[1] In the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue Hunt wrote that "the scene was painted at Sodom, on the margin of the salt-encrusted shallows of the Dead Sea.

[2] The painting was the only major work completed by Hunt during his first trip to the Holy Land, to which he had travelled after a crisis of religious faith.

Hunt intended to experience the actual locations of the Biblical narratives as a means to confront the relationship between faith and truth.

While in Jerusalem, Hunt had met Henry Wentworth Monk, a millenarian prophet who had distinctive theories about the meaning of the scapegoat and the proximity of the Last Judgement.

He wrote to his friend Millais, "I am sanguine that [the Scapegoat] may be a means of leading any reflecting Jew to see a reference to the Messiah as he was, and not as they understand, a temporal King.

In line with traditional Christian theology, Hunt believed that the scapegoat was a prototype for the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus, and that the goat represented that aspect of the Messiah described in Isaiah as a "suffering servant" of God.

Hunt had the picture framed with the quotations "Surely he hath borne our Griefs and carried our Sorrows; Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of GOD and afflicted."

And so the dealer was proved to be right, and I had over-counted on the picture's intelligibility.Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in a letter to William Allingham in 1856, called the painting "a grand thing, but not for the public".

Ernest Gambart, as related by Hunt, was less enthusiastic, and was later to remark: "I wanted a nice religious picture and he painted me a great goat.

"[5][6] The Art Journal in 1860, at the time of the exhibition of Hunt's later work The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, was to characterise the painting as "having disappointed even his warmest admirers".

[7] At the time of the exhibition of The Scapegoat itself, in 1856, The Art Journal questioned Hunt's eye for colour in the painting, casting doubt that the mountains of Edom, seen in the background, really were in actual appearance as painted – which Matthew Dennison, writing in The Spectator in 2008 described the Manchester version as "Day-Glo striations of lilac, crimson and egg-yolk yellow".