Catholic Commentary
Holofernes Encamps Near Judea
9Then he came toward Esdraelon near to Dotaea, which is opposite the great ridge of Judea.10He encamped between Geba and Scythopolis. He was there a whole month, that he might gather together all the baggage of his army.
Judith 3:9–10 describes the Assyrian general Holofernes advancing toward Judea and establishing a military encampment in the Jezreel Valley between Geba and Scythopolis for one month to consolidate his forces. This positioning places him at the threshold of Judea's heartland while evoking Israel's remembered history of both vulnerability and divine deliverance.
The enemy halts at Judea's border—not yet victorious, but close enough to terrify—and in that month of waiting, God prepares an unexpected deliverer.
The Spiritual Sense
At the allegorical level, Holofernes' encampment represents the advance of evil to the very boundary of the soul. He has not yet entered Judea — the inner citadel has not fallen. The month of waiting before the assault mirrors the season of spiritual trial in which the believer is tested before the decisive battle. The Church Fathers read Judith herself as a figure of the Church or of the soul in combat with demonic pride; these verses are the moment just before the decisive grace is given. The geography, with its echoes of past divine deliverances (Deborah, Gideon, Elisha at Dothan), whispers that the God who saved before will save again.
Catholic tradition reads the Book of Judith not merely as a historical or legendary narrative but as a profound theological meditation on divine sovereignty over human power — a theme the Magisterium has consistently affirmed in its teaching on Providence (CCC 302–314). The encampment of Holofernes at the gates of Judea crystallizes what the Catechism calls the "scandalous evil" that tempts faith (CCC 309): the righteous nation surrounded, the Temple threatened, God apparently silent. Yet Catholic teaching insists that "God is the sovereign master of his plan" (CCC 314), and these verses enact precisely that conviction by showing the enemy frozen at the threshold.
The Church Fathers saw in Judith a type of the Blessed Virgin Mary — a reading made explicit by the Council of Trent's tradition and developed by Saint Jerome, who translated and included Judith in the Latin Vulgate canon. Origen read the geography of such passages as maps of spiritual warfare: the encampment of an enemy at a border represents the moment in the soul's journey when vice stands ready to overwhelm virtue. Saint Ambrose, in his treatise De Virginibus, cites Judith as the model of courageous, prayerful femininity confronting tyrannical power.
The month-long pause before Holofernes moves against Judea also illuminates the Catholic understanding of God's permissive will — He allows the trial to reach its full weight so that His deliverance may be all the more manifest. Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (§37), reflects that hope is most purely itself when circumstances appear most hopeless: these verses are a visual icon of that dark moment in which Christian hope is forged.
For the contemporary Catholic, Judith 3:9–10 speaks to the experience of living in a culture that has, in many respects, encamped against the boundaries of Christian faith and practice. Like Holofernes at the ridge of Judea, hostile forces — moral relativism, aggressive secularism, the reduction of religion to the merely private — have not yet breached the inner citadel, but they stand visibly at the border. The temptation in such a moment is either panic or despair.
These verses counsel a different response: attentiveness and preparation. The month Holofernes spends gathering his baggage is the same month in which Israel will fast, pray, and produce Judith. For the Catholic today, the encampment of opposition is an invitation to deepen interiority — to go to Confession, to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, to fast, to refuse the subtle capitulations that surrender ground before the battle is even joined. The ridge of Judea — your inner life ordered to God — remains unbroken as long as prayer holds the line. The enemy's strength is real, but it is finite; God's response comes through the most unlikely instrument, to those who wait on Him.
Commentary
Verse 9: Arrival at the Threshold of the Holy Land
"Then he came toward Esdraelon near to Dotaea, which is opposite the great ridge of Judea." Esdraelon is the Greek name for the Valley of Jezreel, the broad, fertile plain stretching across central Canaan between the Carmel ridge to the northwest and the hills of Gilboa to the east. It is among the most historically contested pieces of ground in all of Scripture — the site of Deborah and Barak's victory over Sisera (Judges 4–5), of Gideon's rout of Midian (Judges 7), of the death of King Saul (1 Samuel 31), and later of Josiah's fatal encounter with Pharaoh Neco (2 Kings 23:29). The narrator's choice of this geography is therefore saturated with theological memory. For the ancient Israelite reader, to hear that a foreign army has entered Esdraelon is to hear the footfall of existential threat.
Dotaea (Dothan) lies to the south, near the hills of Samaria. Its mention is pointed: it was at Dothan that Joseph was thrown into the cistern by his brothers before being sold into Egyptian slavery (Genesis 37:17), a story of betrayal and God's hidden providence. The phrase "opposite the great ridge of Judea" is the author's way of marking a military and spiritual boundary: Holofernes now stands face to face with the heartland of the covenant people. The ridge — the high country running from Galilee south through Samaria and into Judea — is not merely topography; in biblical imagination, the hill country is where the presence of God dwells, where the Temple stands, where Israel lifts its eyes to receive help (Psalm 121:1).
Verse 10: The Encampment and the Month of Waiting
"He encamped between Geba and Scythopolis." Geba (probably present-day Tell Abu Shusheh) is in the Jezreel Valley; Scythopolis (Beth-Shean) is an ancient city at the junction of the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys, notorious in Israel's memory as the place where the Philistines displayed the body of Saul on the city wall (1 Samuel 31:10–12). The encampment between these two points forms a line across the northern approaches to Judea — a strategic chokepoint, but also a symbolic barrier between the pagan world and the holy people.
"He was there a whole month, that he might gather together all the baggage of his army." The thirty days of consolidation are narratively crucial. They create the temporal space in which Judith's story can unfold. But at the typological level, the delay is the delay of Providence: God is not caught off-guard; the pause allows Israel to fast, pray, repent (Judith 4), and to raise up His chosen instrument. The word "baggage" (Hebrew/Greek episitismos or equivalent) implies not just supplies but the full apparatus of imperial war-making — an army that moves with the weight of an empire behind it.