So the army of the Ammonites moved forward: It is strange to find the Ammonites moving out to capture the water supply, after the Moabites and Edomites had volunteered, but that’s what the text says. There is some textual basis in the Old Latin and Syriac for reading “Moabites” (Good News Translation) here, but there is no good reason for thinking it original. Moved forward may be rendered “marched into the valley” (Contemporary English Version).

They encamped as always means “they set up their tents.” The valley refers to the Jezreel Valley, also called Esdraelon (3.9).

Seized the water supply and the springs of the Israelites: Water supply and the springs is a phrase usually treated as two expressions meaning the same thing. Good News Translation combines the two expressions and probably gains clarity by doing so. One can speculate, however, that as strange as the author’s hold on history and geography seems at times to be, he probably knew living conditions in contemporary cities well, and he here may have been expressing a technical difference. The literal expression is “waters and springs/sources of waters,” which sounds even more redundant than in Revised Standard Version. But springs, the places where water actually flowed out of the porous limestone, had to be protected from sources of pollution (Pro 25.26). Sometimes structures were erected over them. Consequently water was often channeled away from the springs to a pond or ponds where water might collect and from which it might be gathered. Perhaps the writer is referring here to the ponds and to the springs themselves in the phrase “waters and sources of waters,” so an alternative translation model is “took control of the ponds and springs that supplied Bethulia with water.”

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.