Gender stereotypes about men and women are informed by the culture, time, and place of one’s birth. Judith, in celebrating the heroism and faith of the virgin Judith, upends gender stereotypes of the poem’s Medieval era that are, to some extent, still operating today, more than a millennium later.

Engaged as a battle narrative, Judith challenges assumptions about the role of men and women in time of conflict. The men in the poem, while traditionally portrayed as competent, heroic figures, are cartoonish in either their villainy or sheer uselessness. The much-feared Assyrian general Holofernes, for instance, is over-the-top monstrous in his predatory plot to seduce the virgin Judith. At the feast, Holofernes is more animal than human. He “took joy in the wine-pouring / Howled and hurled forth a hideous din” (Lines 23-24). Dispatched by Judith, Holofernes, “bereft of soul” (Line 115), is left in the void of a dark afterlife “amid woes and tortures” (Line 118).

The Assyrians under Holofernes’s command are passive toadies following their general’s craven plot to defile a virgin. And after Holofernes is dead, with their army under attack by the Israelites, the Assyrian soldiers dither outside their general’s tent, unable to find the nerve to disturb their leader at the moment of their greatest peril.