Great Women of The Apocrypha: Judith

Read for you by best-selling narrator, Steve Cook, this book tells the story of the beautiful widow Judith who bravely saves her besieged city Jerusalem from the Assyrian army.

She avoids the enemy surrounding the city and manages to make her way into the camp of the enemy commander. While there, she helps him drink until he is drunk and then cuts off his head. She returns to the city with his head, showing it to her own people. This gives them courage and the strength to rally together and defeat the invading army.

In modern times, the Apocrypha has only been excluded from the Old Testament in some Protestant publications. The idea that these books are forbidden is viewed both as myth and fact by many Christian scholars, with the reasonable course left in the midst of divided opinion being to study and understand these books. Jesus himself is said to reference texts from the Apocrypha using the Old Testament language which was familiar to those he was teaching. It is also interesting to note that the Apostolic Fathers of the Early Church referenced the Apocrypha and quoted from it as they did the Old Testament. It was hard not to do so, as the Jewish Old Testament included the Apocrypha.