Teaching of a different kind in our book, and of subsidiary importance, is that where God’s honour is concerned His people must fight, no matter how great the odds against them may be. A warlike spirit breathes throughout the book; but it is against the enemies of God, the heathen nations, that this spirit is directed; so that it is the need and duty and glory of religious warfare that is inculcated. IV. THE DATE OF THE BOOK The historical details given in the book are, as we have seen, wholly unreliable; they cannot, therefore, be of any use in seeking to fix a date. In the absence of other indications there is only one way in which this can be approximately ascertained, and that is by the teaching and contents of the book. But as has already been pointed out, the form in which the story is given in the Apocrypha is not the earliest; so that we must seek to establish dates both for the form that we have here followed, namely, that of the Apocrypha, and for the story as it appeared in its original form. We have shown that the teaching is that of the Pharisaic type; now it is, as has been pointed out in an earlier chapter,[402] from the _Maccabæan conflict_ with surrounding heathenism that Pharisaism emerges as an active movement, and it only becomes quiescent after the annihilation of the Jewish national life in the reign of Hadrian[403]; this gives two outside dates within which the book in either form must have been composed, viz. roughly speaking between B.C. 150-A.D. 135. The book is first quoted in the first epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians,[404] which was written in A.D. 95 or 96; this presupposes the existence of our book for some time previously. But a further consideration is this: the pseudepigraphic book called “The Assumption of Moses,”[405] was written at the beginning of the first century A.D. by a Pharisee whose purpose in writing it was to urge upon the Jews quietude and patience instead of a warlike spirit and national assertion; the writer of this book belonged to the same party as the writer of the Book of Judith in its later form; had both writers lived at the same time it is highly improbable that they would have taken up such entirely opposed attitudes on the question of religious warfare; as there is no period during the first century A.D. the historical conditions of which would suit the warlike spirit of our book, it is obvious that it must have been written before the beginning of the Christian era. Gaster[406] has shown that there is only one period with which all the elements of our book coincide so far as warfare is concerned, and that is the approach of Pompey to Jerusalem in B.C. 63. So that we may safely assign the middle of the first century B.C. as the date for the _later_ form of our book, As regards the earlier form of the book, it is to be noted that it contains no references to ceremonial observances, a fact which proves that it must have been written before Pharisaism had had time to