Holofernes

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Artemisia Gentileschi's painting Judith Beheading Holofernes.

Holofernes (Hebrew, הולופרנס) was an Assyrian http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=17479 invading general of Nebuchadnezzar, who appears in the deuterocanonical Book of Judith.

The Assyrian king Nebuchadrezzar dispatched his general Holofernes to take vengeance on the nations of the west who had withheld their assistance to his reign. Holofernes proceeds to attack Bethulia, a city (possibly Meselieh), which was close to surrender until it was saved by Judith, a beautiful Jewish widow. Judith entered the camp of Holofernes and ingratiated herself with him. Judith then beheaded Holofernes while he was drunk. She returned to Bethulia with the decapitated head, and the Jews subsequently defeated the attacking enemy. Many scholars believe that this story is fictional and thus Holofernes is considered to be a fictional character but not all scholars agree with this view.

The beheading of Holofernes by Judith was a subject for several works of art by such names as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Giorgione, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Caravaggio, Horace Vernet, Gustav Klimt, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Their story also inspired a medieval Old English poem, Mozart's opera Betulia Liberata, a play by Abraham Goldfaden, and an operetta by Jacob Pavlovitch Adler.

Holofernes is also the name of a character from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost.

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