Racialism was an omnipresent factor in nineteenth-century intellectual life, and the study of religion proved no exception to the trend towards racialised explanation. Indeed, the Bible was grist to the racialist mill, a source book of evidence for the dispersion of races and the beginnings of racial divisions and patterns. The Old Testament, in particular, was plundered for insights into the problems of ethnology, with especial attention devoted to the racial significance of chapters 10 and 11 of Genesis. However, the impact of racialist analysis on biblical scholarship was even more profound. Ethnology was added to the subjects on which a thorough biblical scholar needed to be expert, alongside a knowledge of the geography, flora and fauna of the Middle East. Race began to assume a place in encyclopedias of biblical studies, without any suggestion of impropriety or incongruence.

The Holy Land, moreover, became a scene of racialist anthropology. In The races of the Old Testament (1891), the distinguished British Orientalist Archibald Sayce (1845–1933) set out to promote the infant science of ‘biblical ethnology’. Sayce, who was an ordained Anglican cleric as well as the holder of the Oxford professorship in Assyriology from 1891, had no doubts about the importance of applying ethnological methods to the study of the Old Testament: