The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A childless, fasting widow in a besieged hill town, who had no office and no army, shamed the town's magistrates, walked into the enemy camp, lied her way to its general's bed and cut off his head with his own sword: the Bible's clearest case of a saint who used deceit and murder as her weapons.
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Critical acts
- 1
Summoning the Magistrates
She summoned the three elders and told them their oath was impious: "how can ye search out God... and know his mind?" Ozias agreed with every word, still pleaded that the people "compelled us," and told her: "pray thou for us, because thou art a godly woman." Moore hears "polite but ironic condescension" in that line.
- 2
Walking Into the Enemy Camp
She "pulled off the sackcloth," anointed herself, put on the clothes she had worn as a wife, and "decked herself bravely, to allure the eyes of all men that should see her." Her maid carried her own food so she would never eat the enemy's.
- 3
Deceiving Holofernes
She swore by his king, flattered him as "mighty in knowledge, and wonderful in feats of war," confirmed Achior's warning, and then invented a sacrilege: the Bethulians were about to eat the consecrated "firstfruits of the corn, and the tenths of wine and oil."
- 4
The Beheading
She accepted, dressed in all her finery, drank from her own supply, and let him drink "more wine than he had drunk at any time in one day since he was born." When the servants left, she took his falchion from the bedpost: "she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him."
- 5
Directing the Counter-attack
Judith, not Ozias, gave the orders: "take this head, and hang it upon the highest place of your walls," then march out at dawn "as though ye would go down into the field toward the watch of the Assyrians; but go not down." The Assyrians would run to wake Holofernes and "not find him."
- 6
Giving It All Back
She led the women in a victory dance and the whole people in her song, then dedicated all of Holofernes' goods and the canopy "for a gift unto the Lord." After three months in Jerusalem she went home to Bethulia and her husband's estate.
Maxims
Don't let frightened men set God's deadline
Ozias's five-day oath turned a crisis into a countdown to surrender. Judith told the elders that God "is not as man, that he may be threatened," and refused to let their timetable decide the city's fate. See "The Five-Day Oath." [Judith, 8:16; Judith, 7:30-31]
When the argument is won and nothing changes, act
Ozias conceded every point and still asked her only to pray for rain. She stopped debating and announced a deed. Moore: "Unlike Esther... Judith acts rather than reacts."
Keep the plan to yourself until it's finished
"Enquire not ye of mine act." The elders, the patrol and Holofernes all saw only the part of the plan she chose to show them. [Judith, 8:34]
Give your enemy the story he already believes
Achior's sermon had primed Holofernes to think Israel would fall only through sin, so she supplied the sin. See "'I Will Declare No Lie to My Lord.'"
Be underestimated, then strike
Holofernes' idea of danger did not include a widow at dinner. Moore: "so powerful and confident is Holofernes that it never occurred to him to look behind the face of this beautiful woman."
Part IThe Story
Two Strokes With His Own Sword
The general was drunk. He had drunk, the text says, "more wine than he had drunk at any time in one day since he was born," and now he lay "along upon his bed: for he was filled with wine." His servants had gone. His eunuch had shut the tent from outside. The woman he had invited to his banquet, and fully expected to take to bed, stood alone beside him. She prayed silently. She took his falchion down from the bedpost. She gripped his hair. "Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, this day," she said. Then "she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him."
She pulled down his canopy as a trophy, handed the head to her maid, who put it in their food bag, and walked out of the camp of an army of "an hundred and seventy thousand footmen" — "according to their custom unto prayer," exactly as she had done on each of the three nights before. No one stopped her.
Judith was a childless, fasting widow in a besieged hill town. She had no office and no army. She shamed the town's magistrates, walked into the enemy camp, lied her way to its general's bed and cut off his head with his own sword. She is the Bible's clearest case of a saint who used deceit and murder as her weapons, and the commentators who love her most are also the most honest about what she did. Carey Moore, whose Anchor Bible commentary is the standard modern study, ends his notes on her with a line that is half tribute and half shudder: "What more could be said about the saint who murdered for her people!"
She is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness: a study in agency under constraint, of what a woman with no formal power could do when the men who held it had already decided to surrender.
