Fabricated camel stories?

[Zzyzx]

.
"There are 21 references to [domesticated] camels in the first books of the Bible" (such as) "Genesis 24: 'Then the servant left, taking with him 10 of his master’s camels loaded with all kinds of good things from his master. He set out for Aram Naharaim and made his way to the town of Nahor. He made the camels kneel down near the well outside the town; it was towards evening, the time the women go out to draw water.'�

When are the characters of Genesis said to have lived? When were camels domesticated in the Middle East?

If camels were domesticated after the the events were said to have happened, the credibility of the story writers is challenged. Perhaps they lived long after Genesis times, after camel domestication, and simply wrote from their time perspective.

Two Israeli archaeozoologists have sifted through a site just north of modern Eilat looking for camel bones, which can be dated by radio carbon.

None of the domesticated camel bones they found date from earlier than around 930BC – about 1,500 years after the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are supposed to have taken place. Whoever put the camels into the story of Abraham and Isaac might as well have improved the story of Little Red Riding Hood by having her ride up to Granny’s in an SUV.

How can you tell whether a camel skeleton is from a wild or tamed animal? You look at the leg bones, and if they are thickened this shows they have been carrying unnaturally heavy loads, so they must have been domesticated. If you have a graveyard of camels, you can also see what proportion are males, and which are preferred for human uses because they can carry more.

All these considerations make it clear that camels were not domesticated anywhere in the region before 1000BC.

The history recounted in the Bible is a huge part of the mythology of modern Zionism. The idea of a promised land is based on narratives that assert with complete confidence stories that never actually happened.

(Emphasis added)

Of course, the Israeli archeologists may be mistaken and camels may have been domesticated earlier, so the stories may not have been fabricated. They did, however, actually study archeological evidence to reach a conclusion.

1) Is there sound reason to dispute or dismiss the archeologists findings based upon evidence to the contrary (other than the stories themselves)?

2) If the camel incidents were fabricated (less than literally true), does that cast doubt on truth and accuracy of the stories in Genesis?

[99percentatheism]

Writing for CNN's Belief Blog, Joel S. Baden, an associate professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School, says for those who believe the Bible to be fundamentally true, this is hardly going to change any minds.

"For those who believe it to be entirely false, this is surely not the most damning piece of evidence."

Are you saying that camels don't exist?

Camels in Genesis Prove Old Testament is 'Very Accurate,' Professor Claims as He Refutes Archaeologists' Findings
By Anugrah Kumar
February 16, 2014 | 12:29 pm
A professor of theology and Hebrew from Illinois has refuted the claims of Israeli archaeologists that camels could not have been used for transportation by Jewish patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob because the animals weren't domesticated in Israel until hundreds of years after they lived.
.
"There are 21 references to [domesticated] camels in the first books of the Bible" (such as) "Genesis 24: 'Then the servant left, taking with him 10 of his master’s camels loaded with all kinds of good things from his master. He set out for Aram Naharaim and made his way to the town of Nahor. He made the camels kneel down near the well outside the town; it was towards evening, the time the women go out to draw water.'�

When are the characters of Genesis said to have lived? When were camels domesticated in the Middle East?

If camels were domesticated after the the events were said to have happened, the credibility of the story writers is challenged. Perhaps they lived long after Genesis times, after camel domestication, and simply wrote from their time perspective.

Two Israeli archaeozoologists have sifted through a site just north of modern Eilat looking for camel bones, which can be dated by radio carbon.

None of the domesticated camel bones they found date from earlier than around 930BC – about 1,500 years after the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are supposed to have taken place. Whoever put the camels into the story of Abraham and Isaac might as well have improved the story of Little Red Riding Hood by having her ride up to Granny’s in an SUV.

How can you tell whether a camel skeleton is from a wild or tamed animal? You look at the leg bones, and if they are thickened this shows they have been carrying unnaturally heavy loads, so they must have been domesticated. If you have a graveyard of camels, you can also see what proportion are males, and which are preferred for human uses because they can carry more.

All these considerations make it clear that camels were not domesticated anywhere in the region before 1000BC.

The history recounted in the Bible is a huge part of the mythology of modern Zionism. The idea of a promised land is based on narratives that assert with complete confidence stories that never actually happened.

(Emphasis added)

Of course, the Israeli archeologists may be mistaken and camels may have been domesticated earlier, so the stories may not have been fabricated. They did, however, actually study archeological evidence to reach a conclusion.

1) Is there sound reason to dispute or dismiss the archeologists findings based upon evidence to the contrary (other than the stories themselves)?

2) If the camel incidents were fabricated (less than literally true), does that cast doubt on truth and accuracy of the stories in Genesis?

