Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, the leading figure in Danish Neo-Classicism, completed this early work the year he entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David in Paris. Like other artists of his era, he drew from Greco-Roman antiquity for this moralizing subject. The biblical theme might be said to foreshadow his later involvement with the Danish Jewish community and with his patron, the prominent Mendel Levin Nathanson, who worked for the civil rights of Danish Jews.