A Note on Historicity
Judith is a literary figure, not a documented one, and this playbook treats her that way. The Book of Judith "purports to be a historical account," but Moore lists its "shocking carelessness with well-established historical and geographical facts." Its very first verse makes Nebuchadnezzar king of the Assyrians, ruling from Nineveh — a city destroyed before he took the throne. And Bethulia, the story's town, "is unknown! Nor is the town mentioned anywhere else in the Bible."
Others in Moore's survey call the book "a short historical novel which carries a strong religious message." Moore's own verdict is that "Judith appears to be a folktale," written by "a Pharisee and an ironist extraordinaire" who "knew, as did many in his ancient audience, that he was writing fiction rather than fact." He dates it to the Hasmonean period, late in the second or early in the first century BC. The historian Paul Johnson, who includes her in his book Heroes, dissents: "it seems to me more likely that Judith was an actual person."
What follows is a study of a legendary exemplar, read as a model of what can be done from a position of no power at all.
By the Numbers
Judith of Bethulia
34 daysBethulia's siege before the people demanded surrender
5 daysThe deadline the magistrates swore before they would give up the town
3 years, 4 monthsJudith's widowhood in sackcloth on her rooftop before the siege
170,000Foot soldiers in Holofernes' army, by the book's count
4 nightsSpent in the enemy camp before the beheading
2Strokes of the falchion
105Her age at death, in the story
The Widow on the Roof
Before the siege, Judith had withdrawn from the world. For "three years and four months" after her husband's death she lived in "a tent upon the top of her house," wore sackcloth and "fasted all the days of her widowhood, save the eves of the sabbaths, and the sabbaths," and the feasts. Moore notes that the roof was "the most private part of a home." It was a place to pray and mourn. It would also become the place where she received the town's rulers.
She was rich and beautiful, and she ran her affairs through a woman. Her estate was managed by her maid, "that had the government of all things that she had." Moore argues that with a female steward and no man in charge, there could be no gossip — "one more reason why she was so highly respected in the community." The result of all this discipline was a spotless reputation: "there was none that gave her an ill word; for she feared God greatly." Moore's verdict is flat: "Judith was a saint." He also notes something more practical: "Judith had learned during her widowhood to depend upon herself."
That self-sufficiency would matter. When the crisis came, she did not wait to be asked, and she did not ask permission.
The Siege of Bethulia
The Assyrian army had already shown what it did to those who resisted. Around Damascus, Holofernes' forces "smote all their young men with the edge of the sword." Now they had surrounded Bethulia, a hill town that the story treats as the gate to Jerusalem, and they had cut off its water.
After thirty-four days the cisterns were empty. The people surrounded the elders and turned on them: "God be judge between us and you: for ye have done us great injury." They demanded surrender: "it is better for us to be made a spoil unto them, than to die for thirst." Ozias, the chief magistrate, bought time with an oath: "let us yet endure five days," and if no help came, "I will do according to your word." The men of the town were "very low brought."
Judith was a widow with no office. Custom gave her one role in a crisis: to pray. That is exactly what Ozias would ask of her.
The Five-Day Oath
She did not go to the magistrates. She summoned them. She "sent her waitingwoman" to fetch Ozias, Chabris and Charmis to her house, and when they came she began politely — "Hear me now" — and then took them apart. Moore notes that she addressed them "not as a peer but as their superior."
"Who are ye that have tempted God this day, and stand instead of God among the children of men?" They could not plumb the depths of a human heart, she said, so "how can ye search out God... and know his mind?" Their oath was an attempt to put heaven on a deadline. "Do not bind the counsels of the Lord our God: for God is not as man, that he may be threatened; neither is he as the son of man, that he should be wavering."
Then she did something more important than rebuke them. She reframed the crisis. The people saw God's punishment; the elders saw God's abandonment. Judith argued that the siege was a test. "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God, which trieth us, even as he did our fathers," she said, and "the Lord doth scourge them that come near unto him, to admonish them." Israel, she reminded them, had not fallen into idolatry in their generation — "there arose none in our age... which worship gods made with hands" — and so "we trust that he will not dispise us." Moore calls these verses "perhaps, the chief lesson of Judith," and calls her, "with some justification," "the sole female theologian in the OT." A punishment calls only for surrender. A test calls for a response.
She also told them what leadership owed. "Let us shew an example to our brethren, because their hearts depend upon us, and the sanctuary, and the house, and the altar, rest upon us."
