All right, beautiful. Now that we've consecrated our time and prayer, let's dive in here to the study. The study is entitled Judith, Blessed Among Women. And that should ring a bell if you're familiar with the New Testament and the Gospel of Luke, Chapter One, because this is exactly the title that Elizabeth gives to our Blessed Mother Mary.
And so there's a reason for that. We're gonna come to that in the third lesson. And that reminds me, this is a three part series on the Book of Judith. And what we're going to do, and you can see in your syllabus actually, if you wanna pull that out, if you have it available in front of you, if not, just listen on.
It's a three part series and we're gonna tackle it. And the first one, right now, this lesson is a general introduction to the Book of Judith. So as always, I think it's really, really important to spend some time laying down the foundation, the groundwork for this book, looking at topics, most people, I don't actually say most people, but the temptation is to skip over things like the title and the language and this type of stuff. I think that's a mistake because what I find oftentimes, in studying scripture myself and teaching it, is you find a lot of these very important themes of the book, the logical, typological, spiritual themes within these introductory topics.
So what I wanna do in part one of this lesson in this general introduction is to go over the title, go over the language and manuscript tradition, authorship, dating, historical context. And then we'll spend a lot of time, which is a lot of fun, looking at the literary genre. Is it true history? Is it allegorical?
Is it made up? And then what everyone really likes to spend more time on is the main themes and the typology. There's a lot to learn from this book. It's really straightforward.
It's epic, it's adventuresome. You got this incredible profound story of Judith herself who overcomes all the challenges and she bravely conquers the enemy whole of her needs. It's a lot of fun, but there's some super important main themes and typological connections, not least of which I've already mentioned, the connection with Mary, right? So the fact that Judith has called Blessed Among Women as we'll see in lesson three, is very, very, very significant for Mary's role in salvation history as well.
So that's what we're gonna do in part one here. Look at these various introductory topics, spending considerable amount of time, I would say on the literary genre, as well as the main themes of typology. Then part two, the last, say 15 minutes or so, I wanna spend a little bit of time looking at the debate of the deuterocanonical question. Because Judith, as I'll mention a few different times, is not in Jewish and Protestant Bibles.
Why is that the case? We have limited time to discuss this. I really wanna focus my attention on the question of canonicity of what books should be in the scriptures or not in the first century, in the time of Christ and the time of the apostles and how it came to be that we actually got the Bible. But I'm gonna have to leave the whole question of later the development of the Jewish canon and certainly the Protestant canon under the, what I wanna call it, the leadership of Martin Luther for lack of a better word right now.
Martin Luther is rebellion against the church and how he rejected these seven books. That is a topic of another full hour long course in my Bible study scripture 101, the general introduction to the scriptures, lesson six specifically, so I encourage you to check that out in the audio library. All right, so that's the game plan for this lesson. Now, I said it's a three part lesson, or three part Bible study, part one is the general introduction.
And then part two is going to be the first half of the book. And then part three or lesson three will be the final chapters of the book. And that will be based on how the book is divided. The Structure is set up by most scholars.
So we'll get to there when we go to the structure of the book of Judas. So that's what we're doing here today or this lesson as well as over the course of our study. All right, so then without any further ado, let's look here at part one, the introductory topics beginning with the title. And this is pretty straightforward, but yet again, behind the straightforward nature of this particular topic of the title, there's something cool going on.
So in the Greek Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, which I will talk about more at the end of this lesson, how do we got the Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, how it came to be used in the early Christian communities by the apostles and their successors. Well, that's the call the Septuagint, and it is just the name of Judith, Yudith, right? Yudith, that's just the name of the book, really straightforward. In Latin, it's Lieber, Yudith, right?
A little bit more complicated, the book of Judith, all right? And in Hebrew, it simply means a Jewish woman or a Jewess. All right, we don't have a Hebrew title, because I'm gonna explain here just a little bit. We don't have any copies of the Hebrew or any ancient copies of the Hebrew, but a Jewess simply means Jewess.
