Scripture Daily

Context No. 407 of 4322 · Judith

Context · Reflection

Judith 12:1-6: in context

1He commanded that she should be brought in where his silver vessels were set, and asked that his servants should prepare some of his own delicacies for her, and that she should drink from his own wine. 2And Judith said, “I can’t eat of it, lest there be an occasion of stumbling; but provision will be made for me from the things that have come with me.” 3And Holofernes said to her, “But if the things that are with you should run out, from where will we be able to give you more like it? For there is none of your race with us.” 4And Judith said to him, “As your soul lives, my lord, your servant will not use up those things that are with me until the Lord works by my hand the things that he has determined.” 5Then Holofernes’ servants brought her into the tent, and she slept until midnight. Then she rose up toward the morning watch, 6and sent to Holofernes, saying, “Let my lord now command that they allow your servant to go out to pray.”

Judith is now deep inside the enemy camp, a guest at the table of the general Holofernes, who intends to seduce and use her, though she has come with a plan of her own. He offers her the finest of his own food and his own wine, and how she responds is the quiet center of this passage. She declines. I cannot eat of it, she says, and instead she keeps to the provisions she brought with her, refusing to defile herself with the enemy's table even while she is surrounded by it, even while everything about her situation pressures her to just go along.

Holofernes raises the obvious practical objection: what will you do when your own food runs out, since there is none of your kind here to resupply you? And Judith answers with a line that means more than he can hear. As surely as you live, my lord, your servant will not use up what I have brought until the Lord accomplishes by my hand what he has determined. Underneath the double meaning is her real confidence: her provisions will last exactly as long as God's purpose for her requires, and not a day longer or shorter. She is not anxious about running out, because she trusts that God's provision is matched to the length of his plan. And then she establishes a nightly rhythm, going out of the camp to pray before dawn, keeping her prayer intact in the most hostile place imaginable, which also, quietly, prepares her way out.

There is a whole posture in that. Judith does not let the enemy's table absorb her; she keeps her own food and her own prayer even under pressure and the fear of scarcity, and she trusts that what she has been given will last precisely as long as God's purpose for her needs it to. When I am embedded in an environment that presses me to consume whatever it offers and quietly stop being who I am, do I keep my own food and my own prayer, and do I trust, as Judith did, that God's provision will hold out exactly as long as his purpose for me requires, instead of caving to the fear that I will run out?

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