Ozias agreed with every word. "There is none that may gainsay thy words." And then he blamed the crowd, which had "compelled us" to swear, and asked her to do what women were supposed to do: "pray thou for us, because thou art a godly woman." Moore hears "polite but ironic condescension" in that line. He notes that Ozias had not really heard her: "all Uzziah could think of was getting an extension of time through a providential rain."
Judith gave up arguing. She had won the debate and seen that it changed nothing. "Hear me, and I will do a thing, which shall go throughout all generations," she said. She asked only that they stand at the gate that night, and she refused to tell them more: "I will not declare it unto you, till the things be finished that I do."
The elders said "Go in peace." Moore is unsentimental about why: "not because they had such great confidence in her but because they had nothing to lose." The scholar D. N. Freedman suspects she "may have been a pain in the neck to the leadership." What she won was not agreement. It was a five-day licence to act alone. "But Judith did more than explain the crisis," Moore writes: "she acted on it." In his comparison: "Unlike Esther... Judith acts rather than reacts."
The Prayer for Deceit
Before she left, she prayed, and her prayer is among the most unsettling in scripture. She grounded it in her ancestor Simeon, "to whom thou gavest a sword to take vengeance of the strangers." Moore notes that Genesis is "quite critical" of Simeon's revenge on the men of Shechem, yet "Judith spoke approvingly." Freedman, in a letter Moore quotes, puts it more sharply: "she identifies with the avenger, Simeon, rather than with the victim, Dinah."
Then she asked for the gift of lying. "Smite by the deceit of my lips the servant with the prince." "Make my speech and deceit to be their wound and stripe." And she stated the belief on which the whole plan rested: "For thy power standeth not in multitude nor thy might in strong men: for thou art a God of the afflicted, an helper of the oppressed, an upholder of the weak." One widow against a hundred and seventy thousand men. The arithmetic only worked if that sentence was true.
Dressing for the Mission
She "pulled off the sackcloth." She bathed, anointed herself, put on the clothes she had worn as a wife, and "decked herself bravely, to allure the eyes of all men that should see her." Her own later song would make the costume the weapon: "she put off the garment of her widowhood... and took a linen garment to deceive him."
Her maid carried a bag of food — wine, oil, grain, figs and bread — so that Judith would never eat the enemy's. It kept her ritually pure and independent of Holofernes' table. It would also become the sack for his head.
God, the magistrates assured her, would go with her. Moore adds drily: "(But none of the men of Bethulia would.)" Two women walked out of the gate at night toward an army camp. Johnson spells out what they were risking: "one false step would mean a horrible death (after rape)."
Captive Judith Captured Her Captors
The first Assyrian watch stopped her. She gave them a story they could not afford to detain: "I am a woman of the Hebrews, and am fled from them," and she was coming to show their commander a way to "win all the hill country, without losing the body or life of any one of his men." Moore: "What soldier in his right mind would have delayed, let alone abused, such a messenger!"
The patrol sent a hundred men to escort her to Holofernes. They even coached her on how to behave before their general. Moore's phrase for the scene is "captive Judith captured her captors." The whole camp crowded to see her, and the soldiers drew the conclusion that would undo them: "Who would despise this people, that have among them such women?"
'I Will Declare No Lie to My Lord'
Holofernes came out of his canopy "woven with purple, and gold, and emeralds, and precious stones," with silver lamps carried before him. She fell on her face. He reassured her, "I never hurt any that was willing to serve Nabuchodonosor," and told her not to be afraid: "thou shalt live this night, and hereafter." Moore notes the irony: "Judith is safe: Holofernes is the one who is in danger now!"
Then she spoke, and her first audience with Holofernes is a masterclass in saying true words that mean the opposite. "I will declare no lie to my lord this night," she began, and "my lord shall not fail of his purposes." Holofernes heard himself in "my lord." She meant God. Moore counts the ambiguous "lord" several times in the interview and writes that "Judith shows herself to be the master of irony in this episode."
She flattered him without shame, as "mighty in knowledge, and wonderful in feats of war": "Judith nourishes his sensuality and vanity as two allies," one scholar Moore quotes writes, "as a fifth column within the fortress."