And that's pretty vague, right? It's not like she's named Sarah or Rebecca or Sarah or Ruth or any of these other names of great Hebrew women that we have, not so much Hebrew, Ruth is not a Hebrew woman, but you know, these women in the Hebrew scriptures, it's just generic and vague, it's just Jewess, it's a Jewish woman, and that is intentional. Because as I'm gonna share with you in the main themes, she is a representation and a symbol of all of Israel. So her name is meant to be generic like this Jewish woman because her virtues and her strength and her wisdom and her beauty and her being set apart by God to accomplish great things on behalf of his people, that is all meant to point forward to the vocation and mission of Israel as a whole, as the bride of Christ, and there's some personal applications as well for the spiritual battle which we'll discuss later on.
So yeah, I mean, you think the title is pretty boring and straightforward, well, it is straightforward, but it is certainly not boring. Once you begin to read this book as a representation, this Jewish woman is a representation of Israel, the bride of Christ and the individual soul, and what she does, that makes it so much more interesting. So yet again, I think it's important to spend a little time reflecting on these introductory topics. All right, so we're talking about the Greek and the Hebrew, let's get into the language then, point B in your notes, the language and the manuscript tradition.
Now Hebrew is thought to be the original language. However, we do not have any ancient copies, as I just said, we have no ancient copies of this book in Hebrew or in Aramaic, all right? So like Tobit, if you did the book of Tobit with me in the audio library, you can check it out anytime you wish. The book of Tobit is kind of the same thing.
However, we found ancient copies of the book of Tobit in Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is really, really exciting, but that's not the case here with Judah. So the original, we'll get to this here in the next section on authorship and dating, but I think it's probably fair to say that Hebrew was the original language, but the final form of the book that we have now is in Greek. All the oldest copies we have are in Greek, and unfortunately, like the book of Tobit, there are all kinds of variations between the texts. So you got different versions of the texts and even more complicated in the Latin, when St Jerome translated this book, he probably translated it from an Aramaic source, which he did in Tobit.
Remember, I think I said that he translated Tobit in a single day. He didn't know Aramaic, so some other dude read the Aramaic to him, he translated it with the help of somebody else, and he did that in a single day, which is pretty impressive. We don't know if that happened with Judith, but he probably had a copy of an Aramaic or Hebrew source, but nevertheless, when he translated it into Latin, into Latin Vulgate, that also differs here and there from the Greek text. So this is really, really interesting, and it's very, very complicated.
So here's a little quote for you from your Catholic Interrupt to the Old Testament about taking all this with a grain of salt. It says, The manuscript tradition for Judith shows a great deal of variation with longer and shorter additions, extent in Greek and in Latin. As with the book of Tobit, the instability of the manuscript tradition for Judith cautions against placing too much interpretive weight on textual details. And so yeah, we have to take with a grain of salt.
If you really wanna get into the nitty-gritty details and deep into the weeds like scholars do, trying to compare this Greek version with that Greek version with what Saint Jerome translated in the Latin from it, probably presumably a Hebrew Aramaic source he had, it's just a little bit difficult to bring firm and final conclusions on different interpretations. Nevertheless, we can still glean so much great spiritual, theological biblical insights from this book. All right, so the final version we have is probably Greek and that probably came about in the second century BC. And that brings us to point C on the authorship and the dating.
And these two topics always come together. I say this every single time we introduce a new course, authorship and dating reflect on one another. Cause if you're going to maintain that authorship belongs to such and such a person who lived in such and such a time, well, obviously that necessitates a conclusion on dating, right? So if you say authorship is later, just look at the Gospels just really, really quickly, small little rabbit trail here.
If you're gonna say the Gospel of John was not written by John, but some community of believers in the second century, well, you're making two statements there. You're saying John didn't write it, he wasn't an eyewitness and someone else wrote it who didn't witness Jesus and that necessitates it being a later date. Because of John, but if you do insist, on the other hand, if you insist that, no, it really was John who wrote it in his lifetime, he wasn't eyewitness to these accounts. And you're gonna say, well, he probably wrote it.
This is gonna be in the first century, whether it's in the mid-first century or late-first century, that's another debate. So these two topics always come together. Now, what does that mean for us in Judith? Well, pretty much not a lot, okay?
