Глава 9

Judith.9:1 And Judith fell on her face, covered her head with ashes, and threw off the sackcloth in which she was dressed; and as soon as the evening incense was burned in Jerusalem, in the house of the Lord, Judith cried out to the Lord with a loud voice and said: 1. Sackcloth" - σάκκος - rough mourning clothes that Judith wore over the clothes of widowhood. Both clothes are mentioned separately below: Judith. 10:3 v. - According to Judith. 8:5, Judith's sackcloth was on her loins, and, therefore, under the clothes of widowhood. “Evening incense” – as opposed to “morning” incense. The incense was burned twice - in the morning and in the evening (Ex. 10:7-8). Starting to pray, Judith throws off her sackcloth, showing that her personal sadness for her husband is now drowned out by grief for Israel, and that she completely devotes her whole soul to this grief and thirst to help him, to the state of her life. Judith 9:2 O Lord God of my father Simeon, into whose hand you have given a sword to take vengeance on the foreigners, who have opened the womb of a virgin to be insulted, who have exposed the thigh for shame, and have defiled the womb of a virgin to be shamed! You said: let this not happen, but they did it. Judith 9:3 And therefore You delivered up their princes to be slain; You stained their bed, which saw their deceit, with blood, and smote the slaves near the rulers and the rulers on their thrones, Judith.9:4 And you gave their wives for plunder, their daughters for captivity, and all the spoils for division to the sons you loved, who were jealous of your zeal, were disgusted at the desecration of their blood, and called on you for help. God, my God, hear me, a widow! Judith.9:5 Thou didst create the things that were before, and these things, and those things that are to follow, and thou didst keep in mind the present and the things to come, and whatever Thou hast thought, that has come to pass; Judith 9:6 that which he determined, he appeared and said, Here am I. For all Your ways are ready, and Your judgment is foreseen by You. Judith 9:7 Behold, the Assyrians have increased in strength, they are proud of horse and rider, they are vainglorious in the arm of the foot, they rely on the shield and the spear and the bow and the sling, but they do not know that You are the Lord who crushes battles. Judith 9:8 The Lord is your name; crush their strength with Your power, and destroy their strength with Your wrath, for they have planned to desecrate Your sanctuary, to mock the peaceful village of the name of Your glory and to crush the horn of Your altar with iron. Judith 9:9 Behold their arrogance, send Thy wrath upon their heads, give strength to my widow's hand for what I have planned. Judith 9:10 With the lips of my cunning strike the servant before the leader, and the leader before his servant, and crush their pride with the hand of a woman; 10. “Strike the slave before (Greek επί) the leader, and the leader before his servant...” This expression represents a direct parallel to the thought of verse 3, where the Greek επί is given a different, more precise meaning: “You ... struck the slaves near the rulers (i.e., next to and at the same time with the rulers) and the rulers on their thrones.” Judith 9:11 For Thy strength is not in abundance, neither is Thy power in the mighty; but You are the God of the humble, You are the helper of the humble, the protector of the weak, the patron of the discouraged, the savior of the hopeless. Judith 9:12 Thus, thus, God of my father and God of the inheritance of Israel, Lord of heaven and earth, Creator of the waters, King of all Your creation! Hear my prayer 12. “Lord of heaven and earth, Creator of waters...” Heaven, earth and water are presented here as embracing the concepts of everything; this is summarized further: “King of all Your creation...” Judith 9:13 Make my word and my cunning a wound and a wound to those who have planned evil against Your covenant, Your holy house, the high place of Zion, and the house of the inheritance of Your sons. 13. “The house of the inheritance of Thy sons” is a collective designation for all the houses of Israel, received not by the usual inheritance only from their ancestors, but by inheritance from the Lord Himself, bestowed upon their exodus from Egypt. Having decided to use cunning, deception, deceit, and lies to defeat the enemy, Judith calls on the Lord for help, as if it were too unworthy of a deed, and even hopes to reveal in this deed the special glory and greatness of the God of Israel. Isn’t this too daring and unworthy of the Lord God? Some interpreters say that since the Holy Spirit itself. Scripture praises the heroism of Judith, the way in which she destroyed Holofernes (deception), is excused as if by the motives that animated her behavior, by kind-hearted faith. This explanation of the matter, however, is unsatisfactory, and no better than the Jesuit one: “the end justifies the means.” Aquinas's explanation is more careful. He notes that "Scripture commends Judith not for her lies, but for the devotion she had to her people, to whom she was in danger." However, if the same Scripture does not condemn Judith for her cunning and allows her to even so confidently and boldly pray to the Lord to use this cunning for the glory of His Name, it is already obvious that this cunning of hers does not quite fit the usual concepts of lies and should be interpreted from the point of view of other dimensions. Judith's cunning would be shameful if everything in the success of this business was built only on her, was exhausted only by her, and mattered only as a clever discovery of it. With a deeper understanding of the matter, we must feel that the main factor in this whole story is not Judith, not her cunning, courage, etc., but the Lord with His Justice and almighty Wisdom. He, in addition to Judith, determined the fate of Holofernes and could, without any assistance from her, decide this fate in any other way. He uses female cunning to further shame the enemy, who has risen in his boasts above what is proper, not to glorify cunning, not to encourage it, but to crush human pride - with human weakness and cunning. This, of course, does not cast any shadow on the Purest Being, Who used human cunning here not to cover up His weakness, as people use cunning, but precisely for the greater discovery and glorification of His power, destroying the proud arrogance of man with his own fragile weapons. Judith 9:14 Give understanding to all Your people and every nation, so that they may see that You are God, the God of all strength and power, and there is no other protector of the race of Israel besides You. 2–14. Judith’s prayer flows from the memory of the famous act of Simeon in the history of her