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Context No. 966 of 4322 · Judith

Context · Reflection

Judith 7:16-22: in context

16Their words were pleasing in the sight of Holofernes and in the sight of all his servants; and he ordered them to do as they had spoken. 17And the army of the children of Ammon moved, and with them five thousand of the children of Asshur, and they encamped in the valley. They seized the waters and the springs of the waters of the children of Israel. 18The children of Esau went up with the children of Ammon, and encamped in the hill country near Dothaim. They sent some of them toward the south, and toward the east, near Ekrebel, which is near Chusi, that is upon the brook Mochmur. The rest of the army of the Assyrians encamped in the plain, and covered all the face of the land. Their tents and baggage were pitched upon it in a great crowd. They were an exceedingly great multitude. 19The children of Israel cried to the Lord their God, for their spirit fainted; for all their enemies had surrounded them. There was no way to escape out from among them. 20All the army of Asshur remained around them, their footmen and their chariots and their horsemen, for thirty-four days. All their vessels of water ran dry for all the inhabitants of Bethulia. 21The cisterns were emptied, and they had no water to drink their fill for one day; for they rationed drink by measure. 22Their young children were discouraged. The women and the young men fainted for thirst. They fell down in the streets of the city, and in the passages of the gates. There was no longer any strength in them.

In the book of Judith, the Assyrian general Holofernes has surrounded the Israelite town of Bethulia. On the advice of local allies, he does not storm it but simply seizes the springs and the water sources, then waits. The vast army encamps all around, and for thirty-four days the siege holds. The cisterns empty, the water is rationed by measure, and the people begin to collapse, children faint, young men and women weaken, and they fall down in the streets from thirst.

The strategy against Bethulia is a slow one, and that is what makes it so cruel. Holofernes does not need to attack; he simply cuts off the water and lets thirst do the work, and the town is reduced not by a single dramatic assault but by a long, grinding drought of hope. There is a spiritual picture in that. Many of the hardest trials are not sudden catastrophes but slow sieges, a steady drying up of resources and strength, day after day, until people who could have withstood a shock are worn down by the sheer length of it. The people of Bethulia are on the edge of giving up, and the next chapters will show the community wavering, ready to surrender, blaming their leaders. It is the crisis of endurance, the point where the trial has gone on so long that faith itself runs dry. And it is precisely into that exhausted, thirsty town that God will bring deliverance, through an unlikely widow, when they have almost no strength left.

In a long siege of dwindling strength, when the trial drags on past what I can endure, do I give up before God's deliverance comes, or hold on in the thirst?

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