Scripture · Psalm 5:3
Leviticus 16:22
The Scapegoat
The goat will carry on itself all their iniquities into a solitary place, and the man will release it into the wilderness.
The pale goat stands where almost nothing appears able to live. Hunt makes the departure described in Leviticus painfully concrete through salt, shallow water, scattered bones, and the animal’s lowered head.
What does The Scapegoat show?
The wide shore and distant mountains surround a single burdened animal. The red band on its horns and the bones at its feet punctuate a landscape otherwise emptied of people. Hunt studied the shore at the Dead Sea in 1854, then completed the animal in Jerusalem. The large Lady Lever canvas differs from the Manchester version in both the goat’s color and its absence of a rainbow.
The journey did not produce the easy authority Hunt wanted. His memoir records the deaths of two goats before he painted the third. Critics subsequently struggled to connect the animal with the theology, sometimes treating it as an unusually intense animal picture. The frame’s scriptural texts help explain why its isolation was meant to carry more than a natural-history interest.
Featured in: William Holman Hunt’s Bible Paintings: A Goat, a Gun and The Light of the World
What does Leviticus 16:22 mean?
Leviticus 16:22 describes the living goat carrying Israel’s iniquities to a solitary place. The wider chapter locates this action within the Day of Atonement and distinguishes the animal sent away from the goat offered as a sin offering. The wilderness is the destination of removal, not an arbitrary dramatic backdrop.
The frame also associates the work with Isaiah 53:4, the suffering servant bearing griefs and sorrows. That juxtaposition invites a Christian interpretation in relation to Christ. Hunt’s contemporaries disagreed about how the goat should represent Him; the painting’s theological force was debated from the start rather than universally understood.
Leviticus 16:22 names the removal of sins that Hunt places in this desolate landscape; the frame’s Isaiah text opens a further Christian reading.
Sources
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight (LL 3623); oil on canvas, 86.5 × 139.8 cm.
William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. I (1905). The artist’s retrospective account; passages and page references recorded in the accompanying publication research.
Hunt’s Bible paintings: artwork history and sources. Researched manuscript and cited primary accounts; publication review October 15, 2026.
Also from Leviticus:The Scapegoat (smaller version)
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