An American Biblical Orientalism

This book explores the writings of thee Americans evangelicals and their views of the people of the “Bible Lands” in the nineteenth century. David D. Grafton argues that their descriptions of the people impacted the way in which American Bible readers “orientalized” these peoples, fitting them into biblical categories as heroes or villains.

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An American Biblical Orientalism examines the life and work of Eli Smith, William McClure Thomson, and Edward Robinson and their descriptions of the “Bible Lands.” While there has been a great deal written about American travelogues to the Holy Lands, this book focuses on how these three prominent American Protestants described the indigenous peoples, and how those images were consumed by American Christians who had little direct experience with the “Bible Lands.” David D. Grafton argues that their publications (Biblical Researches, Later Biblical Researches, and The Land and the Book) profoundly impacted the way that American Protestants read and interpreted the Bible in the late nineteenth century. The descriptions and images of the people found their way into American Bible Dictionaries, Theological Dictionaries, and academic and religious circles of a growing bible readership in North America. Ultimately, the people of late Ottoman society (e.g. Jews, Christians and Muslims) were essentialized as the living characters of the Bible. These peoples were fit into categories as heroes or villains from biblical stories, and rarely seen as modern people in their own right. Thus, they were “orientalized,” in the words of Edward Said.