Then she used his own intelligence against him. Holofernes had already been warned by Achior, an Ammonite captain, that Israel could not be beaten "except they sin against their God." Achior had told the truth, and Holofernes had expelled him to share Bethulia's fate. Judith did not contradict Achior. She confirmed him — "lay it up in thine heart, for it is true" — and then supplied the one false fact that made attack seem safe. The Bethulians, she said, were about to eat the consecrated "firstfruits of the corn, and the tenths of wine and oil." Once they sinned, God would abandon them. She would go out each night to pray until God told her the sin was done, and then she would lead Holofernes all the way to Jerusalem: "I will set thy throne in the midst thereof." Moore calls the sacrilege "presumably a bold-faced lie on Judith's part, albeit a clever one"; the scholar Dumm, whom he quotes, calls it "an ironic situation in which the victim encourages the executioner."
God, she told him, "hath sent me to work things with thee, whereat all the earth shall be astonished." Moore explains the double meaning: Holofernes "understood Judith to be referring to what she would be doing for him when, in actual fact, she was talking about what she would do to him."
It worked completely. "There is not such a woman from one end of the earth to the other, both for beauty of face, and wisdom of words," said his servants. Holofernes praised her as "both beautiful in thy countenance, and witty in thy words," and promised "thy God shall be my God." But, Moore adds, he "failed to see that Judith was also clever, ruthless, and ironic." Moore draws the book's uncomfortable moral: Achior told the truth and was expelled, while "Judith in her dealings with Holofernes was deceitful, dishonest—and totally successful." He counts that "of the fifteen verses of her speech, only one of them contains unequivocal truth."
— Judith 11:5I will declare no lie to my lord this night.
Three Nights of Prayer
Inside the lie, she kept the law. Offered the general's food, she refused: "I will not eat thereof, lest there be an offence." She would eat only what she had brought: "thine handmaid shall not spend those things that I have, before the Lord work by mine hand." Moore puts the paradox exactly: "Unwilling to eat food which was not kosher, she did not hesitate to tell bold-faced lies." And she built a routine. For three nights she asked leave to go out of the camp to pray, and the guard was ordered "that they should not stay her." Moore says she "considered her nightly visits outside the camp as establishing her means of escape later on." On the fourth night, the same exit would carry the head.
The Banquet in the Tent
On the fourth day Holofernes held a feast for his own servants only, and told his eunuch Bagoas plainly what it was for: "it will be a shame for our person, if we shall let such a woman go, not having had her company," and "if we draw her not unto us, she will laugh us to scorn." He had, the text says, "waited a time to deceive her, from the day that he had seen her." Holofernes planned a seduction. Judith planned an execution. Both used the same evening.
Bagoas invited her to "be made this day as one of the daughters of the Assyrians," and she answered like a willing concubine: "Who am I now, that I should gainsay my lord?" and "whatsoever pleaseth him I will do speedily, and it shall be my joy unto the day of my death." She dressed in all her ornaments, and her maid laid fleeces for her opposite the general. "Drink now, and be merry with us," he said. "I will drink now, my lord, because my life is magnified in me this day more than all the days since I was born."
She ate and drank only what her maid had prepared. He drank more than on any day of his life.
Bagoas shut the tent. She prayed, took the falchion, said "Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, this day," and struck twice. Moore's comment is dry: "Praying for help to pull off a successful murder is not exactly a routine petition to the God of Israel." He also notes that the Latin Vulgate softens the scene, adding "And Judith stood before the bed praying with tears"; the Greek-based text gives her none. She then "tumbled his body down from the bed." Johnson admires the craft: two strokes was "the customary number for the professional executioner of the Tower of London," who used an easier axe.
The book's "greatest irony," in Moore's words, "is that Holofernes was mastered by the very person he thought he had mastered—and with his own sword." The scene is the centre of her legend because it joins both halves of her character in one hour: the perfect performance of a willing woman, and the cold nerve of an executioner.
The Head at the Gate
Judith and her maid left the camp "according to their custom unto prayer" and climbed back to Bethulia. From a distance she called: "Open, open now the gate: God, even our God, is with us." The whole town ran down and lit a fire to see by.
She pulled the head from the bag. "Behold the head of Holofernes, the chief captain of the army of Assur, and behold the canopy, wherein he did lie in his drunkenness; and the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman." Then she swore an oath on her own honour: "My countenance hath deceived him to his destruction, and yet hath he not committed sin with me, to defile and shame me."