"What these archaeologists are doing… is when they read about somebody like Abraham having camels, they're saying, "Aha! The Bible is saying that camels were widespread in Palestine during this period of time, and there's no archaeological evidence for that," Dr. Andrew Steinmann of Concordia University-Chicago tells Issues, Etc., a Christian radio station.

Two archaeologists at Tel Aviv University, Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen, claimed earlier this month they have dated the earliest domesticated camels to the end of the 10th century BC. "In addition to challenging the Bible's historicity, this anachronism is direct proof that the text was compiled well after the events it describes," the university said in a statement.

Steinmann agrees there's no archaeological evidence for widespread use of camels in Palestine at this time, but adds that that's not what the Bible is saying.

Amy Hall, a staff with the Christian group Stand to Reason, has transcribed the professor's interview on her blog.

"What it is showing is that somebody who originally came from Mesopotamia, like Abraham, he did have some camels," she quotes the professor as saying. "And then the other mentions of camels in Genesis and in the early part of the Bible have to do with either people related to Abraham that were living in the Arabian Desert (for instance, the Ishmaelites…have camels when they come and buy Joseph and take him down to Egypt), or other peoples like that, associated with the Arabian Desert-the Amalekites…who live on the edge of the Arabian Desert are mentioned a number of times having camels. But there's no mention of Israelites owning camels…."

Steinmann was also asked about the charge that the new archaeological finding is proof that "someone's been tampering with the text and unwittingly gave themselves away by putting camels in Abraham's possession."

On the contrary, the findings show that Old Testament accounts are "very accurate," the professor responds. "Because they confine it to people from Mesopotamia or the Arabian Peninsula. If this person was going to give himself away, you would expect [to see] him depicting the Canaanites having camels, or people like that. But he doesn't say the Canaanites or the Phoenicians are making extensive use of camels."

Some other scholars are responding to the findings by defending the Old Testament in their own ways.

Noam Mizrahi, a professor of Hebrew culture studies at Tel Aviv University, tells The New York Times one must not rush to the conclusion that the findings automatically deny any historical value from the biblical stories. "Rather, they established that these traditions were indeed reformulated in relatively late periods after camels had been integrated into the Near Eastern economic system. But this does not mean that these very traditions cannot capture other details that have an older historical background."

Writing for CNN's Belief Blog, Joel S. Baden, an associate professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School, says for those who believe the Bible to be fundamentally true, this is hardly going to change any minds. "For those who believe it to be entirely false, this is surely not the most damning piece of evidence."

The presence of these camels in the story highlights "the essential humanity of the biblical writers: like the best authors, they simply wrote about what they knew," adds Baden, author of The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero. "The biblical authors simply transplanted the nomadic standards of their time into the distant past."

- http://m.christianpost.com/news/camels- ... gs-114678/

[Zzyzx]

Are you saying that camels don't exist?

Are you serious? Nothing like that has been stated or implied.

The issue is when camels were domesticated (meaning: "trained to live or work for humans'). If stories contain reference to domesticated camels before the animals were domesticated, there is reason to doubt the truth and accuracy of the stories. Wild, un-domesticated, camels would not fit the stories.

[cnorman18]

For one who wishes to read the Bible as literally and historically true in every detail, this research is indeed a problem (though I would point out that it is hardly news; I recall reading many years ago that it was very doubtful indeed that camels had been domesticated by Abraham's time).

But for one who understands that the Hebrew Bible is literature and oral tradition, as opposed to scientific or historical treatise, it's a bit of trivia. Anachronism is common, even expected, where legends are concerned. Notice the medieval paintings of Biblical events that show Moses and David and even Jesus dressed in 12th- and 14th-century European garb. People of later generations passing down the tales of Abraham would have assumed that camels were as common in his times as in their own, and the "discrepancy" calls for no more explanation than that.

As I have said so many times on this forum -- there is a LOT of ground between "The Bible is historically, literally true and accurate" and "The Bible is totally fabricated fiction and fable." The two dominant camps here seem to have staked out those territories as the only possible alternatives, though, ignoring the fact that they constitute one of the oldest false dichotomies going. Jews of the first century CE did not read the Blble as literal history, and neither did the medieval and pre-medieval Fathers of the Church. That approach to the Bible, as a dogmatic given, is a relatively recent phenomenon in Christianity, and I find it astonishing that so many -- Christians and non-Christians alike -- seem to buy into the falsehood that it is the only "truly Christian" approach to that compilation of ancient literature.

