JUDITH

JUDITH, a wealthy, beautiful, and pious Jewish widow who, as recorded in one of the books of the Apocrypha called after her, entered, with only a single maid as attendant, the camp of the Assyrian army under Holofernes, that lay investing Bethulia, her native place; won the confidence of the chief, persuaded him to drink while alone with him in his tent till he was brutally intoxicated, cut off his head, and making good her escape, suspended it from the walls of the place, with the issue of the utter rout of his army by a sally of the townsfolk.