When Judith Lived

To this series of events it will be right for me to add an account of what Judith did, for she is reported to have lived after the captivity. But the sacred history has not revealed who was king of the Persians in her day. It calls the king under whom her deeds were done Nebuchadnezzar, and that was certainly not the one who took Jerusalem. Yet I do not find that anyone of that name reigned over the Persians after the captivity, unless perhaps, because of the fury and like aims he showed, any king who acted in that way was called Nebuchadnezzar by the Jews. Most people, however, think it was Cambyses the son of Cyrus, on the ground that as a conqueror he pushed into Egypt and Ethiopia. But the sacred history is against this opinion, for it describes Judith as living in the twelfth year of the king in question, and Cambyses held supreme power for no more than eight years. [a]

So, if one may make a conjecture on a point of history, I am inclined to believe that her deeds were done under King Ochus, who came after the second Artaxerxes. I base this conjecture on the fact that, as I have read in secular histories, he is reported to have been cruel by nature and fond of war. He made war on his neighbors, and by war he won back Egypt, which had revolted many years before. At that time too he is said to have mocked the sacred rites of the Egyptians and Apis, whom they regarded as a god. Bagoas, one of his eunuchs, an Egyptian by nation, was indignant at the king’s conduct, and afterward he avenged it by the king’s death, considering that the king had insulted the race he belonged to. Now the inspired history mentions this Bagoas, for it relates that when Holofernes led an army against the Jews by the king’s order, Bagoas was with the army. So I may with good reason put this forward as proof of my opinion that the king named Nebuchadnezzar was really Ochus, since secular historians have reported that Bagoas lived in his reign.

But no one should find it at all strange that merely worldly writers have not touched on any of the things recorded in the sacred writings. The Spirit of God took care in this way that the history should be kept strictly within its own mysteries, unstained by any corrupt mouth, or by one that mixed truth with fiction. That history is in fact set apart from the affairs of the world and is of a kind to be told only in sacred words; plainly it ought not to have been mixed up with other histories, as if it stood on an equal footing with them. For it would have been most unfitting for this history to be mingled with others dealing with other matters or pursuing different inquiries. But now I will go on to what remains, and tell as briefly as I can what Judith did.