She set up a tent for herself: For tent Good News Translation has “little shelter.” This is probably intended to be like the “booths” during the Festival of Booths (Good News Translation “Festival of Shelters”) of Lev 23.33-43 and Deut 16.13-15. In Neh 8.14-18 such booths or shelters were built on rooftops. The roof would probably be the most private part of the house. Roofs in the Hebrew culture were flat rather than peaked, and used for a variety of purposes. There was normally a stairway on the outside of the house leading up to the roof. Judith was able to set up a “small shelter” (Contemporary English Version) on the roof in order to live in it. So one may translate “She moved into a small shelter she had made on the roof of her house.”

Girded sackcloth about her loins and wore the garments of widowhood: For sackcloth see 4.10. About her loins means “around her waist.” Good News Translation adds “In her grief” to explain the function of the sackcloth, but it mistakenly omits the additional reference to the garments of her widowhood. Judith wore the sackcloth in addition to widow’s clothing. This is quite clear in 9.l, where she seems to be wearing it under her other clothes; there Good News Translation is clear that she is wearing another garment. At 10.3 she appears to be wearing sackcloth over her other clothes. These are incongruities inherent in the text, and the translator, as well as readers, will have to live with them. Moore suggests that the author may not have noticed them. An alternative translation model for this final sentence is:

• She wore clothes that showed that she was a widow, and underneath she wrapped sackcloth around her waist.

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Judith. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2001. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.