Abraham And The Mystery of the Bible’s Phantom Camels

Once upon a time, Abraham owned a camel. According to the Book of Genesis, he owned lots of camels. The Bible says that Abraham, used domesticated camels.

Archaeologists Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University released a new study that dates the arrival of the domesticated camel in the eastern Mediterranean region to the 10th century B.C. at the earliest, based on radioactive-carbon techniques. Abraham, however, lived at least six centuries before then. The New York Times, in a story about the finding, announced, “There are too many camels in the Bible, out of time and out of place … these anachronisms are telling evidence that the Bible was written or edited long after the events it narrates and is not always reliable as verifiable history.” Behold, a mystery: the Case of the Bible's Phantom Camels.

The discovery is actually far from new. William Foxwell Albright, the leading American archeologist and biblical scholar, argued in the mid-1900s that camels were an anachronism. Historian Richard Bulliet of Columbia University explored the topic in his 1975 book, The Camel and the Wheel, and concluded that “the occasional mention of camels in patriarchal narratives does not mean that the domestic camels were common in the Holy Land at that period.” Biblical History 101 teaches that the texts themselves were often written centuries after the events they depict.

The new study again raises the age-old question of biblical accuracy. The phantom camels is just one of many historically jumbled references in the Bible. The Book of Genesis claims the Philistines, the traditional enemy of the Israelites, lived during Abraham's time. But historians date the Philistines' arrival to the eastern Mediterranean at about 1200 B.C., 400 years after Abraham was supposed to have lived, according to Carol Meyers, professor of religion at Duke University.

Then there's the case of the great earthquake in the prophetic Book of Zechariah. Geological evidence in archeological sites like Hazor and Gezer date it to the mid-8th century B.C. But the Book of Zechariah, written several hundred years later, uses the event to talk about what will happen at the end of time, notes Eric Meyers, director of Duke University’s Department of Religious Studies and Carol's husband.

These are simply chronological lies, the entire piece is an attempt to aggrandize Jews. The whole thing is bogus.