William Holman Hunt became obsessed with Egypt, Palestine and the land of Israel in his early career, which led to this version of The Scapegoat.

His continuing fascination became a central point of reflection for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), which he formed with John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner. Yet another Rossetti, Christina, a great poet, also made reference in her work to the Biblical scapegoat, often invoked by theologians as an analogy for Christian martyrdom. She wrote, just before Hunt left for the Levant, north of Egypt (which she called the "land of Cheops"):

"The P.R.B. is in its decadence…

And Hunt is yearning for the land of Cheops…

So rivers merge in the perpetual sea;

So luscious fruit must fall when over-ripe;

And so the consummated P.R.B."

Ouch! If she were around today, she would dominate in a freestyle battle. Maybe Hunt just wanted some good Levantine food,  sunshine, and tourist attractions, but he wrapped his adventure up fulfilling his missionary ambitions trying to convert Jews by appealing to the Torah. Historically, efforts of conversion have been a violent affair. To his credit, the sensitive Hunt thought that he could convert Jewish people simply by studying the Torah and drawing analogies to the Christian scriptures. "I am sanguine," Hunt wrote to Millais, "that [The Scapegoat] may be a means of leading any reflecting Jew to see a reference to the Messiah as he was, and not as they understand, a temporal King."

The work is an explicit reference to the sacred day of  repentance, Yom Kippur, described in the Babylonian Talmud and the Book of Leviticus, and Hunt waited until the season of Yom Kippur to compose it. It was his second try at the theme, which he'd begun at the Western edge of the Dead Sea with a painting of a black goat with a rainbow over it, now maintained by Manchester City Art Galleries.

"Meant to signify both a Satanic and a sacred purpose," writes Ellen Spolsky, "the image as painted offers no signs of redemption," although the "solitary landscape" anticipates works by Salvador Dalí and Georgia O'Keeffe. The work was not a success, mostly because his clientele weren't familiar with either the written or oral Torahs. "I wanted a nice religious picture," grumbled Hunt's dealer, "and he painted me a great goat."

This work was donated by "Soap King" Lord Leverhulme, whose name put the lever in the British consumer goods company Unilever. The Soap King saw a rival soap company buying the painting Bubbles by Millais to hawk their suds, and Leverhulme took it a step further, founding an art gallery named for his wife, Lady Elizabeth Ellen Hulme, which is where The Scapegoat hangs.