Judith

Throughout Beloved there are many references to Christianity and religion in general. While I was reading pages 272-274 where Stamp Paid and Paul D discuss Paul’s living arrangements, I paid special attention to who Paul D was going to stay with. I noticed that during the conversation, Judy, of rather Judith, is repeated several times.

Intrigued as to why her name was repeated, I researched connections between the name Judith and religion. What I found was The Book of Judith, a novel whose exact publish year is unknown but is nonetheless very old. While the true origins of the book are also unknown, it is suspected to have first been written in either Greek or Hebrew. The Book of Judith is part of The Old Testament and the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible.

The story is about Judith, a brave, beautiful widow who saves her fellow prisoners from a foreign conqueror, Holofernes who deprived his prisoners of their Gods. To save herself and the others, Judith becomes a maid at the Holofernes’ camp. Soon enough, she gains the enemy’s trust and is granted permission into her conqueror’s tent at night. First, she seduced him. Next, she decapitated him. Through this bold action, she saves her people from from the his wrath.

I think that this connects to Beloved because Sethe and Judith are similar. Both women are without the help of a significant other, are characterized and strong and beautiful, and behead a constricting force. Beloved can be seen as parallel to Holofernes because both of them rob others of life. Holofernes does this through depriving his prisoners of their religion, and considering how important religion was in past, it is likely that the prisoners had symptoms similar to Sethe. Even more, the fact that they were labeled as prisoners corroborates the claim that they became lifeless as prisoners in the past were treated poorly.

There is, however, one major difference between the two stories. Sethe killed Beloved because her maternal love and Judith killed Holofernes because of his tyrannic nature. This, however leaves room for comparison. While Sethe killed because of her maternal love, she received a tyrannic attitude from Beloved. Judith killed to end a tyranny and for this, has been interpreted by some as a Mother of Israel. The fact that Paul D stayed with Judith could have allowed him to understand Sethe and why she acted how she did.