Most of the research on the so-called "Orient" opened up for scholarly study following Napoleon's ill-fated 1798 expedition to Egypt has focused on the imperialist mentality of Orientalism as an academic discourse, most notably with the work of Edward Said. Absent from the discourse on Orientalist texts is the genre that was most widely read in 19th century Europe and America, specifically Holy Land travel texts that cited contemporary customs and manners of Arabs and other groups encountered as illustrations of Bible characters for popular consumption in Protestant churches. There is an extensive literature; Yehoshua Ben-Arieh has estimates that at least 2,000 individuals recorded their visits to Palestine alone between 1800 and 1870, before this area was under European control. While the majority of these authors reflected a Christian bias against the dominant religion of Islam in the Holy Land, most also viewed the current inhabitants as a kind of "ethnographic" window for Biblical interpretation, alongside the recent archaeological discoveries. This paper is concerned with the use of line drawings and lithographs as a visual framing for Bible custom illustrations. Specifically what customs were drawn, what geographical locations were most widely represented, and how do the captions and accompanying narrative text connote the relevance of the images for a Western Christian audience. Three major Protestant texts are examined in detail: William Thomson's "The Land and the Book" (first published in 1859), John Kitto’s "An Illustrated History of the Bible" (1871) and Henry J. Van-Lennep's "Bible Lands: Their Modern Customs and Manners Illustrative of Scripture" (1875). The goals of the paper are threefold. First, it is important to draw attention to a popular literary genre that has been virtually ignored in previous discussions of Orientalism, because the driving “Biblical” fascination in the Near East fueled reception of travel accounts in 19th century Protestant communities far more than limited circulation academic tomes. Second, illustrated texts of Biblical history and Natural History were best sellers in the 19th century, thus literally shaping the imagination of readers on the places and inhabitants of the region. Third, the “textual attitude” of many critics researching the intellectual history of Oriental and Biblical Studies has biased the record by sidelining the power inherent in visual images alongside narratives during the 19th century.