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bcuster
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Were they there? How would the archaeologists know? Maybe they are looking in the wrong places for bones? Not a faith-breaker at all.
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Arizona_Mike
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Faith1960
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Missian_Alyssa
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if you look in near by countries, you will find camels used by man as early as the Predynastic Period (5500 – 3100 BCE).
Also, their discoverly was that of a mining area where the loads would have been much heavier than personal items and a person.
Also, their discoverly was that of a mining area where the loads would have been much heavier than personal items and a person.
books.google.com/books?id=6lY9Q4vnrCEC&pg=PA310&dq=camels+egypt+domesticated&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UxsBU6qaNYqIygGLvIDwCQ&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=camels%20egypt%20domesticated&f=false
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Faith1960
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So domesticated camels were nearby the region we’re asking about?
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Faith1960
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Ok never mind. The credentials are poor and the camels were likely not fully domesticated.
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Missian_Alyssa
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Yes, the countries surrounding Israel had domesticated camels even before the time of Abraham. If you look at a map, those countries would travel through parts of Israel to get to one another. My second point, is the wear and tear on the bones was due to heavier than normal loads from mining. Camels that were used for much lighter loads would not be as worn out. One need only look at reference books to find bones of domesticated camels in the region.
see pictures on these pages too.
biblearchaeology.org/post/2009/02/19/Patriarchal-Wealth-and-Early-Domestication-of-the-Camel.aspx
biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/daily-life-and-practice/camel-domestication-history-challenges-biblical-narrative/
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aragonjohn1
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also some of their owners who ( - s8int.com/WordPress/tag/egypt/ )were ( - s8int.com/phile/sophis43.html )giants
giant camels were news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/05/giant-ancient-camel-remains-discovered-in-canadian-arctic/also discovered recently.God bless
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Darryl1958
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The nature of the evidence is to examine archeological sites from various time periods in the region in question and notice the presence or absence of indications of domestication of camels over time. If there are no evidence of camels in any of the sites of one time period, and then suddenly all the camp sites of another time period have evidence of camels, then that is an indication that camels came into widespread use at that time.
This is the same kind of evidence that is used for pig bones. There is evidence that throughout the region at one time, there were pig bones, representing an unrestricted diet. Then, at a certain time, at certain sites but not others, there is an absence of pig bones, but the different sites otherwise remain culturally undifferentiated as before(eg same pottery, etc). This is an indication that certain subsets of the greater population are separating themselves through diet. It is an indication of how that religio-cultural behavior developed.
To me, it does seem to be a stretch to conclude that Abraham would not have used camels, on the basis of the fact that camels had not been domesticated in the Levant at that time. Abraham was not from the Levant after all, and was mainly a sojourner through the area in his nomadic wanderings from as far east as Iran right into Africa.
There are a variety of reasons why the preponderance of researchers have come to believe in a later date for the final compilation of Genesis into a form very similar to the one that has been passed on down to us, and the idea that Genesis describes the cultural patterns of the Israelite kingdom more than it describes the cultural of the Levant in earlier centuries is but one of those reasons. Anti-literalists push hard in the one direction, and literalists counter just as hard in the opposite direction.
It is a matter of interest for me, but otherwise not really my fight. Camels are coincidental to the worth of the Genesis accounts, which transcend the peculiarities of a particular culture in a particular space and time, and speak to the human condition itself, which is universal. Of course, the more that we understand the particular cultural milieu in which the Biblical stories were written, the more that we will be able to understand the stories themselves. It is not just academic therefore for anyone who has a theological interest in the Bible to want to work with the best information possible as we delve into these stories.
This is the same kind of evidence that is used for pig bones. There is evidence that throughout the region at one time, there were pig bones, representing an unrestricted diet. Then, at a certain time, at certain sites but not others, there is an absence of pig bones, but the different sites otherwise remain culturally undifferentiated as before(eg same pottery, etc). This is an indication that certain subsets of the greater population are separating themselves through diet. It is an indication of how that religio-cultural behavior developed.
To me, it does seem to be a stretch to conclude that Abraham would not have used camels, on the basis of the fact that camels had not been domesticated in the Levant at that time. Abraham was not from the Levant after all, and was mainly a sojourner through the area in his nomadic wanderings from as far east as Iran right into Africa.
There are a variety of reasons why the preponderance of researchers have come to believe in a later date for the final compilation of Genesis into a form very similar to the one that has been passed on down to us, and the idea that Genesis describes the cultural patterns of the Israelite kingdom more than it describes the cultural of the Levant in earlier centuries is but one of those reasons. Anti-literalists push hard in the one direction, and literalists counter just as hard in the opposite direction.
