The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt

When this painting was first exhibited in 1856 at the Royal Academy the response was mixed. Viewers appreciated the vivid and detailed depiction of the area of “Oosdoom” (Kharbet Usdum) by the Dead Sea—an inaccessible and inhospitable place of which no photographs yet existed—and the courage and endurance of the artist in exposing himself to multiple hazards there in order to paint the work ‘from life’.

There was much less appreciation of the typological symbolism employed. This was set out in very full programme notes presenting the Azazel (scapegoat) of the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16 as a type of Christ, with the text on the frame clearly linking the two figures via the ‘suffering servant’ of Isaiah 53.

Hunt’s goat, like Isaiah’s suffering servant, is full of pathos, cut off from the land of the living, spent, and near to death, thus evoking a Christ who ‘was despised and rejected’. He bears away the people’s sins signified by his scarlet headband (Isaiah 1:18), a symbol Hunt would apply directly to the figure of Christ in a later painting, The Shadow of Death. The outcome is atonement and new life, hinted at by the olive branch in the left foreground.

Yet neither public nor critics found the symbolism persuasive, and Hunt himself reflected in hindsight, ‘I had over-counted on the picture’s intelligibility’ (Hunt 1905: 108; Bronkhust 2006). It was certainly unprecedented in its iconography. More importantly, the New Testament does not exploit this Christological type, and the history of textual commentators attempting to do so has been fraught with theological problems (Lyonnet & Sabourin 1970).

Recent biblical scholarship has instead begun to explore the way Christ and the scapegoat figure appear as a pair in the Gospel narratives. In this vein, some have noted connections between the scapegoat and Barabbas evident in Matthew 27:16ff (Moscicke 2018). Others (e.g. Anstis: 2012) have pursued a more intriguing possibility offered by the events earlier in that chapter where Judas, doomed to carry blame throughout history, is dismissed from the Temple to face his demons alone in the social wilderness.