Wooster, Ohio. Josephine Long Wishart Museum of Art. "Exhibition of Paintings of French, Italian, Dutch, Flemish and German Masters, lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art," October 20–December 15, 1944, unnumbered cat. (p. 12).

Palm Beach. Society of the Four Arts. "Portraits, Figures and Landscapes," January 12–February 4, 1951, no. 5.

Minneapolis. University Gallery, University of Minnesota. "Space in Painting," January 28–March 7, 1952, no catalogue?

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," September 18, 2007–January 6, 2008, no catalogue.

Albert Blankert. Johannes Vermeer van Delft, 1632–1675. Utrecht, 1975, p. 13, fig. 3 [English ed., "Vermeer of Delft," Oxford, 1978, p. 11, fig. 4].

Alfred Bader. The Bible through Dutch Eyes: From Genesis through the Apocrypha. Exh. cat., Milwaukee Art Center. Milwaukee, 1976, p. 102, fig. 23, under no. 46.

John Michael Montias. Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, 1982, p. 148, fig. 6, dates it to the 1630s.

Albert Blankert in Vermeer. Paris, 1986, p. 71, fig. 48 (color) [English ed., Rizzoli, New York, 1988], repeats Ref. Blankert 1975.

Michiel Plomp. "'Een merkwaardige verzameling Teekeningen' door Leonaert Bramer." Oud Holland 100, no. 2 (1986), p. 110 n. 5, under no. 14, compares it with a lost painting by Christiaen van Couwenbergh, "Historical Subject (Semiramis Commanding Her Husband's Death)" (known through a drawing by Bramer; Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

Peter C. Sutton. A Guide to Dutch Art in America. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1986, p. 180, calls it an "especially attractive, small-scale history painting".

Wolfgang C. Maier-Preusker. "Christiaen van Couwenbergh (1604–1667), Œuvre und Wandlungen eines holländischen Caravaggisten." Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 52 (1991), pp. 189, 235 n. 98, accepts Montias's dating to the 1630s [see Ref. 1982] and suggests that Van Couwenbergh borrowed the motif of the extended sceptre in his lost painting of Semiramis [see Ref. Plomp 1986] from the one in the MMA work.

Jane ten Brink Goldsmith et al. Leonaert Bramer, 1596–1674: Ingenious Painter and Draughtsman in Rome and Delft. Exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft. Zwolle, The Netherlands, 1994, p. 172, fig. 48a, under no. 48, discusses it in connection with another version of the subject by Bramer (St. Annen-Museum, Lübeck).

Walter Liedtke et al. Vermeer and the Delft School. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2001, pp. 65–66, fig. 68, dates it about 1640; compares it with the lost painting by Van Couwenbergh [see Ref. Plomp 1986] of about the same date, concluding that "the two painters were working along parallel lines" at this time.

Walter Liedtke. Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, vol. 1, pp. xi, 90–93, no. 21, colorpl. 21, fig. 17 (color detail), dates it to the 1640s.