The Mountains Moved by Wrath, Not by Faith
Old Testament: Judith 16:17-18
Let all thy creatures serve thee: because thou hast spoken, and they were made: thou didst send forth thy spirit, and they were created, and there is no one that can resist thy voice. The mountains shall be moved from the foundations with the waters: the rocks shall melt as wax before thy face.
New Testament: Apocalypse 6:14-16
And the heaven departed as a book folded up: and every mountain, and the islands were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the princes, and tribunes, and the rich, and the strong, and every bondman, and every freeman, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of mountains: And they say to the mountains and the rocks: Fall upon us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth upon the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.
The connection
Judith's canticle names the same mountain-moving voice that answers faith elsewhere in Scripture, but here the mountains move because no one can resist the Lord's voice, not because someone asked in trust. The Apocalypse shows this exact power turned loose at the end: mountains and islands moved out of their places, and instead of the disciples' calm, this world's kings and mighty men run to the very mountains for shelter and beg them to fall and hide them. The same divine strength that faith may ask to move a mountain on its behalf is, refused and unasked, still moving mountains anyway, only now against those who refused it.
Moral sense
The choice is never whether the mountain moves, God's voice cannot be resisted either way, but whether a soul asks that power in faith beforehand or meets it unasked as terror at the end.
Anagogical sense
Judith's hymn of what God can do to His enemies previews its own fulfilment in the Apocalypse: the same voice that no creature can resist will one day move every mountain, and there will be no rock left to hide behind.
Warrant
Apocalypse 6:14-16 does not cite, name, or quote Judith 16:17-18. The pairing rests on shared imagery of mountains moved by God's unresisted power. Checked in the Greek, which took some doing: the Douay Judith follows the Vulgate, whose chapter 16 runs three verses behind the Greek, so Douay 16:17-18 is Greek 16:14-15. Read against the right verses, three nouns are shared and they are the three the entry turns on: ore, petrai and prosopon at Judith 16:15 in the Greek, the mountains shaken from their foundations and the rocks melting like wax before Thy face, and oros, petra and prosopon again at Apocalypse 6:14-16, where the mountains are moved and men ask the rocks to hide them from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne. The Apocalypse names no earlier text, so the tier stands.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 678.
The verses
Judith 16:17 · Judith 16:18 · Apocalypse 6:14 · Apocalypse 6:15 · Apocalypse 6:16
