Judith and Jehu: Tyrannies, beheadings, and reforms in 2 Kings 9–10 and Judith

The beheading of Holofernes is the most iconic scene in Judith . Since the author of Judith plays loose-and-free with history which renders an ahistorical situation and saturates the novella with inner-biblical echo and allusion, this investigation seeks to determine whether the author of Judith was inspired by Jehu in 2 Kings 10 as a plot-structuring template. There, Jehu beheads King Ahab’s seventy sons and places their heads in a basket. The extent to which the beheading motif as well as the context of a tyrannical king and a cultic purge was appropriated for the crafting of Judith is explored. Further, a feminist-postcolonial interpretation of the proposed literary pattern in Judith is proffered. With the female protagonist a cipher for colonized Jewry and the novella as revenge fantasy, Judith is a heroine who is at times similar and dissimilar to Jehu, with both common and diverse objectives. A fusion of biblical-historical and contemporaneous-political intentions are discerned in the book of Judith, through this interpretive lens, and extrapolated. 1