also set fire, not only to the city itself, but to all the villas and small cities that were round about it (Wars 3.7.1.; cf. 4.9.1). Galilee was all over filled with fire and blood” (Wars 3.4.1.). Vespasian “went and burnt Galilee and the neighbouring parts” (Wars 6/6/2). When the temple finally burns, Josephus moans: “One would have thought that the hill itself, on which the temple stood, was seething hot, as full of fire on every part of it” (Wars 6.5.1). And, of course, ultimately the whole city of Jerusalem goes up in flames so that as the Romans take the Jews captive to Rome, they relate that they are from “a land still on fire upon every side” (Wars 7.5.5.) “Babylon”, the code name for the impious city of Jerusalem, was “ruined within a single hour”. “They see the smoke as she burns” (Revelation 18:9, 19). A friend of mine remarked that, if our times are following a pattern parallel to all of this, then what sort of punishment is our world in for! ‘Great Tribulation’ Now the ‘great tribulation’ of which Our Lord spoke is none other than the ‘great tribulation’ of which St. John wrote in, e.g., Revelation 7:14 (cf. Matthew 24:21). These are not meant to be separated by millennia! No need to extrapolate to, say, the Third Millennium, to find the “great tribulation” [though, allegorically, modernistic Relativism today are ‘in the spirit’ of the religious persecution that the Jews were then suffering at the hands of their own people]; the seven churches of Revelation (1:9; 2:9-10, 13) were already feeling the strain of it. And no need even to go to Rome and Nero for a terrible persecution of the early Christians. Jerusalem is far enough. On the eve of Nero’s accession, there was a great famine that “spread over the whole empire” (Acts 11:28; cf. Matthew 24:7). “It was about this time that King Herod started persecuting certain members of the Church. He beheaded James the brother of John, and when he saw that this pleased the Jews he decided to arrest Peter as well” (Acts 12:1-3). Some Church Fathers thought that Nero was the Beast of Apocalypse, having shown that his name adds up to 666; the Beast’s heads being the succession of Roman emperors. Be that as it may, in Herod (not either of the Herods contemporary with Jesus, of course) the Beast would have found an appropriate ally. Thus (Acts 12:21-23): ... Herod, wearing his robes of state and enthroned on a daïs, made a speech to them. The people acclaimed him with, ‘It is a god speaking, not a man!’, and at that moment the angel of the Lord struck him down, because he had not given the glory to God. He was eaten away with worms and died. Need we even necessarily go to the Eternal City of Rome for the martyrdom of Sts. Peter and Paul? I don’t know. St. Peter’s bones, we are told, lie beneath St. Peter’s in the Vatican. But that is not necessarily proof that he died there (cf. Exodus 13:19, where Moses carried Joseph’s bones from Egypt to Israel). In this regard, I was interested to read in the Opus Dei commentary re the two witnesses of Revelation 11, who definitely died in Jerusalem (v. 8), that “because the two witnesses testify to Jesus Christ and die martyrs, tradition identifies them with Sts. Peter and Paul ...”. But the two witnesses of Revelation could just as well - perhaps even more likely - be two other of the Apostles slain in Jerusalem before the city’s destruction by the Romans: e.g. James the Lesser. Eusebius (The History of the Church) wrote in detail about this great miracle-working Patriarch of Jerusalem whose martyrdom, he says, was “instantly followed” by the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans (13:1). Some of the Fathers thought that the two witnesses would be Enoch and Elijah, said not to have died. But this could be only in an allegorical sense; in the sense of the two witnesses coming “in the spirit” of Enoch and Elijah (like St. John the Baptist). The next thing we read in Scripture is Jesus’s telling his disciples re the Temple that ‘not a single stone standing here will be left on another’ (Matthew 24:2), and then afterwards telling His four chief Apostles, Peter, Andrew, James and John, privately (the famous Olivet Discourse), about what would happen to Jerusalem. The Book of Revelation is Our Lord’s revealing all of this through St. John now, several decades later, to an audience far larger than just the select four. The Book of Revelation is, I maintain, a continuation of the Gospels and especially of the Olivet Discourse. Why, then, don’t commentators realise the obvious; that Sts. Peter and John are referring to Jerusalem; but under the cryptic name of “Babylon”? And why “Babylon”, instead of, say, “Sodom” or “Egypt”? There is a sad and biting irony in this choice of epithet. Whereas the Babylonians had been they who had destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem the first time round, now it will be the Jews themselves, nick-named “Babylon”, who will be responsible for burning to the ground their very own Temple. And this time it would be irrevocable. Admittedly, what makes somewhat confusing the identifying of Revelation’s “Babylon” is that this scarlet Woman is portrayed as riding on a Beast whose description, “seven hills”, seems to point clearly to Rome. Commentators then take the whole package, Woman plus Beast, as pertaining to Rome; which city - according to tradition - did persecute the followers of Jesus. However, according to the following, this description could actually fit Jerusalem (http://musingsofanoldpastor.blogspot.com.au/search?q=seven): The City on Seven Hills Jerusalem was known long before Rome as the city of Seven Mountains/hills. Rev 17:9: And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. 1. Mt. Gareb, 2. Mt. Acra, 3. Mt. Goath 4. Mt. Bezetha, 5. Mt. Zion, 6. Mt. Ophel, 7. Mt. Moriah. Revelation more naturally evokes the image of Jerusalem as the city seated on seven mountains in 17:9 than Rome. The view that Babylon is a cipher for Jerusalem in the Apocalypse cannot then be dismissed on the basis of this common objection; not only can it be defended that the evidence of 17:9 can fit Jerusalem, there are strong reasons to believe that it in fact does most properly fit Jerusalem. …. Nevertheless, we have already seen in the paradigmatical Old Testament cases of Israel and Jerusalem that two protagonists, not one, were involved, namely: 1. The once just Woman turned Harlot; and; 2. Her suitors who have wooed her in the past, made her rich, but who eventually come to loath her, then turn on her and destroy her. So some could argue that the same situation is to be found in Revelation: 1. The Woman, Jerusalem, rides on 2. Roman power, but is to be distinguished from the latter which will eventually cause her destruction. The Woman is Jerusalem; the Destroyer is Rome. When was the Book of Revelation Written? What has exacerbated the whole exegetical problem of properly interpreting Revelation on a literal level is, I believe, the conventional opinion that St. John wrote this Apocalypse in hoary old age, in c. 95 AD, about a quarter of a century after Jerusalem had been destroyed. Hence many commentators are loath to see any relevance for Revelation in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Protestant and Catholic writers alike accept the late 95 AD date of authorship (Protestant Thomas Foster sharing this view in common with Opus Dei and Fr. Kramer). However, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, there has emerged a new scholarship of great expertise as typified by Fr. Jean Carmignac, showing that the books of the New Testament literature (esp. the Gospels), were composed much earlier than was originally thought. And the signs are that the entire New Testament, including Revelation, pre-dates 70 AD. I believe that there is abundant evidence in the Apocalypse to indicate that it was written early. In fact the reason that prevented my writing this article initially was: Where to start? There is so much! My effort in the end had been greatly assisted by my finding Gentry’s preterist interpretation on the eve of commencing this article. The whole Book of Revelation is focussed upon the Holy Land and especially Jerusalem. The Temple; the golden altar; the 24 elders keeping watch at Beth Moked in the north from where an attack might come (and general Titus did in fact take Jerusalem from there, at the city’s weakest point); the sabbath restrictions; etc., etc. Apart from their late dating of St. John’s Revelation preventing commentators from recognising the obvious, that “Babylon” is Jerusalem, this path they have taken leads them into other awkward anomalies as well. It is commonly believed that St. Paul had already completed his missionary activity and had been martyred well before St. John the Evangelist wrote the Book of Revelation. Paul is given the credit for having established the seven churches to which John later wrote. This view forces commentators into making such strange observations as Fr. Kramer’s: “... St. John could not have interfered in the administration of the churches in the lifetime of St. Paul” (op. cit., pp. 7-8). Oh, no? Was St. Paul (who even refers to himself as a very late arrival on the scene, I Corinthians 15:8) greater than St. John, the Beloved Disciple of Our Lord? St. Paul himself would answer us an emphatic: ‘No’! Of his visit to Jerusalem after his 14 year absence, he tells us: “... James, Cephas and John, these leaders, these pillars, shook hands with Barnabas and me .... The only thing they insisted on was that we should remember to help the poor ...” (Galatians 2:9, 10). St. John was by no means subservient to St. Paul; but apparently gave orders to the latter. All the Apostles