Judith

Judith is a wealthy and beautiful young widow living in a hilltop town called Bethuliah. During a siege of her town, she undertakes a daring and sexually ambiguous mission to save her people from annihilation. She kills the general of the enemy forces by hacking off his head as he lies in a drunken stupor. Her story is a variant on the David and Goliath story, where a seemingly weak person overcomes a person of superior strength by calling on God's help and using cunning and intelligence. The Book of Judith was never intended as factual history - it is more like fiction with a theological message. Supposedly set in 587BC it was in fact written much later, and many of the details in the story are incorrect - for example, Nebuchadnezzar was a Babylonian, but the story presents him as ruler of the Assyrians. The Book of Judith is not included in the Protestant or Jewish Scriptures, perhaps because of its sexual content - Sigmund Freud said that beheading was symbolic castration. Perhaps readers found its irony hard to swallow: Judith is a virtuous woman who murders a defenseless man, and the basic message of her story is that the end justifies the means. Oddly enough, the Book of Judith is far more religious in content that the Book of Esther, which is in all Bibles. You'll see this if you read Chapter 8, where Judith challenges the town officials for trying to make God in their own image It's one of the best descriptions of what God might or might not be that has ever been written.