In a treatise on the books of the Old and New Testaments, written probably in the late 990s, at a time when Viking attacks on eastern and southern England were intensifying, abbot Ælfric exploited a reference to the Book of Judith to make a rare comment on events outside the monastery. He explained that he had put Judith's story into English (in a homiletic paraphrase) ‘as an example to you people, so that you may defend your country with weapons against the threatening host’. Judith was a pious widow who saved the Israelites from destruction at the hands of the Assyrians by allowing herself to be taken into the bedroom of Holofernes, an enemy general laying siege to their city of Bethulia, and then chopping off his head. The courage and fortitude which Ælfric so admired caught the imagination of many later medieval writers and painters also. The Book of Judith is one of several books which, though immensely popular and influential, and still part of the Roman Catholic Bible, were excluded after the Reformation from the official ‘canonical’ books of the Protestant Bible. They may often be found there today, however, in a separate section of ‘apocryphal’ scripture.

There is no evidence that the version of Judith's story created by an anonymous OE poet was written with the specific purpose of encouraging the English in their own conflicts with invaders.