had a hand in establishing the churches throughout Judaea and Samaria, as Jesus Christ had commanded them, and then “to the ends of the earth”, which St. Paul boasted had been achieved even in his day (Colossians 1:23). And Our Lord told the Apostles, “solemnly”, that they would not have completed “the rounds of the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes” (Matthew 10:23). We had better look now briefly at that particular ‘Coming’. The ‘Coming’ for the Apostles The Son of Man refers on various occasions to his ‘coming with His kingdom’ in the context that it would occur whilst some of those present were still alive (e.g. Matthew 16:28; Luke 9:27). Liberal modernist exegetes, imagining that Christ could here be referring only to his final and definitive Coming, love to point out that, because it has not occurred to this day, Jesus Christ was prone to error, was not omniscient, and that the Apostles who had expected His coming in their day were deluded (especially St. Paul). But there may be more than one biblical ‘coming’. Only a matter of about a week after Our Lord had addressed the above words to His disciples, there had occurred the Transfiguration, to which St. Peter would refer back in later years in the context of “the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (cf. 2 Peter 1:16 and 1:18-19). At least, it seems to have been a kind of preview of the real thing. The risen Lord told Peter, in regard to John: “‘If I want him to stay behind till I come, what does it matter to you? You are to follow Me’. The rumour then went out among the brothers that this disciple [John] would not die. Yet Jesus had not said to Peter, ‘He will not die’, but, ‘If I want him to stay behind till I come’.” (John 21:21-23) Since the Apostles greatly yearned for the ‘coming’ of Jesus Christ, could that have been the definitive ‘coming’ at the end of the world? I suggest not. Too far away. Rather the Apostles were yearning for a ‘coming’ of Jesus in their own day; one that would, in some cases, coincide with their martyrdom, their being uplifted into Heaven (as in the case of the deaths of the two witnesses). Apparently Christ had apprised them of this; for St Peter wrote: “I know the time for taking off this tent is coming soon, as Our Lord Jesus Christ foretold to me” (2 Peter 1:14). Presumably the Master would also have told St. Paul; for did he not ‘show [Paul] how much he himself must suffer for My name’ (Acts 9:16)? Was this ‘coming’ for the Apostles therefore the kind of consoling heavenly visitation that St. Stephen Protomartyr had experienced just before his death (Acts 7:56): ‘I can see heaven thrown open ... and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God’? Did it, for many of them, coincide with his victorious coming in 70 AD as the Rider upon the white horse, to oversee the destruction of harlot Jerusalem and the now-corrupted Judaïc system? Because Our Lord’s predictions are - for those who believe him to be the Word Incarnate - infallible, there must have been a ‘coming” already in the days of the Apostles, of that particular generation. 70 AD (conventional dating) is then the likely date for it. The 40 years of probation for the ‘woman’ were now up. It was to be divorce and execution.

Judith’s fame continued to spread

by Damien F. Mackey “Her fame continued to spread, and she lived in the house her husband had left her. Before she died, Judith divided her property among her husband’s and her own close relatives and set her slave woman free. When she died in Bethulia at the age of 105, she was buried beside her husband, and the people of Israel mourned her death for seven days. As long as Judith lived, and for many years after her death, no one dared to threaten the people of Israel”. Judith 16:23-25 Introduction Judith became immensely famous in the eyes of the people of Israel, for, as we read in Judith 16:23 that “her fame continued to spread”. Even before her heroic action in the camp of the Assyrians, we are told of this goodly woman that (Judith 8:7-8): “[Judith] lived among all her possessions without anyone finding a word to say against her, so devoutly did she fear God”. Moreover she had, according to the elder, Uzziah, shown wisdom even from her youth (vv. 28-29): “Uzziah replied, ‘Everything you have just said comes from an honest heart and no one will contradict a word of it. Not that today is the first time your wisdom has been displayed; from your earliest years all the people have known how shrewd you are and of how sound a heart’.” Aside from the recognition of her renowned beauty, by (i) the author (Judith 8:7; 10:4); (ii) the elders of Bethulia (10:7); (iii) the Assyrian unit and soldiery (10:14, 19); (iv) Holofernes and his staff (10:23; 11:21, 23; 12:13, 16, 20), we learn that even the coarse Assyrians were impressed by her wisdom and eloquence (11:21, 23). And Uzziah, after Judith’s triumph over Holofernes, proclaimed magnificently in her honour (Judith 13:18-20): … ‘May you be blessed, my daughter, by God Most High, beyond all women on earth; and blessed be the Lord God, Creator of heaven and earth, who guided you to cut off the head of the leader of our enemies! The trust which you have shown will not pass from human hearts, as they commemorate the power of God for evermore. God grant you may be always held in honour and rewarded with blessings, since you did not consider your own life when our nation was brought to its knees, but warded off our ruin, walking in the right path before our God’. And the people all said, 'Amen! Amen!' And the stunned Achior, upon seeing the severed head of Holofernes, burst out with this exclamation of praise (Judith 14:7): ‘May you be blessed in all the tents of Judah and in every nation; those who hear your name will be seized with dread!’ Later, Joakim the high priest and the entire Council of Elders of Israel, who were in Jerusalem, came to see Judith and to congratulate her (Judith 15:9-10): On coming to her house, they blessed her with one accord, saying: ‘You are the glory of Jerusalem! You are the great pride of Israel! You are the highest honour of our race! By doing all this with your own hand you have deserved well of Israel, and God has approved what you have done. May you be blessed by the Lord Almighty in all the days to come!’ And the people all said, 'Amen!' ‘Blessed by God Most High, beyond all women on earth’. ‘The glory of Jerusalem, the great pride of Israel, the highest honour of [her] race!’ What more could possibly be said! From whence came this incredible flow of wisdom? We may tend to recall the Judith of literature as being both beautiful and courageous - and certainly she could be most forthright as well, when occasion demanded it, somewhat like Joan of Arc (who was supposedly referred to, in her time, as ‘a second Judith’). Yet, there is far more to it: mysticism. T. Craven (Artistry and Faith in the Book of Judith), following J. Dancy’s view (Shorter Books of the Apocrypha) that the theology presented in Judith’s words to the Bethulian town officials rivals the theology of the Book of Job, will go on to make this interesting comment (pp. 88-89, n. 45.): Judith plays out her whole story with the kind of faith described in the Prologue of Job (esp. 1:21 and 2:9). Her faith is like that of Job after his experience of God in the whirlwind (cf. 42:1-6), yet in the story she has no special theophanic experience. We can only imagine what happened on her housetop where she was habitually a woman of regular prayer. [End of quote] Although the women’s movement is quite recent, it has already provided some new insights and some radically different perspectives on Judith. According to P. Montley (as referred to by C. Moore, The Anchor Bible. “Judith”, pp. 65): … Judith is the archetypal androgyne. She is more than the Warrior Woman and the femme fatale, a combination of the soldier and the seductress … …. Just as the brilliance of a cut diamond is the result of many different facets, so the striking appeal of the book of Judith results from its many facets. … [End of quote] M. Stocker will, in her comprehensive treatment of the Judith character and her actions (Judith Sexual Warrior, pp. 13-15), compare the heroine to, amongst others, the Old Testament’s Jael – a common comparison given that the woman, Jael, had driven a tent peg through the temple of Sisera, an enemy of Israel (Judges 4:17-22) – Joan of Arc, and Charlotte Corday, who had, during the French Revolution, slain the likewise unsuspecting Marat. “If viewed negatively – from an irreligious perspective, for instance”, Stocker will go on to write, “Judith’s isolation, chastity, widowhood, childlessness, and murderousness would epitomize all that is morbid, nihilistic and abortive”. Hardly the type of character to have been accorded ‘increasing fame’ amongst her people! Craven again, with reference to J. Ruskin (‘Mornings in Florence’, p. 335), writes (p. 95): “Judith, the slayer of Holofernes; Jael, the slayer of Sisera; and Tomyris, the slayer of Cyrus are counted in art as the female “types” who prefigure the Virgin Mary’s triumph over Satan”. Judith a Heroine of Israel --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The way that I see it, these early commentators had the will, if not the history/archaeology, to demonstrate the trustworthiness of the Judith story. Then, at about the time that the archaeology had become available, commentators no longer had the will. