Hare, hyrax and hart: biblical natural history and hermeneutics in British expeditions to the Holy Land, 1863–1884

The history of science remembers Henry Baker Tristram (1822–1906) as an early adopter of Darwinism whose interests as a clergyman overtook his commitment to science following the 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce debate on evolution. Yet Tristram’s most notable contributions to natural history and to the relationship between religion and science came after the 1860 debate, through his research on the fauna of Ottoman Palestine and his founding role in the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). This article draws on published works and the unpublished correspondence of Tristram and his fellow naturalists of the PEF to shed much needed light on the history of natural history in the nineteenth-century Levant. Reproducing debates on the identity of biblical mammals – the ‘conies’ and ‘deer’ of the King James Bible – the article assesses the role of biblical natural history in late Victorian clerical and scientific debates. It argues that the primary target of Tristram’s Christian science was not Darwinism, but the ‘higher criticism’ of Bishop John Colenso (1814–1883). By applying contemporary zoology and philology toward the interpretation of scripture, Tristram and his colleagues defended the authorial authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the enduring relationship between Christianity and science. Despite the varied priorities of the PEF’s founders, the institution’s naturalists united to accurately identify biblical mammals in the contemporary fauna of Ottoman Palestine, thereby creating an evidentiary terrain on which Christian scripture was corroborated, and the relationship between Victorian science and religion was negotiated.