Need your help gents and ladies! Identifying a painter, or the painting..

We get quite a few of these requests, but it's extremely unlikely that any of us will be able to help - there are millions upon millions of paintings out there, so many of them seem to be signed by an elephant wielding a yard-brush - wholly indecipherably - and it would be the purest luck if any one of us happened to have encountered these paintings before. In this case, the script could be Cyrillic, perhaps Russian or Greek; it could even be Hebrew (very unlikely).  And we are of course seeing it sideways on.   I have no idea what the subject matter is supposed to represent - it doesn't seem to conform to any particular genre, or refer to any known classical legend or myth.  It's a mystery.  An old painting, but frankly of dubious quality. Two suggestions: one, take it to an auction house specializing in older paintings, to discover if they've ever seen its like before; two, take it out of its frame and give the back of the painting and the stretcher bars a good look - sometimes, there's an auctioneer's mark, or a gallery's; occasionally the artist may even have left his name to be found there, possibly realizing that handwriting wasn't his strongest point.  

Ah - now that opens up a whole new area of possibilities - I know very little Hebrew, but that now seems much more likely.  Was in a church .... suggesting it's not a Jewish story or legend it represents; though who knows.....  is it perhaps a representation of the Devil?  Fascinating that there's the beginnings of an older picture on the back - suggesting the painter was one of our struggling brethren, short of materials and the money to acquire them, since this isn't something you'd normally choose to do with an oil painting.   Perhaps an answer could be found by getting a Hebrew speaker to take a look at the signature - and perhaps a rabbi or Christian priest to look at the image; it doesn't at first sight look like a religious painting, but it clearly HAS a meaning, hidden within it somewhere - the real problem for me is working out what that meaning might be.  There's something distinctly sinister about the look on the male figure's face, don't you think? PS - I'd love to take a look at it, particularly to see how the painting is secured in the frame, e.g. whether it's a rigid panel, or a canvas.  All of these things tell us something.  But I assume you're rather a long way away from me - probably just as well, since I'd get wrapped up in the research and start to obsess over it........