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What did the young Judith do to achieve her early fame? Well, if the typical contemporary biblical commentators are to be believed, Judith did nothing in actual historical reality, for the famous story is merely a piece of pious fiction. Here, for instance, is such a view from the Catholic News Agency [CNA]: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resources/bible/introduction-to-the-old-testament/judith/ Judith …. Judith is often characterized as an early historical novel. Yet ironically, its content is unhistorical. The book begins by telling us that Nebuchadnezzer was the king of Assyria ruling in Ninevah. But Ninevah was destroyed seven years before Nebuchadnezzer became king. And he was king of Babylon, not Assyria. It would be similar to an author beginning a book, "In 1776, when Abraham Lincoln was the president of Canada..." The author of Judith clues us in that he is not telling a typical story. While the story is replete with proper names of places and people, many of them are not placed "correctly" and many of them are unknown from other sources. The book of Judith is not trying to narrate an historical event nor is it presenting a regular historical novel with fictional characters in a "real" setting. Rather, Judith is iconic of all of Israel's struggles against surrounding nations. By the time of its writing, Israel had been dominated by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians and the Greeks. The name "Judith" means "Jewess." The character of Judith is therefore representative of the whole nation of Israel. In an almost constant battle against the surrounding nations, the Israelites depended on the Lord for their survival and sustenance. Judith represents the best hopes and intentions of the Israelites-the vanquishing of the oppressors and the freedom of the land of Israel. The general Holofernes, whom Judith assassinates, represents the worst of the oppressors. He is bringing 182,000 troops against a small city in a corner of Israel to force them to worship the head of foreign oppression: Nebuchadnezzer. The city is terribly outmatched, but Holofernes opts for a siege rather than a battle. When the people are at the point of despair because they have run out of water, Judith volunteers to try an unusual tactic. She leaves the city with her maid and gets close to Holofernes because of her beauty. She uses a series of tricks and half-truths to find Holofernes drunk and vulnerable. Then she beheads him with his own sword! It is crucial to see the irony of the story and of Judith's words. For example, the Ammonite [sic] Achior who Holofernes rejected was supposed to share the cruel fate of the Israelites at the hand of the Assyrians, but he is saved with the Israelites instead (6:5-9). Judith uses the phrase "my lord" (Adonai in Heb.) several times, but it is unclear whether she is referring to Holofernes or to God. The great nation is defeated by a humble woman. The story is similar to the famous David and Goliath episode. The reader should look for ironic moments where a character's intentions or statements are fulfilled, but in the way that he or she would least expect. The book of Judith is divided into basically two sections, ch. 1-7 and 8-16. The first seven chapters lay out the "historical" background and describe the political situation which led to Holofernes attack on Israel. It is important to understand that the events are not historical, but they are full of details that one finds in a good novel. Achior plays a key role by narrating Israel's history and firmly believing in God's protection of his people (5). He eventually converts to Judaism after the Assyrians are defeated (14:10). The second half of the book (8-16) focuses on Judith herself and her heroic acts. Once the Assyrians discover Holofernes decapitated body, they flee in confusion and the Israelites rout them. Ch. 16 contains a hymn about Judith's deeds. …. Judith is a book of the Bible that is meant to be enjoyed. By enjoying the story and the Lord's victory over the great nations through Judith, we can appreciate the paradoxical way God chooses to work on earth, using the weak to conquer the strong, the poor to outdo the rich. [End of quote] But this attribution of non-historicity to the Book of Judith was not the standard Catholic approach down through the centuries, until, say, the 1930’s. During that long period of time, Catholic scholars generally tended to regard the book as recording a real historical drama, whether or not their valiant efforts to demonstrate this were convincing. The way that I see it, these early commentators had the will, if not the history/ archaeology, to demonstrate the trustworthiness of the Judith story. Then, at about the time that the archaeology had become available, commentators no longer had the will. A combination of will and more scientific history/archaeology would make for a really nice change. For, today it is very rare to find any who are prepared to argue for the full historicity of the Book of Judith. I, in my university thesis, A Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah and its Background (http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/5973), wrote regarding this situation (Preface, p. x): I know of virtually no current historians who even consider the Book of Judith to be anything other than a ‘pious fiction’, or perhaps ‘historical fiction’, with the emphasis generally on the ‘fiction’ aspect of this. Thus I feel a strong empathy for the solitary Judith in the midst of those differently-minded Assyrians (Judith 10:11-13:10). In that thesis I had argued (with respect to the book’s historical and geographical problems) for what I consider in retrospect to be the obvious scenario: that the Judith event pertains to the famous destruction of Sennacherib’s army of 185,000 Assyrians. The heroine Judith initiated this victory for Israel by her slaying of the Assyrian commander-in-chief, which action then led to the rout and slaughter of the army in its panic-stricken flight. For my up-dated version of this, see e.g. my article: “Nadin” (Nadab) of Tobit is the “Holofernes” of Judith http://www.academia.edu/36576110/_Nadin_Nadab_of_Tobit_is_the_Holofernes_of_Judith This is the incident that had made Judith so famous throughout Israel in her youth – a fame that apparently only increased as she grew older. But Judith, even more than being the most beautiful and courageous woman that she was, had already, at a young age, exhibited - as we have read - amazing wisdom and even sanctity. Her wisdom (some might say cunning) was apparent from the way that she was able to beguile the Assyrians with her shrewd and bitingly ironic words. Judith was so formidable and significant a woman and one would expect to find further traces of her in the course of her very long life. She has a further significant biblical presence in the form of Huldah, teacher and expounder of the Torah: Judith and Huldah (2) Judith and Huldah | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu I believe that Judith has, as well, been picked up in many literatures and mythologies of many nations. Judith a Universal Heroine Glimpses of Judith in BC Antiquity Some ancient stories that can be only vaguely historical seem to recall the Judith incident. Two of these that I picked up in my thesis appear in the ‘Lindian Chronicle’ (dated 99 BC), relating to the Greco-Persian period, and in Homer’s classic epic tale, The Iliad. The Lindian Chronicle Thus I wrote in my thesis (op. cit., Volume Two, pp. 67-68): Uzziah, confirming Judith’s high reputation, immediately recognized the truth of what she had just said (vv. 28-29), whilst adding the blatantly Aaronic excuse that ‘the people made us do it’ (v. 30, cf. Exodus 32:21-24): ‘But the people were so thirsty that they compelled us to do for them what we have promised, and made us take an oath that we cannot break’. Judith, now forced to work within the time-frame of those ‘five days’ that had been established against her will, then makes this bold pronouncement – again completely in the prophetic, or even ‘apocalyptic’, style of Joan of Arc (vv. 32-33): Then Judith said to them, ‘Listen to me. I am about to do something that will go down through all generations to our descendants. Stand at the town gate tonight so that I may go out with my maid; and within the days after which you have promised to surrender the town to our enemies, the Lord will deliver Israel by my hand’. A Note. This 5-day time frame, in connection with a siege - the very apex of the [Book of Judith] drama - may also have been appropriated into Greco-Persian folklore. In the ‘Lindian Chronicle’ it is narrated that when Darius, King of Persia, tried to conquer the Island of Hellas, the people gathered in the stronghold of Lindus to withstand the attack. The citizens of the besieged city asked their leaders to surrender because of the hardships and sufferings brought by the water shortage (cf. Judith 7:20-28). The Goddess Athena [read Judith] advised one of the leaders [read Uzziah] to continue to resist the attack; meanwhile she interceded with her father Jupiter [read God of Israel] on their behalf (cf. Judith 8:9-9:14). Thereupon, the citizens asked for a truce of 5 days (exactly as in Judith), after which, if no help arrived, they would surrender (cf. Judith 7:30-31). On the second day a heavy shower fell on the city so the people could have sufficient water (cf. 8:31, where Uzziah asks Judith to pray for rain). Datis [read Holofernes], the admiral of the Persian fleet [read commander-in-chief of the Assyrian army], having witnessed the particular intervention of the Goddess to protect the city, lifted the siege [rather, the siege was forcibly raised]. …. [End of quote] Apparently I am not the only one who has noticed the similarity between these two stories, for I now find this (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/judith.html): “The