ancestors (Gen. 34:30), who, together with another son of Jacob, his brother Levi, cruelly took revenge on the desecration of his sister (Dinah) on Shechem and all the inhabitants of his city. Having remembered this event with noble pride and confession of the just omnipotence of God (vv. 1–6), Judith moves on to the present plight of her people, sets out the proud and daring threats and intentions of the Assyrians against the sanctuary and the people of God, quite correctly and reasonably sees in these threats and intentions a new, similar to Shechem, attack on the honor and integrity of God’s property (7–8 Art.), and just as in the act of her famous ancestor, cunning was used as a weapon of revenge against lawless insolence, so now in the same cunning she sees the most suitable means for crushing the insolence of the enemy and prays to God to help her in this worthy way to glorify His Name and the Power of His Justice over the daring encroachers on His shrines (Art. 9-14). It is curious that the significance of the actions of the famous ancestor of Judith, Simeon, so praised by Judith, appears in Genesis 34 and 49, etc. in a completely different light. According to the text of Genesis, Jacob was very outraged by Simeon’s act. And this is not just out of fear for the consequences of such a brutal reprisal; If only fears of revenge for the murder of Shechem had guided Jacob in disapproving of Simeon's act, he, of course, would not have recalled this act with the same sharp censure many years later, when all danger had passed (in the second of the mentioned passages in the Bible). Obviously, Jacob was fundamentally against Simeonov’s act, in which he saw unnecessarily cruel revenge, narrow pride and vain inhumanity, especially in view of the sincere repentance brought by Shechem. The case of Simeon according to Judith appears in a completely different light. For her, this matter seems, first of all, one of the most glorious deeds of the Lord, the protector of the innocent and the punisher of the arrogant oppressors of innocence. Simeon in this case was a simple instrument of the just wrath of God and fulfilled this purpose apart from any personal interests and narrow considerations. And his work was not the work of him alone, but of all the zealots of the Name of God and His glory, which is why the name of Simeon then merges with all the sons beloved of God, whose representatives in this case were Simeon and Levi. The question now is, which of the above two interpretations of Simeon’s case should be accepted as more true and acceptable? It seems to us that both do not exclude each other at all and should retain their strength, mutually replenishing and correcting each other. In our life, there are very often cases when events and phenomena, apparently completely ordinary and revolving in the sphere of life of one famous person, reflect a universal, broad and deep meaning for all times, for all people. Among such events is the case of Simeon, which came to light only at a later time in its full significance and comprehensive coverage. The act of the “foreigners,” who provoked such cruel and well-deserved revenge on the part of Simeon, seems to be a criminal violation of God’s clearly expressed prohibition: “You said: let this not happen, but they did it” (2 v.). In the report about this act in the above-mentioned place in the book of Genesis (Gen. 34:7), these words correspond to something similar: “but it was not right to do this.” Perhaps both of these expressions represent a free paraphrase of the well-known genuine prohibition of God introduced in Deut. 23:17: “There shall be no harlot among the daughters of Israel...” Moses, as the author of not only Deuteronomy, but also Genesis, of course, allows us to understand this prohibition under the dully expressed thought of the indicated passage of Genesis. Some interpreters, however, rightly believe that this dumb expression of the thought of the criminality of Shechem’s act was used by Moses for a reason and shows its strict application to the views and state of the narrated time. This time, perhaps, did not yet have a clear and direct judgment of God on this issue, but was guided only by custom and moral concepts that were still established then. Nevertheless, these customs and concepts, many of which subsequently received Divine sanction at Sinai, had a sacred meaning for the children of Jacob, because they were affirmed on the basic requirements of natural moral sense, belonged to the area of ​​those moral principles with which, according to the Apostle, “the Gentiles, not having the law, create the law by nature” (Rom. 2:14), and all the more should have been assimilated by the sensitive souls of the children of Israel, in view of his Divine chosenness. It is not surprising, therefore, that the unfortunate incident with Dina was taken so close to their hearts and prompted them to such a terrible act of revenge. The immediate continuation of the appeal “Lord God of my father Simeon” (2 v.) is the prayer in verse 9: “give my widow’s hand strength for what I have planned.” This is everything in which God’s help should be expressed. Judith expresses more often this general content of her prayer: “crush their fortress... destroy their power” (v. 8); “look at their exaltation, send Your wrath” (verse 9); “strike down with the lips of my cunning... crush their pride” (v. 10); “Make my word and my cunning a wound and a wound for those who plan cruel things...” (v. 13); “Give wisdom to all Your people and every nation” (v. 14). From some hints in the prayer itself (and even earlier, see Judith 8:32–34) it is established that Judith already had a completely prepared plan and method of action. As a worthy daughter of Simeon, she chose the sword to take revenge on those who disgraced the honor of Israel, and decided to use cunning as a way to successfully achieve her goal: she decided, to some extent, to become a new “Dina”, to allow herself to be lured to the very trap of the enemy and, left alone with him, to “give” instead of the expected caresses a deadly blow with a sword. The dazzling beauty, aggravated by the magnificent clothes with decorations and the outstanding intelligence of Judith, made it possible to hope for a good half of the success of the planned business; the rest - it’s better to say: everything - this wonderful woman hoped to accomplish only with the help of God and the power of her strong faith in the Savior of the hopeless and the Defender of the oppressed. How little importance she herself attached to herself can be seen from the fact that with her weakness she even emphasized the even greater greatness of God’s work that was to be accomplished through her: “crush their pride with a woman’s hand!” (10 art. etc.).