One argument that I have read or heard many times is that the patriarchal stories are anachronistic because they present people riding on camels (e.g., Genesis 24:61; 31:17), when camels were not domesticated during the time of the patriarchs, the second millennium B.C.E. I remember telling a conservative Christian friend of mine about this argument, and his response was, "How do scholars know this? Was there a video camera back then, showing the absence of camels?" A couple of years later, my friend told me of colleagues of ours who study the Hebrew Bible, and he said that they told him that there actually is evidence for domesticated camels in the second millennium B.C.E. When I talked with one of these colleagues, he referred me to a book by Kenneth Kitchen that made such an argument. These incidents made me wonder why scholars have said that there were no domesticated camels during the alleged time of the patriarchs, for I often heard or read people repeat this claim, without offering any basis.
In this post, I will give you a taste of some of the basis for the scholarly argument that domestic camels did not exist in the second millennium B.C.E., as well as the scholarly argument to the contrary. For those who want to research the issue further, I will post links that cite scholarly sources, as well as refer you to some of the sources that I'll use in writing this post.
I will start with a couple of quotations of Niels Peter Lemche, from page 149 of Early Israel:
"I have no intention of rehearsing this discussion, since its results are unambiguous. As the 'ship of the desert' the camel was a late arrival in Oriental history (even though it is possible that the two-humped variety may have been domesticated several thousand years earlier in Central Asia). It was first around 1000 that the taming of the single-humped camel (dromedary) was an accomplished fact in the Near East, even if it is reasonable, with R. Bulliet, to claim that this domestication must have taken place over a considerable period of time."
"Both Henninger and B. Brentjes...maintain, like A. Pohl, that the domestication of the camel by the Semites actually goes much further back, perhaps as far back as the 3rd or 4th millennium. However, arguments in favor of such a date are discounted by most historians. Of course, it is obvious that the camel existed in the Orient long before it was domesticated. However, in order to maintain that a given find indicates the presence of domesticated camels, skeletal remains would have to be present in such quantities and in particular age patterns so that we would then be in a position to state that the society in question had other uses for it than merely hunting it."
As you may notice in the second quote, one of the issues in the debate concerns the quantity and type of camel finds in the ancient Near East. Juris Zarins' article on the "Camel" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary states the following:
"Third-millennium B.C. camel remains from the S Levant are very rare. From Arad in an EB I context (ca. 2900 B.C.), a few bones have been found...and from Bir Resisim in the N Negev in an EB IV context (ca. 1900 B.C.), several fragments have been reported...It is unlikely that in both of these cases the remains represent domestic camels." Zarins acknowledges that the "domestic camel was apparently known to the inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization by 2300 B.C." (and he mentions discovered hair and dung as things that led excavators to this conclusion), but he argues that "domesticated camels arrived en masse in N Arabia and the S Levant only by the latter part of the 2d millennium B.C." Zarin states that, in the Arabian Peninsula during 2200-1200 B.C.E., camels were not used for riding, but rather for milk. At the same time, Zarin says that, while "Camel remains from S Arabia...are not common[,] survey and excavation have been limited".
Why is Arabia so important to the discussion? Nahum Sarna states on page 96 of his Jewish Publication Society commentary on Genesis that the "original habitat of the camel seems to have been Arabia", so Zarins' assumption may be that, in the ancient Near East, the domestication of the camel started in Arabia and spread elsewhere, since Arabians were traveling traders.
I am a little confused by Zarins' argument. His point seems to be that there aren't many camel remains in Arabia from the alleged time of the patriarchs, and yet he says that there are "several fragments" in part of the Northern Negev around 1900 B.C.E. I suppose they're not the right kind of fragments.
But let's turn to another issue in the debate: textual and artistic evidence. On this, Zarins states the following:
"The earliest mention of the camel as a domesticated animal occurs in the inscriptions of [Ashur]-bel-kala (1074-1057 B.C.) from Assyria. In an account dated to 1069 B.C., herds of camels are mentioned as if they are curiosities to the people of Assyria...It would appear then that the Assyrians were not familiar with domesticated camels much earlier than the late 2d millennium B.C."
Nahum Sarna also discusses the lack of textual and artistic evidence for the domestic camel in much of the second millennium:
"The camel does not figure in Egyptian texts and art until the Persian period. It is conspicuously absent from the published Mari texts from Mesopotamia, which are replete with information about pastoral nomadic groups and their way of life. Thousands of commercial and administrative texts from the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 1950-1530 B.C.E.) maintain complete silence on the existence of the animal. All available evidence points to the conclusion that the effective domestication of the camel as a widely used beast of burden did not take place before the twelfth century B.C.E., which is a long time after the patriarchal period."
So there are two arguments against the existence of a domestic camel in the ancient Near East throughout much of the second millennium B.C.E., the time of the patriarchs: the paucity of camel remains (or, perhaps more accurately, certain types of camel remains) in Arabia and (apparently according to Lemche) elsewhere in the ancient Near East, and the absence of references to domestic camels in ancient Near Eastern texts and art.
