King Nebuchadnezzar of Assyria sent his general Holofernes to subdue the peoples who had refused him aid in an earlier war, and Holofernes's campaign brought him to Judea, where the Israelites of Bethulia refused to surrender^[3]. He besieged the city and cut off its water. Judith, a beautiful widow, devised her own plan: she entered the Assyrian camp, told Holofernes a story about her people's imminent downfall, and won his trust over several nights of prayer outside the camp. When Holofernes finally invited her to his tent and drank himself insensible, Judith beheaded him with his own sword and carried the head back to Bethulia in a bag, after which the leaderless Assyrian army was routed^[3][1]. In art the subject became a settled symbol of virtue's triumph over vice, painted by Donatello, Botticelli, Caravaggio and Gentileschi's own father Orazio, among many others, each choosing a different moment in the story to dramatise^[1].

Gentileschi's most famous treatments of the subject show the killing itself. Her first version, painted around 1612 to 1613 not long after the trial in which she was raped by Agostino Tassi and then subjected to torture during questioning, is held at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples; a second, more richly costumed version dated to 1620, with Judith dressed in gold and adorned with jewellery, is now in the Uffizi^[2][2]. Both differ from Caravaggio's earlier treatment of the same subject in giving equal physical force to both women: rather than a passive witness, Abra actively pins Holofernes down while Judith drives the blade through his neck, the two working together as if butchering meat rather than performing a single heroic gesture^[4]. These beheading scenes established the visual vocabulary, muscular arms, pushed-up sleeves, unflinching concentration, that Gentileschi carried into her quieter aftermath compositions.

Painters working in Caravaggio's circle developed a distinct type of Judith picture that shows not the beheading but its immediate aftermath, the two women alert to unseen danger as they prepare to leave the enemy camp. Gentileschi's own father, Orazio, painted more than one such aftermath composition, staging Judith and Abra listening and looking off canvas toward an implied threat beyond the picture's edge, a device that heightens suspense precisely by directing the viewer's attention outside the frame^[5]. This type of picture asks something different of its subject than the beheading scenes do: not physical exertion but nerve, the discipline of two women holding still and alert in the minutes after an act of violence, still inside hostile territory.