Israeli scholar Y. M. Grintz has pointed out the parallels between the theme of the book [Judith] and an episode which took place during the siege of Lindus, on the island of Rhodes, but here again the comparison is extremely weak”. Yes, the latter is probably just a “weak” appropriation of the original Hebrew account. I have written a lot along these lines of Greek appropriating, e.g.: Similarities to The Odyssey of the Books of Job and Tobit http://www.academia.edu/8914220/Similarities_to_The_Odyssey_of_the_Books_of_Job_and_Tobit Whereas the goddess Athena may have been substituted for Judith in the Lindian Chronicle, she substitutes for the angel Raphael in the Book of Tobit. I made this comparison in “Similarities to The Odyssey”: The ‘Divine’ Messenger From whom the son, especially, receives help during his travels. In the Book of Tobit, this messenger is the angel Raphael (in the guise of ‘Azarias’). In The Odyssey, it is the goddess Athene (in the guise of ‘Mentes’). Likewise Poseidon (The Odyssey) substitutes for the demon, Asmodeus (in Tobit). It may also be due to an ‘historical’ mix up that two of Judith’s Assyrian opponents came to acquire the apparently Persians name of, respectively, “Holofernes” and “Bagoas” (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/judith.html): “Holofernes and Bagoas are to be identified with the two generals sent against Phoenicia, Palestine and Egypt by Artaxerxes III towards 350 [BC]. The names are certainly Persian, and are attested frequently …”. Greco-Persian history is still awaiting a proper revision. “The Iliad” Earlier in my thesis (pp. 59-60) I had written in similar vein, of Greek appropriation, regarding the confrontation between the characters in the Book of Judith, “Holofernes” and “Achior”: Achior had made an unexpected apologia on behalf of the Israelites. It had even come with this concluding warning to Holofernes (5:20, 21): ‘So now, my master and lord … if they are not a guilty nation, then let my lord pass them by; for their Lord and God will defend them, and we shall become the laughing-stock of the whole world’. These words had absolutely stunned the soldiery who were by now all for tearing Achior ‘limb from limb’ (5:22). Holofernes, for his part, was enraged with his subordinate. Having succeeded in conquering almost the entire west, he was hardly about to countenance hearing that some obscure mountain folk might be able to offer him any meaningful resistance. Holofernes then uttered the ironic words to Achior: ‘… you shall not see my face again from this day until I take revenge on this race that came out of Egypt’ (6:5); ironic because, the next time that Achior would see Holofernes’ face, it would be after Judith had beheaded him. Holofernes thereupon commanded his orderlies to take the insolent Achior and bind him beneath the walls of Bethulia, so that he could suffer, with the people whom he had just verbally defended, their inevitable fate when the city fell to the Assyrians (v. 6). After the Assyrian brigade had managed to secure Achior at Bethulia, and had then retreated from the walls under sling-fire from the townsfolk, the Bethulians went out to fetch him (6:10-13). Once safely inside the city Achior told them his story, and perhaps Judith was present to hear it. Later she would use bits and pieces of information supplied by Achior for her own confrontation with Holofernes, to deceive him. [End of quote] In a footnote (n. 1286) to this, I had proposed, in connection with The Iliad: This fiery confrontation between the commander-in-chief, his subordinates and Achior would be, I suggest - following on from my earlier comments about Greco-Persian appropriations - where Homer got his idea for the main theme of The Iliad: namely the argument at the siege of Troy between Agamemnon, supreme commander of the Greeks, and the renowned Achilles (Achior?). And further on, on p. 69, I drew a comparison between Judith and Helen of Troy of The Iliad: The elders of Bethulia, “Uzziah, Chabris, and Charmis - who are here mentioned for the last time in the story as a threesome (10:6)” … - are stunned by Judith’s new appearance when they meet her at the town’s gate (vv. 7-8): “When they saw her transformed in appearance and dressed differently, they were very greatly astounded at her beauty and said to her, ‘May the God of our ancestors grant you favour and fulfil your plan …’.”…. Upon Judith’s request (command?), the elders “ordered the young men to open the gate for her” (v. 9). Then she and her maid went out of the town and headed for the camp of the Assyrians. “The men of the town watched her until she had gone down the mountain and passed through the valley, where they lost sight of her” (v. 10). “Compare this scene”, I added in (n. 1316), “with that of Helen at the Skaian gates of Troy, greatly praised by Priam and the elders of the town for her beauty. The Iliad, Book 3, p. 45”. See also my article: Judith the Jewess and “Helen” the Hellene (10) Judith the Jewess and " Helen " the Hellene | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu We recall that Craven had grouped together “Judith, the slayer of Holofernes; Jael, the slayer of Sisera; and Tomyris, the slayer of Cyrus …”. Whilst Judith and Jael were two distinct heroines of Israel, living centuries apart, I think that Tomyris, the slayer of Cyrus must be - given the ancient variations about the death of Cyrus - a fictitious character. And her story has certain suspicious likenesses, again, to that of Judith. Tomyris and Cyrus I have added here a few comparisons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great#Death Death … The details of Cyrus's death vary by account. The account of Herodotus from his Histories provides the second-longest detail, in which Cyrus met his fate in a fierce battle with the Massagetae, a tribe from the southern deserts of Khwarezm and Kyzyl Kum in the southernmost portion of the steppe regions of modern-day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, following the advice of Croesus to attack them in their own territory.[68] The Massagetae were related to the Scythians in their dress and mode of living; they fought on horseback and on foot. In order to acquire her realm, Cyrus first sent an offer of marriage to their ruler, Tomyris, a proposal she rejected. Compare e.g.: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context “Holofernes declares his intention of having sexual intercourse with Judith (12:12). Judith responds to his invitation to the banquet by saying “Who am I, to refuse my lord?”, clearly a double entendre! Holofernes, at the sight of Judith, is described as “ravished.” But he does not get any further with Judith than Cyrus would with Tomyris, for Judith, upon her return to the camp, will proclaim (13:15-16): ‘Here’, she said, ‘is the head of Holofernes, the general of the Assyrian army, and here is the mosquito net from his bed, where he lay in a drunken stupor. The Lord used a woman to kill him. As the Lord lives, I swear that Holofernes never touched me, although my beauty deceived him and brought him to his ruin. I was not defiled or disgraced; the Lord took care of me through it all’. Wine will also play a vital part in the Cyrus legend, though in this case the defenders [i.e., the Massagetae - replacing the Israelites of the original story], rather than the invader, will be the ones affected by the strong drink: [Cyrus] then commenced his attempt to take Massagetae territory by force, beginning by building bridges and towered war boats along his side of the river Jaxartes, or Syr Darya, which separated them. Sending him a warning to cease his encroachment in which she stated she expected he would disregard anyway, Tomyris challenged him to meet her forces in honorable warfare, inviting him to a location in her country a day's march from the river, where their two armies would formally engage each other. He accepted her offer, but, learning that the Massagetae were unfamiliar with wine and its intoxicating effects, he set up and then left camp with plenty of it behind, taking his best soldiers with him and leaving the least capable ones. The general of Tomyris's army, who was also her son Spargapises, and a third of the Massagetian troops killed the group Cyrus had left there and, finding the camp well stocked with food and the wine, unwittingly drank themselves into inebriation, diminishing their capability to defend themselves, when they were then overtaken by a surprise attack. They were successfully defeated, and, although he was taken prisoner, Spargapises committed suicide once he regained sobriety. It is at this point that Tomyris will be stirred into action, more as a warrior queen than as a heroine using her womanly charm to deceive, but she will ultimately - just like Judith - swear vengeance and decapitate her chief opponent: Upon learning of what had transpired, Tomyris denounced Cyrus's tactics as underhanded and swore vengeance, leading a second wave of troops into battle herself. Cyrus the Great was ultimately killed, and his forces suffered massive casualties in what Herodotus referred to as the fiercest battle of his career and the ancient world. When it was over, Tomyris ordered the body of Cyrus brought to her, then decapitated him and dipped his head in a vessel of blood in a symbolic gesture of revenge for his bloodlust and the death of her son.[68][69] However, some scholars question this version, mostly because Herodotus admits this event was one of many versions of Cyrus's death that he heard from a supposedly reliable source who told him no one was there to see the aftermath.