page_title: William McClure Thomson
section_title: The Land and the Book
hierarchical_section_title: William McClure Thomson / The Land and the Book
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece of W.M. Thomson's Land and the Book (1872) Bethlehem
context_page_description: William McClure Thomson was an American Protestant missionary working in Ottoman Syria. After spending 25 years in the area he published a best-selling description of what he had seen in his travels. He used his observations as a means of illustrating and illuminating passages from the Bible.
context_section_description: In 1859 Thomson published an account of his experiences entitled The Land and the Book. Aimed at the general public rather than academics or theologians it became very popular. In America over the next forty years it was only outsold by Uncle Tom's Cabin.
  The book is framed around a pilgrimage undertaken during 1857. Thomson is accompanied by an unnamed individual whose questions enable the author to recount his experiences and illustrate stories from the Bible. They set out from Beirut in January riding South to Sidon and Tyre from where they cut inland and arrived in Palestine via the Hula Valley. They visited Safad, Tiberias, Nazareth and Jenin before returning to the coast at Caesarea and South to Jaffa, Ashdod and Gaza. From Gaza they turned North via Bayt Jibrin, Hebron and Bethlehem ending the journey in Jerusalem.
  In his book he gives lengthy accounts of two memorable events. He was one of the first outsiders to arrive at Safad following the devastating 1837 earthquake and in June 1839 he presided over the funeral of Lady Hester Stanhope.
  The naturalist Henry Baker Tristram, author of A Natural History of the Bible, used Thomson's book as his guide during his exploration of Palestine.
  At the turn of the century an English writer, H. Rider Haggard, covered a similar itinerary. When he landed at Haifa his party had difficulty hiring horses due to a nationwide shortage caused by the arrival of a party of 500 Americans on a tour of the Holy Land.
  Many of the illustrations in the book are by his son W.H. Thomson.
caption: Frontispiece from an 1872 edition of Land and the Book - Bethlehem.
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