She shouted "Praise, praise God," and left the praise of herself to others. Ozias blessed her "above all the women upon the earth." Moore notes that Judith gave "all the credit for the night's victory to God": modest in words, devastating in what she held up.
She sent for Achior. When the Ammonite "saw the head of Holofernes in a man's hand in the assembly of the people, he fell down on his face, and his spirit failed." Moore points out the contrast: the "battle-seasoned warrior" fainted at what the widow had done "with her own hands." Revived, Achior asked what had happened, and "Judith declared unto him in the midst of the people all that she had done," turning a private deed into public memory. Achior converted.
'But Go Not Down'
A dead general does not by itself defeat a vast army. Judith knew it, and she, not Ozias, gave the orders. "Take this head, and hang it upon the highest place of your walls." At dawn, the men were to march out "as though ye would go down into the field toward the watch of the Assyrians; but go not down." The Assyrians would run to wake Holofernes and "not find him."
Moore marks the change in role: "No longer just an assassin, Judith was now acting as military leader and chief strategist," combining "Deborah, the strategist, and Jael, the assassin." The comparison is apt; the earlier heroine of Judges, Deborah, had also directed a war she could not fight herself.
It happened exactly as Judith said. Bagoas found the headless body and cried that "one woman of the Hebrews hath brought shame upon the house of king Nabuchodonosor." The army fled. Israelites from every region chased them "until they were past Damascus," and the camp was looted for thirty days. No miracle is needed to explain it: "The very panic of the Assyrian army is quite plausibly explained as due to the death of its leader." One killing and one feint ended the siege.
The Song of the Sandal
The high priest came from Jerusalem to tell her: "Thou art the exaltation of Jerusalem, thou art the great glory of Israel." The women of Israel came to dance for her and crowned her and her maid with olive. "She went before all the people in the dance, leading all the women," while the armed men followed behind with garlands. Then "Judith began to sing this thanksgiving in all Israel, and all the people sang after her."
Judith wrote her own legend, and in it the weapon was beauty. The song turns her deed into a reversal of everything the enemy had boasted. Assur had promised to "dash the sucking children against the ground," but "the Almighty Lord hath disappointed them by the hand of a woman." No young men, Titans or giants struck down the champion; "Judith the daughter of Merari weakened him with the beauty of her countenance." The best-known lines are almost cinematic: "Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his neck." Moore calls this "the most effective part of the Song" and sums it up: "How ironical! The would-be ravisher is ravished and killed!"
The song carries her darker side too. It ends with a curse: "Woe to the nations that rise up against my kindred! the Lord Almighty will take vengeance of them in the day of judgment, in putting fire and worms in their flesh; and they shall feel them, and weep for ever."
Giving It All Back
She was now rich, famous, unmarried and much desired. The people gave her Holofernes' tent and plate. She dedicated all of it, and the canopy, "for a gift unto the Lord." After three months in Jerusalem she went home to Bethulia and her husband's estate.
She never remarried: "many desired her, but none knew her all the days of her life." The scholar Montague, whom Moore quotes, reads the childless widow as proof that "a woman's glory can consist in something else." She "made her maid free" — the one confederate who had gone with her, stood guard outside the bedchamber and carried the head. Moore: "she risked her life for her mistress," and "it was a nameless maid who... will be remembered forever." Before her death Judith distributed her goods to the nearest kin of both her husband and herself.
She took no office, founded nothing and left no heir. Her reward was reputation and peace. She "increased more and more in honour," lived to "an hundred and five years old," and "there was none that made the children of Israel any more afraid in the days of Judith, nor a long time after her death."
The Dark Side
Judith's method is the problem at the heart of her story, and the best commentators do not look away from it. She was a liar by design and by prayer: Moore calls her "a shameless flatterer" and "a bold-faced liar," and Johnson says she "had to tell a great deal of ingenious and cunning lies over four nerve-wracking days." She killed a drunk, sleeping host and hung his head on the walls. Moore calls her "a ruthless assassin" "with no respect for the dead," and concludes that "by the standards of most people, except perhaps those whose lives depended upon her saving act, Judith was brutal." She chose Simeon the avenger over Dinah the victim as her model, and her song ends not in mercy but in "fire and worms" for her people's enemies.