How have conservatives responded to these arguments? In my reading, I came across two conservative arguments for the historicity of the patriarchal narrative on camels:
The first argument is that the patriarchal narratives themselves are consistent with the evidence against the domestic camel in the second millennium B.C.E. Sarna states the following:
"The camel appears elsewhere [than Genesis 12:16] in the patriarchal narratives, but it is not the regular mode of transportation. Its use seems to be restricted to women. Abraham sets out for Mount Moriah on an ass; Simeon and Levi find asses, but not camels, among the loot of Shechem; Joseph's brothers mount asses to go down to Egypt to buy food; Joseph does not send camels to transport his father from Canaan, and there is no reference to camels among the animals sold to Joseph by the hard-pressed Egyptians in return for food...It cannot be denied, however, that mention of the camel in the Abrahamic and Jacob narrative is integral to the stories, at least in chapters 24 and 31, and cannot be the work of a late glossator. On the other hand, to regard these narratives as anachronistically late productions from a time when the camel was already widely used is to leave unexplained why that beast, which figures so infrequently in biblical historiography, should have been put into the patriarchal stories, while the horse, which figures far more frequently, is totally absent."
So Sarna does not believe that the camels in the patriarchal narratives are an anachronism. How does he account for them, then? His solution is the following:
"Certain bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical texts from Mesopotamia equate a domesticated animal called 'a donkey-of-the-sea-land' with a dromedary, thus proving a knowledge of the latter in southern Mesopotamia in Old Babylonian times (ca. 2000-1700 B.C.E.). Moreover, the scribes knew to differentiate between the dromeday and the Bactrian camel, and a Sumerian text from that period mentions the drinking of camel's milk. The original habitat of the camel seems to have been Arabia. It is likely that the domesticated camel at first spread very slowly and long remained a rarity. A wealthy man might acquire a few as a prestige symbol for ornamental rather than utilitarian purposes. This would explain their presence in Abraham's entourage, their nonuse as beasts of burden, and their special mention in situations where wealth and honor need to be displayed, as, for instance, in Genesis 24."
Sarna's argument seems to be that, in the time of the patriarchs, there were a few domesticated camels, but they were not widespread, which would explain their absence from ancient Near Eastern texts and art from that period. Similarly, apologist Glenn Miller quotes scholar R.W. Bulliet (the emphases are Miller's; see here):
"The most satisfactory explanation of this circumstance is that the camel was known because it was brought into the area by traders carrying goods from southern Arabia but that it was not bred or herded in the area. It is worthy of note that whereas the citations from the Bible associating camels with Abraham and his immediate descendants seem to fit the generalized pattern of later camel use in the area, they could also fit a pattern in which camels were very uncommon. The largest number of animals mentioned in those episodes is ten, and those ten are probably most of what Abraham had since they were sent with his servant with the apparent intention of creating a sufficiently wealthy impression to entice the father of a woman of good family into letting his daughter cross the desert to marry Isaac. No man, incidentally, is described as riding a camel, only women, who seem to have perched atop camp goods instead of riding in an enclosed woman's traveling compartment as was later to be the norm."
So, for some conservatives, the lack of evidence for a domestic camel in the time of the patriarchs is actually consistent with the patriarchal narratives.
The second argument is that there is indeed textual and artistic evidence for a domestic camel in the second millennium B.C.E. In a sense, Sarna refers to some of that, in terms of Mesopotamian texts, but he does not present iron-clad proof that the camel was domesticated at that time---only that camels existed, and that the dromedary was similar to a domestic animal called a "donkey of the sea land". But Miller cites evidence that Boulliet mentions:
"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.)".
"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."
"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 norther Syria at this time, but the animal involved is clearly domestic.'"
Similarly, apologist Eric Lyons discusses textual and artistic evidence (see here):
"What makes their claims even more disturbing is that several pieces of evidence do exist (and have existed for some time) that prove camels were domesticated during (and even before) the time of Abraham (roughly 2,000 B.C.). In an article that appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies a half-century ago, professor Joseph Free listed several instances of Egyptian archaeological finds supporting the domestication of camels [NOTE: The dates given for the Egyptian dynasties are from Clayton, 2001, pp.14-68]. The earliest evidence comes from a pottery camel’s head and a terra cotta tablet with men riding on and leading camels. According to Free, these are both from predynastic Egypt (1944, pp. 189-190), which according to Clayton is roughly before 3150 B.C. Free also listed three clay camel heads and a limestone vessel in the form of camel lying down—all dated at the First Dynasty of Egypt (3050-2890 B.C.). He then mentioned several models of camels from the Fourth Dynasty (2613-2498 B.C.), and a petroglyph depicting a camel and a man dated at the Sixth Dynasty (2345-2184 B.C.). Such evidence has led one respected Egyptologist to conclude that “the extant evidence clearly indicates that the domestic camel was known [in Egypt—EL] by 3,000 B.C.”—long before Abraham’s time (Kitchen, 1980, 1:228)."
I'll stop here. I hope you enjoyed our journey through scholarship on the domestic camel in the patriarchal period!