William McClure Thomson (31 December 1806 – 8 April 1894) was an American Protestant missionary who worked in Ottoman Syria.

In April 1834, Thomson was in Jaffa when a revolt broke out, and he was unable to return to Jerusalem until Ibrahim Pasha recaptured the city with 12,000 troops.

In August 1840, Thomson and other American missionaries were evacuated from Beirut by the USS Cyane, and witnessed the bombardment of the city by a coalition of British, Austrian, and Turkish naval forces under the command of Charles Napier.

In the United States, it was only outsold by "Uncle Tom's Cabin," an abolitionist novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, over the following 40 years.

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.

The naturalist Henry Baker Tristram, author of A Natural History of the Bible, used Thomson's book as his guide during his own exploration of Palestine.