‘Yet he Committed No Act of Sin with Me, to Defile and Shame Me' (Judith 13:16): The Narrative of Judith as a Corrective to the Narrative of Yael and Sisera

Students of the book of Judith have noted that one of its goals is to counterbalance the story of Esther. Here it is shown that it has another biblical narrative in mind: the encounter of Jael and Sisera in Judges 4-5. To demonstrate this, the figures of Judith and Jael are compared and contrasted. It is shown that the Judith narrative rectifies Jael's in the national and religious domains, but, most of all, in the realm of sexual morality. The book of Judith duplicates the erotic aspect of the encounter between Jael and Sisera by placing its heroine in a similar situation, but makes that eroticism, which is only alluded to in the earlier story, open and explicit. At the same time it emphasizes that the heroine's chastity was not violated. Because Judith is in many respects modeled on Jael, we can say that her story is meant to defend Jael, too, against the suspicions about the propriety of her behavior: it shows that a woman who is alone in a tent with a strange man can, by using her wits, overcome and kill him without sacrificing her honor