Moore quotes an older writer, Ball, whose lament still stands: "Even the modern world has been slow in attaining to the conviction that not everything is fair in war."
Why Johnson Counts Her a Hero
Johnson places Judith beside Jael, the woman in Judges who killed the exhausted fugitive general Sisera while he slept. He finds that murder "odious": "It is hard to see her as a heroine at all." Judith, he argues, "was altogether a more admirable and heroic figure" because her risk was far greater. Jael's victim was helpless in her own tent. Judith walked into his camp and "knew that one false step would mean a horrible death (after rape) and therefore courage was an essential part of her feat—courage of a high order too, multifaceted, for it had to include both the effrontery of playing the irresistible harlot (and a praying one too) and the decisive physical feat of decapitation."
Johnson follows the deed into art, to Caravaggio and to Artemisia Gentileschi, who returned to the subject after she was raped by her teacher and whose Judith is "sawing the head off, using all her strength." Then he draws an uncomfortable conclusion. These stories convey "the element of physical ruthlessness involved in many acts of heroism, especially when they are carried out by women." "Heroism is usually loveless, and when performed by women its element of hate and inhumanity appears particularly savage. The hero, and still more the heroine, must be capable of atrocity."
By his own definition, a hero is anyone "widely, persistently over long periods, and enthusiastically regarded as heroic," and Judith passes that test easily. His chapter honours her and refuses to clean her up. Like Joan of Arc, she was a woman of fierce piety who acted where men would not; unlike Joan, she won, survived and went home.
Part IIThe Playbook
Judith had no office, no army and no right to act. She had a reputation, one confederate, a bag of food and a mind her enemy refused to take seriously. Her methods are the methods of the underestimated, and her story is also a warning about what they cost.
The principles
Principle 1
Reframe the crisis, and refuse the panic deadline
The elders' five-day oath was a countdown to surrender. Judith told them God "is not as man, that he may be threatened," and recast the siege as a test, "which trieth us." A punishment calls for surrender; a test calls for a response.
Tactic: Before you can act in a crisis, change the story people tell about it, and challenge deadlines that exist mainly to relieve the people who set them.
Principle 2
When the argument is won and nothing changes, act
Ozias agreed with every word and still asked her only to pray for rain. She stopped debating: "Hear me, and I will do a thing." She asked for the narrowest permission she needed, an open gate, and took the problem off their hands.
Tactic: When decision-makers agree with you and still will not move, stop persuading and do the thing yourself.
Principle 3
Keep the plan to yourself until it is finished
"I will not declare it unto you, till the things be finished that I do." The elders, the patrol and Holofernes each saw only the part she chose to show them.
Tactic: For high-risk plays, share only what each party needs to do their part; a plan nobody knows cannot be talked out of you.
Principle 4
Give your opponent the story he already believes
Achior had told Holofernes Israel could be beaten only through sin. Judith confirmed it, added the one false fact that made attack look safe, and offered him a "throne" in Jerusalem. Her words were literally true and wholly misleading: "I will declare no lie to my lord."
Tactic: The most persuasive story confirms what the listener already believes and adds one new fact; work inside the frame your counterpart already holds.
Principle 5
Establish a pattern, then exploit it
Three nights of prayer outside the camp made the fourth night's exit routine. The guards had orders "that they should not stay her."
Tactic: Build the routine before you need it; a repeated, harmless behaviour becomes cover for the decisive one.
Principle 6
Strike the head, then step down
"It never occurred to him," Moore writes of Holofernes, "to look behind the face of this beautiful woman." One killing and one feint, "but go not down," broke an army. Then she credited God out loud, wrote the song, gave the spoils to the Temple, freed her maid and went home.
Tactic: Use being overlooked as cover, aim at the single point of failure, and after the win give away the spoils; the reputation outlasts the loot.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Don't let frightened men set God's deadline. A five-day oath is a countdown to surrender.
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Summon, don't petition. She called the magistrates to her house.
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Keep the law even inside the lie. She ate only what she brought.
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Be underestimated, then strike. He saw a beautiful widow, not the sword.
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Write the song yourself. "The Almighty Lord hath disappointed them by the hand of a woman."
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Count what the method costs. Moore calls her "the saint who murdered for her people." Not everything is fair in war.
