The Divided Lip

This text appears in Marginalia.

The biblical tradition contains a striking and frequently misunderstood pattern: women are repeatedly praised not for speaking truth to power, but for misdirecting power when truth has become unsafe. These figures do not lie for gain, comfort, or advantage. They lie because the authority confronting them has ceased to operate lawfully, and because truth-telling would not correct injustice but extinguish it.

The clearest articulation of this ethic appears in the story of Judith, who alone in scripture explicitly asks for “deceitful words” (Judith 9:10, 9:13). This request is often treated as morally or theologically troubling, as though it represented a lapse from truth into malice. Yet both the text and its interpretive tradition resist that reading. Judith’s prayer is not a curse born of hatred, nor a desire for destruction for its own sake. It functions instead as a form of ethical diagnosis: a recognition that the authority she confronts has already placed itself outside the conditions under which truth can be spoken safely or heard justly.

Crucially, the phrase “by the deceit of my lips” does not describe false belief or corrupt intention. It names a method. Deceit here is not expressive but instrumental: language used to act within a hostile jurisdiction rather than to declare sincerity within a collapsed one. Judith does not ask for falsehood as an end; she asks for words capable of operating where ordinary truth has lost all procedural standing. Her lips do not confess; they intervene.

The Assyrian authority embodied in Holofernes is totalising, violent, and uninterested in judgment as such. It trusts in weapons, hierarchy, and spectacle, and therefore no longer recognises speech except as submission. Under such conditions, candour is not virtue; it is surrender. To speak truth directly to such power is not to challenge it, but to present truth for annihilation.

Judith’s deception is therefore not oppositional speech, but procedural evasion. She does not confront authority on its own terms, nor does she attempt to persuade it. Instead, she allows power to be undone by its own assumptions. When she prays that Holofernes be “caught in the net of his own eyes,” the image is not one of external punishment, but of self-entrapment. Power collapses not because it is attacked, but because it completes its own logic unchecked.

The prayer’s language reinforces this structural reading. The pairing of “prince and servant” or “master and slave” does not multiply targets; it insists on completeness. The point is not vengeance against individuals, but the collapse of authority across its entire hierarchy once its centre has failed. What falls is not merely a ruler, but the system that depended upon him.

Judith’s words thus function less as persuasion than as prophecy – not prediction in a mystical sense, but articulation of what must follow when domination replaces law. Such speech does not cause harm; it names what illegitimate power has already earned. The decisive act that follows does not correct authority; it renders authority unable to continue.

Equally important is the manner of that act. Judith does not invoke strength against strength. Her prayer explicitly emphasises the weakness of the hand that will act – “by the hand of a woman,” more precisely, by the hand of a female, a widow, someone rendered politically negligible. The emphasis is not on feminine power, but on deliberate powerlessness. The act humiliates domination precisely because it comes from what domination has dismissed. Power is undone not by being matched, but by being overthrown by what it refused to count.

Judith belongs to a wider biblical genealogy of women who practice deception not against justice, but on its behalf. Rebekah deceives Isaac to secure the covenantal line because patriarchal procedure has become arbitrary rather than lawful. Tamar disguises herself because Judah’s legal authority withholds what the law itself requires. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah lie to Pharaoh because compliance would make them instruments of genocide. Rahab deceives the king of Jericho because military sovereignty has already foreclosed moral appeal. Jael violates hospitality norms because the general who seeks refuge has weaponised power beyond redress.

What unites these women is not cunning, but diagnosis. Each recognises that the authority confronting them is illegitimate not in name, but in operation. Law still exists, but it no longer serves justice; speech still circulates, but it no longer reaches judgment. In such circumstances, truth cannot travel directly. It must be carried sideways, hidden long enough to reach a forum capable of receiving it.

This reframes biblical deceit entirely. It is not an ethical exception granted under pressure, nor a lapse from moral clarity. It is a response to a specific failure of jurisdiction. When authority demands truth while simultaneously guaranteeing its destruction, the ethical failure lies not with the deceiver, but with the system that has made deception necessary.

Judith’s prayer therefore articulates a principle that remains urgently relevant: when authority has collapsed into domination, the moral task is not to speak louder, but to act elsewhere. Justice does not require strength answering strength, nor numbers answering numbers. It survives instead through careful misdirection, through weakness that cannot be absorbed, through acts that end violence without reproducing its logic.

In this light, biblical deceit is not a celebration of falsehood. It is an indictment of power that has made truth impossible to speak without annihilation. Judith does not triumph because she lies; she triumphs because she understands that justice sometimes survives only by refusing to present itself for execution.

Prayer (After Judith)

Teach us the sideways path,
when the straight word is a cliff-edge,
and the path called “honest”
leads only to the mouth of ruin.

There are hours
when truth stands unclothed before power,
and power calls that nakedness consent.
In such hours,
grant us the steady hand of the unregarded.

Grant us the divided lip
and the undivided heart.
Give us the word that is false in the mouth
but true in the marrow –
the speech that travels under another name
to arrive where it is needed.

Let us use the untrue rightly,
as one uses iron:
knowing its weight,
knowing its edge,
knowing it must never be mistaken
for the hand that bears it,
nor for the will that guides it.

Let power hear only what it expects,
and in that hearing, trust.
Let it rest upon its own confidence
until it is taken
by the gravity of its own pride.

This is no prayer for purity.
It is a prayer for the firmness
to walk the crooked way
without becoming crooked;
to wear the mask
without becoming the mask.

And when the work is finished,
let the falsehood fall away –
a tool returned to the earth,
leaving the ground clear
for what was always intended
to stand.



This post is part of Kate Coldrick’s wider body of writing. More of her work can be found at katecoldrick.com