Judith

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Judith appears in the verse of Paradiso XXXII 10, where Saint Bernard numbers her among the women who sit on the steps of the rose: «Sarra e Rebecca, Iudìt e colei / che fu del cantor di Troia / cioè Eva, e Ruth». The critical note clarifies that in the sequence of the mothers of the Hebrew people, from Mary to Eve to Ruth, Judith seems to be an exception: she is not a mother according to the flesh, but her deed is understood as a maternal action, inasmuch as she symbolically gave life to the Hebrew people. Neither the biblical book of the same name nor the episode of the beheading of Holofernes is mentioned here; the entry therefore limits itself to recording the function that the note assigns to her in the canto.