Righteous Judith

Righteous Judith, daughter of Merari of the tribe of Simeon, a wealthy widow (her husband was Manasseh), resident of the town of Bethulia. When the town was besieged by the army of the Assyrian general Holofernes and its inhabitants faced death from thirst and hunger, Judith, dressed in her finest garments, entered the enemy camp together with her maidservant. By her beauty and wise words she won Holofernes's trust; at a feast, when the general, having drunk himself into a stupor, fell asleep, Judith beheaded him with his own sword and returned to the city with the enemy's head. The army, left without its commander, fled upon learning of his death, and the city was saved.

Afterward Judith lived a secluded, devout life as a widow and, according to the book's account, lived to the age of 105, being buried in her husband's tomb. The Book of Judith is a non-canonical (deuterocanonical) book of the Old Testament, a significant work of Old Testament literature about the defense of faith and homeland.

She has no separate individual feast day — she is commemorated together with the other Old Testament righteous ones on the movable Sunday of the Holy Forefathers (the second Sunday before Nativity).

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: category_gender has been corrected from the erroneous "m" to the correct "f" — Judith is, of course, a woman. The fabricated commemoration "on Cheesefare Wednesday" has been removed as unconfirmed by any source and replaced with the correct collective commemoration on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers.