Brings together translations of two ancient texts. This book talks about "The Apocryphal Book of Judith", the tale of a widow as warrior-savior, and of the possibility that hidden within this narrative is another older sequence - a pagan one. It is composed out of this audacious possibility.

They did not, for reasons lost to us, go on to attribute to J II her beautiful young heroine's military success: that she entered a wilderness, that she killed her enemy, that she defended her city and saved her people. Centuries after Judith was removed from the Bible, J II was still revered as the maker of this woman, this symbol of Israel. Once the second scroll was found in 1932, her "identity," beyond the simple fact of a woman writing, seemed less certain. Her most beloved poems are probably not the private yearnings of a solitaire but part of a ceremony for cultivated women.