I do understand why my friend Zzyzx so often addresses the fundamentalist contingent here; but I feel compelled, now and then, to point out that not all "theists" (a term I detest, since it IS so conducive to stereotyping) take that bizarre, self-contradictory and counterproductive approach to Scripture. As my own rabbi says: "If you want to demean and devalue the Bible, read it literally."

Oh, and note my signature as well.

[Overcomer]

99percentatheism quoted Andrew Steinmann as follows:

"What these archaeologists are doing… is when they read about somebody like Abraham having camels, they're saying, "Aha! The Bible is saying that camels were widespread in Palestine during this period of time, and there's no archaeological evidence for that," Dr. Andrew Steinmann of Concordia University-Chicago tells Issues, Etc., a Christian radio station.

I heard that interview. As Steinmann noted, we have to look at who was using the camels and where they came from. We have archaeological evidence that there were domesticated camels in Mesopotamia at the time of Abraham as this quotation indicates:

"A bronze figurine of a man on a crouching camel, was found at Nineveh, in Mesopotamia. Camels had been domesticated by the middle of the second millennium BC, and it is likely that they expanded the possibility of long-distance trade across the dry regions that border Mesopotamia." From the Old World Civilizations--the Rise of Cities and States, Goran Burenhult, gen. ed. Harper/American Museum of Natural History: 1994.

Where did Abraham come from? Mesopotamia. Might he have brought some camels with him? It would seem quite likely. So it isn't a problem that Abraham had them. And it certainly wouldn't be odd for members of his family, living in the Arabian Desert (the Ishmaelites, for example), to have them, too.

For me, it would be a problem if the Bible recorded everybody in the whole region having hordes of camels. The Bible doesn't indicate that and there is, currently, no archaeological evidence elsewhere that suggests camels were in common use there. However, for someone coming from a land where camels were commonly used, it doesn't seem odd to me that they brought some with them. And there would be a lot of traffic going from Arabia to Egypt and back again, some of it involving camels, so they wouldn't be unknown in the region.

The most renowned work on camels in the Ancient Near East is Richard Bulliet's The Camel and the Wheel. Bulliet is a history professor at Columbia. He states that, while there was no widespread use of camels in Palestine in the period of the patriarchs, it is a huge leap to assume there was NO use of camels by somebody there. He asserts that archaeological evidence points to camels being domesticated long before 1100 B.C. He presents the following as evidence:

1. A 3.5 ft cord of camel hair from Egypt, dated around 2500 BC. Buillet believes it is "from the land of Punt, perhaps the possession of a slave or captive, and from a domestic camel"

2. The bronze figurine from the temple of Byblos in Lebanon. It is in a foundation with strong Egyptian flavoring, and is dated before the sixth Egyptian dynasty (before 2182 BC). Although the figure could be taken as a sheep, the figure is arranged with items that would strongly require it to be a camel (e.g., a camel saddle, camel muzzle, etc.)

3. Two pots of Egyptian provenance were found in Greece and Crete, both dating 1800-1400 BC, but both in area so far removed from the range of the camel as to suggest its presence in the intermediate areas (e.g., Syria or Egypt) during an earlier time. Both have camels represented, and one literally has humans riding on a camel back.

4. A final piece of strong evidence is textual from Alalakh in Syria, as opposed to archaeological: a textual ration-list. There is a entry for 'camel fodder' written in Old Babylonian. "Not only does this attest the existence of camels in northern Syria at this time, but the animal involved is clearly domestic."

From The Camel and the Wheel, pp. 60 -64.

Another Ancient Near East scholar, Kenneth Kitchen, suggests that the fourth item mentioned about is under dispute, but says this:

"While a possible reference to camels in a fodder-list from Alalakh (c. eighteenth century BC) has been disputed, the great Mesopotamian lexical lists that originated in the Old Babylonian period show a knowledge of the camel c. 2000/17000 BC, including its domestication. Furthermore, a Sumerian text from Nippur from the same early period gives clear evidence of domestication of the camel by then, by its allusions to camel's milk...For the early and middle second millennium BC, only limited use is presupposed by either the biblical or external evidence until the twelfth century BC. "

There isn't a lot of evidence to work with, of course, but what we do have indicates that the Biblical mention of camels in Abraham's day is not an anachronism.

[Donray]

[Replying to post 4 by cnorman18]



Could you point out what parts of the bible are just made up stories?

[Haven]

I agree with 99percent here -- camels were domesticated in Central Asia earlier than they were in Palestine (around 2,000 BCE in Iran, and 930 BCE in Palestine), and so it is possible, if not necessarily likely, that any historical Abraham (assuming he was from Central Asia) would have had camels.

However, there are many other reasons to doubt the Abraham story, and there is no physical or extra-biblical textual evidence that Abraham actually existed.