[70] Herodotus’s claim that this was “the fiercest battle of … the ancient world”, whilst probably not befitting the obscure Massagetae, is indeed a worthy description of the defeat and rout of Sennacherib’s massive army of almost 200,000 men. But this was, as Herodotus had also noted, just “one of many versions of Cyrus's death”. And Wikipedia adds some variations on this account: Dandamayev says maybe Persians took back Cyrus' body from the Massagetae, unlike what Herodotus claimed.[72] Ctesias, in his Persica, has the longest account, which says Cyrus met his death while putting down resistance from the Derbices infantry, aided by other Scythian archers and cavalry, plus Indians and their elephants. According to him, this event took place northeast of the headwaters of the Syr Darya.[73] An alternative account from Xenophon's Cyropaedia contradicts the others, claiming that Cyrus died peaceably at his capital.[74] The final version of Cyrus's death comes from Berossus, who only reports that Cyrus met his death while warring against the Dahae archers northwest of the headwaters of the Syr Darya.[75] [End of quote] Scholars may be able to discern many more Judith-type stories in semi-legendary BC ‘history’. Donald Spoto, in Joan. The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (Harper, 2007), has referred to the following supposed warrior-women, a re-evaluation of whom I think may be worth considering (p. 73): The Greek poet Telesilla was famous for saving the city of Argos from attack by Spartan troops in the fifth century B.C. In first-century Britain, Queen Boudicca [Boadicea] led an uprising against the occupying Roman forces. In the third century Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra (latter-day Syria), declared her independence of the Roman Empire and seized Egypt and much of Asia Minor. [End of quote] But there are also a plethora of such female types in what is considered to be AD history. Glimpses of Judith in (supposedly) AD Time Before I go on to discuss some of these, I must point out - what I have mentioned before, here and there - a problem with AD time, especially its so-called ‘Dark Ages’ (c. 600-900 AD), akin to what revisionists have found to have occurred with the construction of BC time, especially its so-called ‘Dark Ages’ (c. 700-1200 BC). Whilst I intend to write much more about this in the future, I did broach the subject again in my article: Mohammed, a composite of Old Testament figures, also based upon Jesus Christ (10) Mohammed, a composite of Old Testament figures, also based upon Jesus Christ | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu and some of this will have a direct bearing upon Judith (see Axum and Gudit below). But here is a different summary of attempts to expose the perceived problems pertaining to AD time, known as the “Phantom Time Hypothesis”, by a writer who is not sympathetic to it: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-phantom-time-hypothesis/ by Alan Bellows When Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz introduces his paper on the “phantom time hypothesis,” he kindly asks his readers to be patient, benevolent, and open to radically new ideas, because his claims are highly unconventional. This is because his paper is suggesting three difficult-to-believe propositions: 1) Hundreds of years ago, our calendar was polluted with 297 years which never occurred; 2) this is not the year 2005, but rather 1708; and 3) The purveyors of this hypothesis are not crackpots. The Phantom Time Hypothesis suggests that the early Middle Ages (614-911 A.D.) never happened, but were added to the calendar long ago either by accident, by misinterpretation of documents, or by deliberate falsification by calendar conspirators. This would mean that all artifacts ascribed to those three centuries belong to other periods, and that all events thought to have occurred during that same period occurred at other times, or are outright fabrications. For instance, a man named Heribert Illig (pictured), one of the leading proponents of the theory, believes that Charlemagne was a fictional character. But what evidence is this outlandish theory based upon? It seems that historians are plagued by a plethora of falsified documents from the Middle Ages, and such was the subject of an archaeological conference in München, Germany in 1986. In his lecture there, Horst Fuhrmann, president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, described how some documents forged by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages were created hundreds of years before their “great moments” arrived, after which they were embraced by medieval society. This implied that whomever produced the forgeries must have very skillfully anticipated the future… or there was some discrepancy in calculating dates. This was reportedly the first bit of evidence that roused Illig’s curiosity… he wondered why the church would have forged documents hundreds of years before they would become useful. So he and his group examined other fakes from preceding centuries, and they “divined chronological distortions.” This led them to investigate the origin of the Gregorian calendar, which raised even more inconsistency. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar we still use today was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII to replace the outdated Julian calendar which had been implemented in 45 BC. The Gregorian calendar was designed to correct for a ten-day discrepancy caused by the fact that the Julian year was 10.8 minutes too long. But by Heribert Illig’s math, the 1,627 years which had passed since the Julian calendar started should have accrued a thirteen-day discrepancy… a ten-day error would have only taken 1,257 years. So Illig and his group went hunting for other gaps in history, and found a few… for example, a gap of building in Constantinople (558 AD – 908 AD) and a gap in the doctrine of faith, especially the gap in the evolution of theory and meaning of purgatory (600 AD until ca. 1100). From all of this data, they have become convinced that at some time, the calendar year was increased by 297 years without the corresponding passage of time. …. [End of quote] As with the pioneering efforts of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky (Ages in Chaos) to reform BC time, some of this early work in AD revisionism may turn out to be extreme and far-fetched. But I would nevertheless agree with the claim by its proponents that the received AD history likewise stands in need of a massive renovation. In my articles on Mohammed - {who, I am now convinced, was not an historical personage, but a composite of various biblical (pseudepigraphal) characters, and most notably (for at least the period from Birth to Marriage), was Tobias (= my Job), son of Tobit} - I drew attention to a very BC-like “Nehemiah”, thought to have been a contemporary of Mohammed. Moreover, the major incident that is said to have occurred in the year of Mohammed’s birth, the invasion of Mecca by Abrahas the Axumite, I argued, was simply a reminiscence of Sennacherib’s invasion and defeat: … an event that is said to have taken place in the very year that Mohammed was born, c. 570 AD, the invasion of Mecca by Abraha[s] of the kingdom of Axum [Aksum], has all the earmarks, I thought, of the disastrous campaign of Sennacherib of Assyria against Israel. Not 570 AD, but closer to 700 BC! Lacking to this Qur'anic account is the [Book of] Judith element that (I have argued in various places) was the catalyst for the defeat of the Assyrian army. .... But, as I went on to say, the Judith element is available, still in the context of the kingdom of Axum - apparently a real AD kingdom, but one that seems to appropriate ancient Assyrian - in the possibly Jewish heroine, Gudit (var. Gwedit, Yodit, Judith), ostensibly of the mid- C10th AD. Let us read some more about her. Judith the Simeonite and Gudit the Semienite Interesting that Judith the Simeonite has a Gideon (or Gedeon) in her ancestry (Judith 8:1): “[Judith] was the daughter of Merari, the granddaughter of Ox and the great-granddaughter of Joseph. Joseph’s ancestors were Oziel, Elkiah, Ananias, Gideon, Raphaim, Ahitub, Elijah, Hilkiah, Eliab, Nathanael, Salamiel, Sarasadai, and Israel”, and the Queen of Semien, Gudit (or Judith), was the daughter of a King Gideon. That the latter, Gudit, is probably a fable, however, is suspected by the following writer: http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=314380 Bernard Lewis (1): The Jews of the Dark continent, 1980 The early history of the Jews of the Habashan highlands remains obscure, with their origins remaining more mythical than historical. In this they areas in other respects, they are the mirror image of their supposed Kin across the Red sea. For while copious external records of Byzantine, Persian, old Axumite and Arab sources exist of the large-scale conversion of Yemen to Judaism, and the survival of a large Jewish community at least until the 11th century, no such external records exist for the Jews of Habash, presently by far the numerically and politically dominant branch of this ancient people. Their own legends insist that Judaism had reached the shores of Ethiopia at the time of the First temple. They further insist that Ethiopia had always been Jewish. In spite of the claims of Habashan nationalists, Byzantine, Persian and Arab sources all clearly indicate that the politically dominant religion of Axum was, for a period of at least six centuries Christianity and that the Tigray cryptochristian minority, far from turning apostate following contact with Portugese Jesuits in the 15th century is in fact the [remnant] of a period of Christian domination which lasted at least until