[Judah, Kingdom Of], the kingdom in the S. of Palestine of the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin that remained true to the house of David after the revolt of the other ten under Jeroboam, who formed what was called the kingdom of Israel, a larger, but a weaker.
[Judaizers], a party, called also Ebionites, in the primitive Church who sought to overlay the simple ordinances of Christianity with Judaic observances and rites, "a yoke which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear."
[Judas], surnamed Iscariot, one of the twelve Apostles of Christ, who from some infatuation that unaccountably possessed him, and to his everlasting infamy, betrayed his Master to His enemies for 30 pieces of silver; was designated by Christ as the Son of Perdition.
[Judas Maccabæus], a son of [Mattathias] (q. v.), who succeeded his father in the leadership of the Jews against the Syrians in the war of the Maccabees, and who gave name to the movement, a man of chivalric temper, great energy, firm determination, dauntless courage, and powerful physique; who, with the elect of his countrymen of kindred spirit encountered and overthrew the Syrians in successive engagements, till before a great muster of the foe his little army was overwhelmed and himself slain in 160 B.C. See [Maccabees].
[Jude, Epistle of], an epistle in the New Testament, of which Judas, the brother of James, was the author; written to some unknown community in the primitive Church, in which a spirit of antinomian libertinism had arisen, and the members of which are denounced as denying the sovereign authority of the Church's Head by the practical disobedience and scorn of the laws of His kingdom. For the drift and modern uses of this epistle see Ruskin's "Fors Clavigera," chaps. lxvi. and lxvii., where it is shown that the enemies of the faith in Jude's day are its real enemies in ours.
[Judges, Book of], a book of the Old Testament; gives an account of a series of deliverances achieved on behalf of Israel by ministers of God of the nation so called, when, after their occupation of the land, now this tribe and now that was threatened with extinction by the Canaanites; these deliverers bore the character of heroes rather than judges, but they were rather tribal heroes than national, there being as yet no king in Israel to unite them into one; of these the names of twelve are given, of which only six attained special distinction, and their rule covered a period of 300 years, which extended between the death of Joshua and the birth of Samuel; the story throughout is one: apostasy and consequent judgment, but the return of the Divine favour on repentance insured.
[Judgment, Private], assumption of judgment by individual reason on matters which are not amenable to a lower tribunal than the universal reason of the race.
[Judith], a wealthy, beautiful, and pious Jewish widow who, as recorded in one of the books of the Apocrypha called after her, entered, with only a single maid as attendant, the camp of the Assyrian army under Holofernes, that lay investing Bethulia, her native place; won the confidence of the chief, persuaded him to drink while alone with him in his tent till he was brutally intoxicated, cut off his head, and making good her escape, suspended it from the walls of the place, with the issue of the utter rout of his army by a sally of the townsfolk.
[Judson, Adoniram], Burmese missionary and scholar, born at Maiden, Mass.; sailed for Burma 1812, and for 40 years laboured devotedly, translating the Bible into Burmese, and compiling a Burmese-English dictionary; he died at sea on his way home (1788-1850).
[Juggernaut] (22) or Puri, a town on the S. coast of Orissa, in Bengal; one of the holy places of India, with a temple dedicated to Vishnu, and containing an idol of him called Jagannâtha (or the Lord of the World), which, in festival times, attracts thousands of pilgrims to worship at its shrine, on one of which occasions the idol is dragged forth in a ponderous car by the pilgrims and back again, under the wheels of which, till prohibited, multitudes would throw themselves to be crushed to death in the hope of thereby attaining a state of eternal beatitude.