Because we don't know, we have no clear evidence indicating the person, the time, the place, or anything like that. In fact, it's very complicated because it's a big span of time that's being reflected here. Well, I think that we can insist upon, like your Ignatius-Caldit Bible says, is that scholars attribute the book to a Jew, certainly, to a Jew who is deeply devoted to the nation and to the faith of Israel. So familiarity with the geography of Central Palestine further suggests that its author lived in the land of Israel, in quote.
So this much we can say, it was a Jew, a devout Jew faithful to the Mosaic law, insisting upon things like a fidelity to the kosher laws, the dietary rituals. This is a big question after the Jews came back from captivity, Babylonian captivity in the Persian period and certainly to the Greek period. There's a lot of debate about whether or not the Jews should just, you know, you know, blend the rules a little bit and just enjoy some of these foods that the Gentiles ate. Well, that question comes up here, as we're going to see in lesson three about Jews, Judas Fidelity to the kosher laws.
All right, but so this is a Jew who is faithful to the law, faithful to God, faithful to the nation, very much aware of Jewish history and places and persons. And so that much is pretty much all we can say. Now, in terms of the dating, because of authorship, we don't really know, dating is very broad. You're gonna find a lot of discrepancies and debates, arguments amongst different commentaries and scholars because you have both Persian and Greek words and customs and references and idioms and names throughout the entire text.
So that makes it difficult to pin down the dating. And this is over a period of 400 years. So if you remember, broadly speaking, you've got four major superpowers in the ancient world. So you've got the Assyrian empire who conquers the Northern kingdoms in 722.
Then after them comes the Babylonians that conquered Judah and Jerusalem and the city and the temple around 586 BC. Then after them come the Medo Persians, even after them come the Greeks. Now the Medo Persians, the Cyrus comes to power in 538 BC. And then the Greeks come to power in the fourth century with Alexander the Great and all the generals that ruled after him.
And then of course you could add the Romans in the time of Christ for sure. All right, but these are four major superpowers. Now from the Persian period to the Greek period, you're talking 400 years. All right, from 538 to, yeah, say 400 years.
400 years is a great round number during this period. 538 all the way to the period of Antiochus, Epiphanes, and Tacus IV with a Macaberean, Macaberean period. So that's a long time of dating, which if you have Persian references, so here's one example at the top of my head. As you're reading in chapter two, what is it?
Chapter two verse seven, it looks like. In chapter two verse seven, there's this reference to how Persia wants earth and water from her subjects. That is a Persian expression. Give them the earth and water, which symbolizes submission of you and your land to the king.
So that's very, very Persian. Then as you go down towards the end of the book of Judah, in chapter 15, there's a reference of people being crowned with an olive wreath, which is very much a Greek reference accustomed to their culture, not the Persians but the Greeks. So here's just one example from each culture that's present in the book of Judith. So are you going to say that it's written in the Persian period?
Well, then how do you explain the Greek references? All right, so it's probably written, at least the final form was written much later in the Greek period. Now, I would say, as I'm gonna share with you a quote here from your Caledical Bible, it's both. The long and short of it is that there's this mysterious development over the course of time of this book.
Again, very much like Tobit, which we just completed. Tobit probably began with even first hand accounts written by Tobit and his son Tobias. And so you've got written and oral traditions in Hebrew that were maintained over the course of time. And then gradually the final document that we have, in its final form happened much later on.
All right, so that's probably what happened here as well. So for example, here's your quote. The coexistence of Persian and Hellenistic features in the same book may be accounted for by tracing the original story of Judith to the fifth or fourth century BC, that would be the Persian period. While acknowledging that the canonical book of Judith we possess today may have been written or at least edited in the second century BC.
That's the Greek period, the Hellenistic period. A degree of speculation is unavoidable at this point. And here's where I think is a good conclusion here. Perhaps the story of Judith circulated as oral or written tradition in Israel well before the Maccabean uprising, but it assumed a heightened importance in the midst of this national crisis.
When the covenant people faced grave dangers of foreign intrusion and religious oppression. In quote, I think that makes a lot of sense. I really like that. Let me read it one more time.
Perhaps the story of Judith circulated as oral or written tradition in Israel well before the Maccabean uprising, but it assumed a heightened importance in the midst of this national crisis when the covenant people faced grave dangers of foreign intrusion and religious oppression. That to my mind is a great balance. It takes into consideration Persian words, customs, idioms, references, as well as the Greek ones. And so we have a Hebrew original in some sort of kernel form, right?
