Book of Judith

The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical book included in the Septuagint and the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian Old Testament of the Bible but excluded from the Hebrew canon and assigned by Protestants to the apocrypha. It tells of a Jewish widow, Judith, who uses her beauty and charm to kill an Assyrian general who has besieged her city, Bethulia. With this act, she saves nearby Jerusalem from total destruction. The name Judith (), meaning "praised" or "Jewess", is the feminine form of Judah.

The surviving manuscripts of Greek translations appear to contain several historical anachronisms, which is why some Protestant scholars now consider the book non-historical. Instead, the book may be a parable, theological novel, or perhaps the first historical novel. The Roman Catholic Church has historically maintained that the book is an authentic history from the reign of Manasseh and that the names in the book were changed at a later date for an unknown reason. The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies the real name of "Bethulia" as Shechem and argues that the name was changed because of the feud between the Jews and Samaritans. If this is the case, it would explain why other names seem anachronistic as well. Provided by Wikipedia