the 10th century. For the historian, when records fail, speculation must perforce fill the gap. Given our knowledge of the existence of both Jewish and Christian sects in the deserts of Western Arabia and Yemen it is not difficult to speculate that both may have reached the shores of Axum concurrently prior to the council of Nicaea and the de-judaization of heterodox sects. Possibly, they coexisted side by side for centuries without the baleful conflict which was the lot of both faiths in the Mediterannean. Indeed, it is possible that they were not even distinct faiths. We must recall that early Christians saw themselves as Jews and practiced all aspects of Jewish law and ritual for the first century of their existence. Neither did Judaism utterly disavow the Christians, rather viewing them much as later communities would view the Sabateans and other messianic movement. The advent While Paul of Tarsus changed the course of Christian evolution but failed to formally de-Judaize all streams of Christianity, with many surviving even after the council of Nicaea. Might not Habash have offered a different model of coexistence, even after it’s purported conversion to Christianity in the 4th century? If it had, then what occurred? Did Christianity, cut off from contact with Constantinople following the rise of Islam, wither on the vine enabling a more grassroots based religion to assume dominance? While such a view is tempting, archaeological evidence pointing to the continued centrality of a Christian Axum as an administrative and economic center for several centuries following the purported relocation of the capital of the kingdom to Gonder indicates a darker possibility. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, turns on our knowledge of the Yemenite- Axum-Byzantine conflict of the 6th century. This conflict was clearly seen as a religious, and indeed divinely sanctioned one by Emperor Kaleb, with certain of his in scriptures clearly indicating the a version of “replacement theology” had taken root in his court, forcing individuals and sects straddling both sides of the Christian-Jewish continuum to pick sides. Is it overly speculative to assume that those cleaving to Judaism within Axum would be subject to suspicion and persecution? It seems to me likely that the formation of an alternative capital by the shores of lake Tana, far from being an organized relocation of the imperial seat, was, in fact, an act of secession and flight by a numerically inferior and marginalized minority (2). Read in this light, the fabled Saga of King Gideon and Queen Judith recapturing Axum from Muslim invaders and restoring the Zadokan dynasty in the 10th century must be viewed skeptically as an attempt to superimpose on the distant past a more contemporary enemy as part of the process of national myth making. What truly occurred during this time of isolation can only be the guessed at but I would hazard an opinion that the Axum these legendary rulers “liberated” was held by Christians rather than Muslims. …. [End of quote] See also my series: Judith the Simeonite and Judith the Semienite (10) Judith the Simeonite and Judith the Semienite | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu and: (10) Judith the Simeonite and Judith the Semienite. Part Two: So many Old Testament names! | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu Judith and Joan of Arc Perhaps the heroine with whom Judith of Bethulia is most often compared is the fascinating Joan [Jeanne] of Arc. Donald Spoto again, in his life of Joan, has a chapter five on Joan of Arc that he entitles “The New Deborah”. And Joan has also been described as a “second Judith”. Both Deborah and Judith were celebrated Old Testament women who had provided military assistance to Israel. Spoto, having referred to those ancient pagan women (Telesilla, etc.), as already discussed, goes on to write (p. 74): Joan was not the only woman in history to inspire and to give direction to soldiers. .... Africa had its rebel queen Gwedit, or Yodit, in the tenth century. In the seventh appeared Sikelgaita, a Lombard princess who frequently accompanied her husband, Robert, on his Byzantine military campaigns, in which she fought in full armor, rallying Robert’s troops when they were initially repulsed by the Byzantine army. In the twelfth century Eleanor of Aquitaine took part in the Second Crusade, and in the fourteenth century Joanna, Countess of Montfort, took up arms after her husband died in order to protect the rights of her son, the Duke of Brittany. She organized resistance and dressed in full armor, led a raid of knights that successfully destroyed one of the enemy’s rear camps. Joan [of Arc] was not a queen, a princess, a noblewoman or a respected poet with public support. She went to her task at enormous physical risk of both her virginity and her life, and at considerable risk of a loss of both reputation and influence. The English, for example, constantly referred to her as the prostitute: to them, she must have been; otherwise, why would she travel with an army of men? Yet Joan was undeterred by peril or slander, precisely because of her confidence that God was their captain and leader. She often said that if she had been unsure of that, she would not have risked such obvious danger but would have kept to her simple, rural life in Domrémy. [End of quote] I think that, based on the Gudit and Axum scenario[s], there is the real possibility that some of these above-mentioned heroines, or ancient amazons, can be identified with the famous Judith herself – she gradually being transformed from an heroic Old Testament woman into an armour-bearing warrior on horseback, sometimes even suffering capture, torture and death - whose celebrated beauty and/or siege victory I have argued on many occasions was picked up in non-Hebrew ‘history’, or mythologies: e.g. the legendary Helen of Troy is probably based on Judith, at least in relation to her beauty and a famous siege, rather than to any military noüs on Helen’s part. In the name Iodit (Gwedit) above, the name Judith can be, I think, clearly recognised. The wisdom-filled Judith might even have been the model, too, for the interesting and highly intelligent and philosophically-minded Hypatia of Alexandria. Now I find in the Wikipedia article, “Catherine of Alexandria” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Alexandria that the latter is also likened to Hypatia. Catherine is said to have lived 105 years (Judith’s very age: see Book of Judith 16:23) before Hypatia’s death. Historians such as Harold Thayler Davis believe that Catherine (‘the pure one’) may not have existed and that she was more an ideal exemplary figure than a historical one. She did certainly form an exemplary counterpart to the pagan philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria in the medieval mindset; and it has been suggested that she was invented specifically for that purpose. Like Hypatia, she is said to have been highly learned (in philosophy and theology), very beautiful, sexually pure, and to have been brutally murdered for publicly stating her beliefs. Interestingly, St. Joan of Arc identified Catherine of Alexandria as one of the Saints who appeared to her and counselled her. Who really existed, and who did not? Judith of Bethulia might be the key to answering this question, and she may also provide us with a golden opportunity for embarking upon a revision of AD time. For there are also many supposedly AD queens called “Judith”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Judith Queen Judith may refer to at least some of these: • Judith of Babenberg (c. late 1110s/1120 – after 1168), daughter of Leopold III, Margrave of Austria and Agnes of Germany, married William V, Marquess of Montferrat • Judith of Bavaria (925 – June 29 soon after 985), daughter of Arnulf, Duke of Bavaria and Judith, married Henry I, Duke of Bavaria • Judith of Bavaria (795-843) (805 - April 19 or 23, 843), daughter of Count of Welf and Hedwig, Duchess of Bavaria, became second wife of Louis the Pious • Judith Premyslid (c. 1057–1086), daughter of Vratislaus II of Bohemia and Adelaide of Hungary, became second wife of Władysław I Herman • Judith of Brittany (982 – 1017), daughter of Conan I of Rennes and Ermengarde of Anjou, Duchess of Brittany, married Richard II, Duke of Normandy • Judith of Flanders (October 844 – 870), daughter of Charles the Bald and Ermentrude of Orléans, married Æthelwulf of Wessex • Judith of Habsburg (1271 – May 21, 1297), daughter of Rudolph I of Germany and Gertrude of Hohenburg, married to Wenceslaus II of Bohemia • Judith of Hungary (d.988), daughter of Géza of Hungary and Sarolt, married Bolesław I Chrobry • Judith of Schweinfurt (before 1003 – 2 August 1058), daughter of Henry, Margrave of Nordgau and Gertrude, married Bretislaus I, Duke of Bohemia • Judith of Swabia (1047/1054 – 1093/1095), daughter of Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor and Agnes of Poitou, married Władysław I Herman, successor to Judith of Bohemia • Judith of Thuringia (c. 1135 - d. 9 September after 1174), daughter of Louis I, Landgrave of Thuringia and Hedwig of Gudensberg, married Vladislaus II of Bohemia 'Woe to the nations that rise up against my people! The Lord Almighty will take vengeance on them in the day of judgment; he will send fire and worms into their flesh; they shall weep in pain forever'. Judith 16:17 Judith of Bavaria ‘second Judith’ or ‘Jezebel’? “The poems depict her as "a second biblical Judith, a Mary sister of Aaron in her musical abilities, a Saphho, a prophetess, cultivated, chaste, intelligent, pious, strong in spirit, and sweet in conversation”. We read in my article: Isabelle (is a belle) inevitably a Jezebel? http://www.academia.edu/35191514/Isabelle_is_a_belle_inevitably_a_Jezebel of a whole list of supposedly historical queens Isabelle (or variations of that name) who have been likened to the biblical Jezebel, or have been called ‘a second Jezebel’. One of these queens was: Isabella of Bavaria ‘like haughty Jezebel’ http://www.academia.edu/35177941/Isabella_of_Bavaria_like_haughty_Jezebel Now the Bavarians do not fare too well, because apparently they also had a C9th AD queen Judith who was likened to Jezebel – though, alternately, to the pious Judith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_of_Bavaria_(died_843) Scandals: Contemporary criticisms of Judith’s role and behavior …. However, the rise of Judith’s power, influence and activity in the court sparked resentment towards her. Agobard of Lyons, a supporter of Lothar, wrote two tracts Two Books in Favor of the Sons and against Judith the Wife of Louis in 833. These tracts were meant as propaganda against Judith from the court of Lothar in order to undermine her court and influence. The tracts themselves attack her character, claiming her to be of a cunning and underhanded nature and of corrupting her husband. These attacks were predominantly anti-feminist in nature. When Louis still did not sever marital ties with Judith, Agobard claimed that Judith’s extramarital affairs were carried out "first secretly and later impudently".