Mr Cook, Sahar and I had a good conversation on Friday about the Deutero-Canonical Book of Judith ( http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=3825845) the inspired word it reveals. Gender politics are at the core of this apocryphal work. Certain lines ring true when they are compared to the narrative that Faulkner weaves in Absalom, Absalom! Thomas Sutpen is a metaphorical Holofernes in at least two ways. The rebellion that he puts down in Haiti reminds the careful reader of these lines from the Book of Judith (2:27-28)
Then he went down into the plain of Damascus during the wheat harvest, and burned all their fields and destroyed their flocks and herds and sacked their cities and ravaged their lands and put to death all their young men with the edge of the sword.So fear and terror of him fell upon all the people who lived along the seacoast, at Sidon and Tyre, and those who lived in Sur and Ocina and all who lived in Jamnia.
Sutpen and Holofernes are the scourges of the earth and Henry is the heir scion of this death-dealing inheritance. Although Bon and Judith were never married, Henry makes a widow of his sister and her plot to avenge her love has all the trappings of a ritual murder. In the Book of Judith, her namesake speaks these fateful words
By the deceit of my lips strike down the slave with the prince and the prince with his servant; crush their arrogance by the hand of a woman.(Judith 9:10)
Once her vengeance is fulfilled, the trajectory of the story finds its meet and proper end.
And no one ever again spread terror among the people of Israel in the days of Judith or for a long time after her death (Judith 16:25)
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