William Robertson Smith (1846-94) was a highly influential and multifaceted Victorian scholar who played a key role in the development of social anthropology and is also considered one of the founders of the sociology of religion. In this book, reverend Smith's last and most ground-breaking work, the author seeks to define the very essence and nature of religious behaviour. He approaches the core social institutions of semitic religion through a combination of history, scriptural analysis and ethnography (based on his fieldwork among Arab tribes). The problems and themes he discusses remain central to social anthropology and sociology of religion until today.

Religion of the Semites probes deeply into the origin and evolution of semitic religions. This work had a profound impact on Smith's contemporaries -- and later influenced such diverse thinkers as Durkheim, Mauss, Hubert, Frazer, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, and Freud.