[4] Paschasius Radbertus accused Judith by associating her with the engagement in debauchery and witchcraft … of filling the palace with "soothsayers... seers and mutes as well as dream interpreters and those who consult entrail, indeed all those skilled in malign craft". Characterized as a Jezebel and a Justina … Judith was accused by one of her enemies, Paschasius Radbertus, of engaging in debauchery and witchcraft with her purported lover, Count Bernard of Septimania, Louis' chamberlain and trusted adviser. This portrayal and image stands in contrast to poems about Judith.[2] The poems depict her as "a second biblical Judith, a Mary sister of Aaron in her musical abilities, a Saphho, a prophetess, cultivated, chaste, intelligent, pious, strong in spirit, and sweet in conversation".[2] However, Judith also garnered devotion and respect. Hrabanus Maurus wrote a dedicatory letter to Judith, exalting her "praiseworthy intellect"[11] and for her "good works".[11] The letter commends her in the turbulent times amidst battles, wishing that she may see victory amidst the struggles she is facing. It also implores her "to follow through with a good deed once you have begun it"[11] and "to improve yourself at all times". Most strikingly the letter wishes Judith to look to the biblical Queen Esther, the wife of Xerxes I [sic] as inspiration and as a role model …. [End of quote] A tale of two more Judiths “In the ninth century, two great families arose because of two women named Judith — a fortuitous name that recalled the widow who, during the siege of Jerusalem [sic] by the Assyrians, saves her city by pretending to offer herself to Holofernes only to behead him and return in triumph to her people”. Patrick J. Geary Patrick Geary has written: https://stravaganzastravaganza.blogspot.com/2014/01/medieval-age-tale-of-two-judiths.html#!/2014/01/medieval-age-tale-of-two-judiths.html JUDITH OF BAVARIA AND JUDITH OF FLANDERS If mythical women stood at the beginnings of origin legends, this may be because real flesh-and-blood women stood at the beginnings of great aristocratic families. After all, such families of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries largely owed their status, their lands, and their power to women. As Constance Bouchard and before her Karl Ferdinand Werner have pointed out, the great comital families might often appear to spring from “new men” in the ninth or tenth centuries, but actually these new men owed their rise to fortuitous marriages with greater, established families. …. Family chroniclers and genealogists were well aware of the importance of such marriages in preserving and augmenting family power and honor — it was a constant and essential element in generational strategies throughout the Middle Ages. As Anita Guerreau-Jalabert has argued, the image of a strictly agnatic descent through generations is more an invention of nineteenth-century genealogists than a reflection of medieval perceptions of kinship.2 At the same time, the question of how much credit for the successes of kindreds should be attributed to these women rather than to the men of the kindred remained very much in question. As Janet Nelson points out, elite women played a double symbolic role within their husbands’ lineages: first, they made possible the continuation of the lineage, but at the same time, because they did not themselves belong to it, they made possible the individualization of a particular offspring within the lineage.3 Thus reconstruction of family histories meant coming to terms, under differing needs and circumstances, with the relative importance of such marriages and of the women who put not only their dowries and their bodies but their personalities and kinsmen to work on behalf of their husbands and their children. Over time, the ideological imperative of illustrious male descent could best be fostered if memory of the women who made their rise possible was removed from center stage in favor of the audacious acts of men. In the ninth century, two great families arose because of two women named Judith — a fortuitous name that recalled the widow who, during the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians, saves her city by pretending to offer herself to Holofernes only to behead him and return in triumph to her people.4 The biblical Judith was thus, as Heide Estes has pointed out, one of the few models of a woman playing an active role in public life available, although the reception of the story of Judith in the Middle Ages shows the dangerous ambiguity attached to this woman.5 The younger of the Judiths considered in this chapter was the grand-daughter of the elder, and their stories illustrate the two principal ways that women could be at the start of families’ fortunes. The story of how these beginnings were reformed over time suggests the complexities of aristocratic dynastic memory in the tenth through twelfth centuries. …. … the alliance that moved this kindred to the very center of the Frankish stage was the marriage of Judith, daughter of Welf and Heilwig, to the emperor Louis the Pious in 819, following the death of Louis’s first wife, Irmingard. Judith, according to the Annales regni Francorum and the account of an anonymous biographer of Louis known as the Astronomer, was selected in a sort of beauty pageant, in which the emperor examined daughters of the nobility before making his choice, a practice some have seen as imitating Byzantine tradition.14 More recently, Mayke de Jong has pointed out that this description, and particularly that of the “Astronomer,” is less a reflection of Byzantine court tradition than an image of Judith modeled on the biblical figure of Esther, a comparison already made by Hrabanus Maurus in his defense of the empress. …. [End of qu0te] “... ideal of the Christian woman” “Barbara Welzel has pointed out that Judith was first considered as the ideal of the Christian woman … but became as well an important figure of identification for princesses, serving as a political exemplum”. Maryan Ainsworth and Abbie Vandivere The two authors write, with relation to Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen’s, famous painting of c. 1530 AD (conventional dating), “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” (pictured above): https://jhna.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/JHNA_6.2_Ainsworth_Vandivere.pdf …. When considering for whom this painting of Judith, expressing female power, wisdom, and fortitude, may have been painted, a likely candidate comes to mind -- Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands. It may well have been through Jan Gossart or perhaps Bernard Van Orley (ca. 1491/92–1542) that Vermeyen was introduced to Margaret, who held her court in Mechelen. He must have entered the service of Margaret in 1525, for a document of 1530 petitions the regent for back pay for a period of about five years, indicating that Vermeyen had already been working for her.37 During this time, Vermeyen seems to have been mostly engaged in making portraits of the royal family and other nobles, such as the Portrait of Cardinal Érard de la Marck that with the Holy Family formed a diptych which belonged to Margaret. The importance of the widow Judith as a model of strength and feminine virtue for Margaret of Austria and the iconography of the Burgundian-Habsburg court cannot be underestimated. The reminders of Judith’s importance as a just, vigorous, and brave ruler took many forms. Some of these were ephemeral, such as the tableaux vivants devoted to Judith that were performed at the official entries of princesses, such as Margaret of York, Mary of Burgundy, and Juana of Castile, into Netherlandish cities.38 Margaret of Austria owned a Judith tapestry (no longer extant) that was originally part of her trousseau for her marriage to Juan of Castile, and when she returned to Flanders after Juan’s death, the tapestry accompanied her.39 Possibly commissioned by Margaret from Bernard van Orley (her court painter), although not mentioned in the inventory of her possessions, was a tapestry of the Triumph of Virtuous Women that survives only as a petit patron (Vienna, Albertina Museum, inv. no. 15463).40 Featured in the foreground before the triumphal all’antica chariot