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Origin of the name JUDITH.
Etymology of the
name JUDITH.
Meaning of the baby name JUDITH.
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JUDITH.
[Heb. Yehudhith
= the feminine of Yehudhi
= "Jewish," "a Jewess." But when the name is
applied to a Hittite woman it has been supposed that Yehudhith may
be the feminine of Yehudhah
= "praised." [Judah.] In the case of Judith,
the Jewish heroine, it is used in its natural meaning]. Usage: America,
England, Ireland, Israel, Switzerland.
A Hittite, a daughter of Beeri.
She became one of Esau's wives (Gen. xxvi. 34). (The Sunday School
Teacher's Bible Manual, Hunter, 1894)
Judith. This name became popular
through the story of the lovely Jewess of Bethulia, who assassinated
Holofernes, Nebuchadnezzar's general, in order to save her native town.
Though a Hebrew name, it very early found its
way to Europe, and occurs in English history before the reign of King Alfred the Great.
Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald, when
about twelve or thirteen years of age, was given in marriage to
Aethelwulf, King of Kent and Wessex; and upon his death she became the
wife of Aethelbald, King of Wessex. For her third husband she
married Baldwin I., Count of Flanders. Thereupon the name became a
hereditary one in that house, and was re-introduced into this country by
the marriage of Tostig, the third son of the great Earl Godwine and
brother of King Harold II., for he married Judith, the sister of Count
Baldwin V. of Flanders.
A few years later and we meet the name again;
for Waltheof II., Earl of Bernicia, upon his submission to William the
Conqueror, was rewarded with the hand of the Conqueror's niece Judith, a
daughter of the Count Aûmale: this lady certainly lent more terror than
lustre to the name!
From those remote days down to the present the
name has held its own amongst us, and steadily reappears in every
generation, amongst Christians as often as amongst those of the Jewish
faith, and in Ireland it has always been exceptionally popular.
One of Shakespeare's daughters bore the name. There exists a
fragment of an old English religious poem, entitled The Story of
Judith, and Isaac Bickerstaff's oratorio Judith is founded on
the Apocryphal Book.
Sir Walter Scott introduces a Judith
into The Fortunes of Nigel. The diminutives are Jugge and
Judy. (Girls' Christian Names, Swan, 1905)
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