If you want to say. It's like the acorn in the tree, right? The acorn's Hebrew and gradually over time it took its final form in the Hellenistic period, giving us the final Greek versions that we have today. And that includes the Greek references.
So I think that that makes a lot of sense here. But in the end, we're going to have to just get to heaven and ask God what happened here. As is the case with many of the books of scripture, exactly what happened. Lord has clouded this in mystery in the sands of time.
So in any case, authorship and dating, that makes a lot of sense. So this explains, by the way, why we only have the Greek. We only have, excuse me, Greek copies, ancient copies. And we have the Greek title and the Latin title, but we don't have anything in Hebrew.
No Hebrew title because we don't have those Hebrew originals. And all kind of reflects upon each other. It's all one big conversation. Now the historical context, well, first I should point out, this is included in the historical books of the Catholic Bible.
So we've got Joshua, Judges, Ruth, first second Samuel, first second Kings, the Chronicles, Ersnium Maya, Tobit Judith. These are all the historical books. So Judith, historically, ever since we've had the Bible, has been included in the Catholic Bible, along with the historical books. And as I said, it's not in the Jewish and Protestant canons.
But we'll talk about canonicity in the first century, at least, at the end of this lesson. So there is the context of this book within the Bible itself. But the historical context is set in the Persian period. It's in the Persian period not long after the exiles of Judah returned from captivity from Babylon.
And as I said before, that started in 538 BC when King Cyrus of the Middle Persians, the first year of his reign, allowed the Jews, whoever wanted to, to go back and rebuild the temple and rebuild their city. So it happened at some point after that, and really some point after the reconstruction of the temple, which happened around 515 BC. We know this because there's references to it in the book itself. For example, if you check out chapter 4, verse 3 of Judith, it says, for they had only recently returned from the captivity, and all the people of Judea were newly gathered together, and the sacred vessels in the altar of the temple had been consecrated after their proffination.
So that's very clear. Like, you're getting very obvious, clear descriptions of what time this happened to Jews that recently returned. And I should say, by recently does that mean a few years, or a few decades, or even as much as 50 to 100 years, we're not exactly sure recently is a very broad term. But the temple has been rebuilt.
It's been re-consecrated with all the vessels, and the people have come back. A very similar reference is in chapter 5, verse 19. If you flip there, if you had your Bible, great, do it. If not, here's what it says.
Chapter 5, verse 19, this is when Aqior is describing the history of Israel. And he says, they have now returned to their god and come back from the places to which they were scattered, and they have occupied Jerusalem where their sanctuary or their temple is. And they have settled in the hill country because it was unhavant. So these two verses within the text clearly give us the time period.
So the Assyrian conquest has happened, the Babylonian conquest has happened, the city was destroyed, Cyrus lets them all come back, and over period, and that whole story is told in Ezra and Ezzra and Nehemiah. But they come back, and now some point after that, now we have a new conflict, we have a new antagonist, a new enemy with the Holofaranias, and he wants to subdue the Jews, as well as the city of Jerusalem. And that's what we're looking at. Now, this is a great historical context, but it really begs the question, is it actual history?
And here, there is no end to the debate. And really, unfortunately, I have to tell you, there are no firm conclusions. The church has never spoken as to whether or not. It is actual history.
Really, really, there are three options here. So it is an actual historical account. Number one, number two, it's fictional. It's historical fiction or historical romance.
Or it's allegory or cryptic history. That's meant to tell a good moral story. I think all three options, they're always trying to tell a moral story and give encouragement to the people of Israel and now us, the Christians, and new people of God. That's all true.
So number one, it's historical fiction. It didn't actually happen. It's all made up for good intentions, good purposes, but it is all made up. Two, it's allegory.
Three, it's proper history. And that's what we're going to look at here in the next number of 10, 15 minutes here. Hey, this is Doc Neck. Thank you so much for listening to this course sample.
If you enjoyed it and want to listen to the entire lesson, please become a student over at scripture and tradition.com, where you can listen to this entire course, but also all the other courses that we have available in the S&T audio library, where you can listen to them on demand, however, and whenever you want. So thank you so much. God bless you and keep setting your vinyl.