are Jael killing Sisera, Lucretia committing suicide, and Judith with the head of Holofernes on the tip of her sword. Margaret’s court sculptor, Conrad Meit, produced one of the masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture, a Judith with the Head of Holofernes (Munich, Bayerische Nationalmuseum), circa 1525–28. Although it is not listed among Margaret’s belongings, it certainly reflects courtly taste and was most likely commissioned by a woman for whom Judith was a noble exemplar.41 Margaret’s library contained books on virtuous women, among them Giovanni Bocaccio’s De femmes nobles et renomées (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Fr. 12420). Judith has a featured role in one of the most influential texts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Parement et triumphe des dames, written in 1493–94 by Olivier de la Marche. Here the author gives lessons to a noble lady of the virtues of humility, wisdom, loyalty, fidelity, and so forth in prose stories of famous virtuous women. Margaret of Austria owned an early version of the text, published between 1495 and 1500 (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, ms. 10961-70).42 In 1509, Agrippa of Nettesheim dedicated to Margaret his treatise De nobilitate et praecellentia foemini sexus, where he notes that Judith “depicted herself as an example of virtue, which should be imitated not only by women but also by men,”43 Barbara Welzel has pointed out that Judith was first considered as the ideal of the Christian woman44 but became as well an important figure of identification for princesses, serving as a political exemplum.45 Just as Judith saved her people from the Assyrians, so, too, did Margaret defend her people in a politically active role. Her success in this endeavor was acknowledged in a monumental woodcut by Robert Péril (Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. no. 849-21), showing the genealogy of the Habsburgs, which praised Margaret as: “the Regent and sovereign of the Low countries, which she wisely ruled for Emperor Charles, her nephew; she opposed the enemy with the force of weapons and transferred the lands of Friesland, Utrecht and Overissel into the following of his majesty [Charles V].”46 In terms of Margaret’s remarkable political acumen, a singular event comes to mind that may have a specific connection to Vermeyen’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes. In August of 1529, around the time of the painting’s presumed date, Jan Vermeyen accompanied Margaret to the signing of the so-called Paix des Dames or Ladies’ Peace, otherwise known as the Peace of Cam- brai: the most extraordinary diplomatic achievement of the regent’s career. Meeting her sister-in- law Louise of Savoy (mother of Francis I) almost in secret in Cambrai, Margaret -- representing her nephew Charles V -- negotiated a peace between the French and the Habsburgs. This treaty, which included the arranged marriage of Eleanor of Austria (sister to Charles V) to Francis I, ended, at least for a time, the fighting between the forces of King Frances I and Emperor Charles V. An obvious parallel exists between Margaret and Judith: two virtuous and powerful women, who managed to find a solution to the lust for battle of men and nations and create peace. Whether this painting commemorates a specific event or generally celebrates the heroic achievement of one woman, it is certainly a product of the milieu of Margaret of Austria’s court. …. [End of quote] Judith and Holofernes, Attila and Odabella “Odabella implores him to kill her, but not to curse her. She reminds his fiancé the story of the Hebrew Judith, who saved Israel from the Babylonians [sic] by beheading their leader Holofernes. Odabella has sworn to revenge …”. “Attila” by Giuseppe Verdi Judith and Holofernes, Attila and Ildico “The tradition that Attila died in a wedding-night may be true. But Attila is so much like Holofernes and Ildico so much like Judith… that we suspect the tradition, even in its most sober version”. Otto Maenchen-Helfen Taken from: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nice-things-to-say-about-attila-the-hun-87559701/ [Attila’s] spectacular demise, on one of his many wedding nights, is memorably described by Gibbon: Before the king of the Huns evacuated Italy, he threatened to return more dreadful, and more implacable, if his bride, the princess Honoria, were not delivered to his ambassadors…. Yet, in the mean while Attila relieved his tender anxiety, by adding a beautiful maid, whose name was Ildico, to the list of his innumerable wives. Their marriage was celebrated with barbaric pomp and festivity, at his wooden palace beyond the Danube; and the monarch, oppressed with wine and sleep, retired, at a late hour, from the banquet to the nuptial bed. His attendants continued to respect his pleasures, or his repose, the greatest part of the ensuing day, till the unusual silence alarmed their fears and suspicions; and, after attempting to awaken Attila by loud and repeated cries, they at length broke into the royal apartment. They found the trembling bride sitting by the bedside, hiding her face with her veil…. The king…had expired during the night. An artery had suddenly burst; and as Attila lay in a supine posture, he was suffocated by a torrent of blood, which instead of finding a passage through his nostrils, regurgitated into the lungs and stomach. …. The real story goes as follows (Judith 13:1-10): When evening came, his slaves quickly withdrew. Bagoas closed the tent from outside and shut out the attendants from his master’s presence. They went to bed, for they all were weary because the banquet had lasted so long. But Judith was left alone in the tent, with Holofernes stretched out on his bed, for he was dead drunk. Now Judith had told her maid to stand outside the bedchamber and to wait for her to come out, as she did on the other days; for she said she would be going out for her prayers. She had said the same thing to Bagoas. So everyone went out, and no one, either small or great, was left in the bedchamber. Then Judith, standing beside his bed, said in her heart, “O Lord God of all might, look in this hour on the work of my hands for the exaltation of Jerusalem. Now indeed is the time to help your heritage and to carry out my design to destroy the enemies who have risen up against us.” She went up to the bedpost near Holofernes’ head, and took down his sword that hung there. She came close to his bed, took hold of the hair of his head, and said, “Give me strength today, O Lord God of Israel!” Then she struck his neck twice with all her might, and cut off his head. Next she rolled his body off the bed and pulled down the canopy from the posts. Soon afterward she went out and gave Holofernes’ head to her maid, who placed it in her food bag. …. Judith and Queen Elizabeth 1 Aidan Norrie has written (2016): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/rest.12258 Elizabeth I as Judith: reassessing the apocryphal widow's appearance in Elizabethan royal iconography Abstract Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England was paralleled with many figures from the Bible. While the analogies between Elizabeth and biblical figures such as Deborah the Judge, King Solomon, Queen Esther, King David, and Daniel the Prophet have received detailed attention in the existing scholarship, the analogy between Elizabeth and the Apocryphal widow Judith still remains on the fringes. Not only did Elizabeth compare herself to Judith, the analogy also appeared throughout the course of the queen's reign as a biblical precedent for dealing with the Roman Catholic threat. This article re-assesses the place of the Judith analogy within Elizabethan royal iconography by chronologically analysing of many of the surviving, primary source, comparisons between Judith and Elizabeth, and demonstrates that Judith was invoked consistently, and in varying media, as a model of a providentially blessed leader. …. [End of quote] Will true Elizabeth stand up? Compared to Judith and Esther, she was a new Moses and as wise as King Solomon. According to this article: http://www.ibrarian.net/navon/paper/The_Development_of_the_Cult_of_Elizabeth_I.pdf?paperid=20396591 On one … of the first portraits of [Elizabeth I] as a queen she appears in a religious context, she washes the feet of twelve poor women at a Maundy ceremony. …. On the title-pages of the different editions of the Bible Elizabeth’s figure appears: she is surrounded by the four cardinal virtues on the 1569 edition, while on the 1568 edition between the figures of Faith and Love she personifies the third New Testament virtue, Hope. At the beginning of the Coronation Entry as she left the Tower she praised God for her deliverance from prison during the reign of Mary and compared herself to the prophet Daniel spared by God by special providence: “I acknowledge that Thou hast dealt as wonderfully and as mercifully with me as Thou didst with Thy true and faithful servant Daniel, Thy prophet, whom Thou deliverest out of the den from the cruelty of the greedy and raging lions. Even so was I overwhelmed and only by Thee delivered.” …. During the first decade Elizabeth was mostly compared to figures of the Old Testament. In the fifth pageant of the Coronation Entry she appeared as Deborah, the Old Testament judge, listening to the advice of three figures representing the three estates of England, the clergy, the nobility and the commons. …. In sermons she was compared to Judith who rescued her people, and to Esther who interceded for her people. …. She was seen also as a new Moses leading his people out of the captivity of Egypt, and as Solomon the wise king.