Nebuchadnezzar, King of the Assyrians, at Nineveh

The opening verse says that Nebuchadnezzar reigned over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh. He did not. He was king of Babylon, and Nineveh had been destroyed by an alliance including his own father some years before his accession. The errors compound: the Jews in the story have returned from an exile Nebuchadnezzar has not yet imposed and have rebuilt a Temple he has not yet destroyed; the line of march given for Holofernes is impossible as a route; the central town of Bethulia is unknown and its name looks constructed; the names of several commanders are Persian and belong to a later empire altogether.

These are not the slips of a badly informed historian, because a Jewish writer of any period could be relied on to know who burned the Temple. The dominant scholarly reading is that they are deliberate, the author signalling at the outset that this is a parable about the archetypal gentile tyrant rather than a chronicle, much as the book of Jonah plants a Nineveh of impossible size. On that reading the impossibilities are a genre marker, and testing the story against the Assyrian record misunderstands what kind of book it is.

Composition is usually placed in the Hasmonean period, in the second or early first century BCE, on the strength of its theology, its zeal for the law and for circumcision, its Persian and Greek vocabulary, and its interest in a Jewish polity defending itself successfully. The Greek is thick with Hebraisms and Jerome refers to a Semitic version; the consensus is a lost Hebrew original translated into Greek, though the Greek is the only continuous ancient text there is. Jerome's Latin, made hastily from an Aramaic text, is shorter and differs throughout.