It is a matter of interest for me, but otherwise not really my fight. Camels are coincidental to the worth of the Genesis accounts, which transcend the peculiarities of a particular culture in a particular space and time, and speak to the human condition itself, which is universal. Of course, the more that we understand the particular cultural milieu in which the Biblical stories were written, the more that we will be able to understand the stories themselves. It is not just academic therefore for anyone who has a theological interest in the Bible to want to work with the best information possible as we delve into these stories.
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pnewton
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While it is absolutely acceptable to believe in such a date, I can not help but note that the rise of many of these theories corresponds with the rise of modernism (as in the heresy) and I have read a lot of proponents of these theories use modernism as a basis for their beliefs. The biggest problem is a rationalism that deliberately rejects both any supernatural explanation and any traditional understanding.
In our pride, we think that now we can understand truth better without reference to God and the understanding that truth is a revelation as well as an understanding. From the Syllabus of Errors (FYI - these are* errors *inherent in modernism):
- Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the welfare of men and of nations.
I am all form modern biblical scholarship. However, I think it best be taken with a grain of salt. One hundred years from now, I am sure much of what we have reasoned to be true will be found wrong or incomplete. We have not “arrived”.
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Peter_Plato
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Form criticism and the metaphysical assumptions underlying it are gradually being overturned by a new generation of Biblical scholarship. Richard Bauckham is one who has done a great deal of work on establishing the credibility of the idea of reliable transmission of eyewitness accounts through a traceable sequence. His book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is a powerful antidote to mythology claims and the Jesus Seminar type of scholarship.
N.T. Wright is another excellent scholar who effectively dismantles the “historical Jesus” claims of the Jesus Seminar in this article.
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Arizona_Mike
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If there is a conflict between two possibilities, both with evidence to support them - one that supports an ancient text, and one that contradicts it - why is it so often the default position for you, and for people who share your views, to support the one that contradicts the ancient text?
Do you really believe the scientist who wrote the original text qualified to be seen as another “Galileo” or a “great mind”?
If I see a research study as what it is - a claim that contradicts not simply an ancient text (and not one that makes any particularly miraculous claims, in this instance), as well as the existing evidence of archaeology, and which furthermore entertains a logical fallacy of claiming that absence of evidence must mean the evidence of absence - that we are all of us really, really - wait for it - really in trouble?
We are in a world where the Ukraine is in flames, where thousands of developing humans are dismembered and scraped out of their mothers’ wombs, where Christians are being murdered and sacred sites are being destroyed in the middle east. where rioting is expanding in Venezuela, where Belgium has just legalized the euthanasia of children - and our big concern should be that treating a researcher’s claims on camel bones as the junk science it appears to be, means that we are in really, really, REALLY big trouble?
Seriously?
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Arizona_Mike
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Sorry, forgot to answer your question.
No, the representations go back much further than that - about 3150 B.C., if not earlier.
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Peter_Plato
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It is not clear to me, at least, that this evidence is at all solid.
As a journalist you ought to be able to decipher and distinguish between claims that are solid and those which are very tenuous, at best.
Look closely at the following paragraph from the article, especially the bold-faced portions.
The archeologists are speaking of the 800 to 1000 years from the time of Abraham to the time of David, just decades prior to the carbon dated camel bones. Obviously, if those extant camel bones had shown definite signs of domestication, then the actual process of domestication must have been occurring for at least several hundred years.
Furthermore, evidence also shows wild camels in the region for perhaps thousands of years prior to the dated bones. Evidence from other regions shows domestication of dromedary camels in Arabia had been occurring for several thousand years prior to this time. Given the migratory use of camels, the fact that they have not been found in one location says little about whether they would have been available on a more transient basis.
All of this amounts to a claim issue. Merely because carbon dated domesticated camel bones have not been found in the region does not logically entail they were not or could not have been used in the area. Nor does evidence that they were not widely used entail that Abraham could not have been an exception in the region given that he travelled widely and seemed particularly well-endowed, livestock-wise.
I don’t know who you have been reading, but details “both small and big” have NOT been established to have been chronologically or historically false. There are contentious facts, no doubt, but these have not been definitively confirmed either way by anything nearing certitude.
No one is arguing that every word written in Scripture needs to be literally correct, but factual claims that are not factually correct are, indeed, problematic, whether or not you see it that way.
I am not clear what you mean by “faith,” but my faith does indeed depend upon the “truth” of matters that have truth claims that surround them. Otherwise, we fall into some form of “subjective” confidence as the basis for faith, which then leads down the road of relativism and whatever you believe is as valid as any other set of beliefs.
My guess is that is, precisely, where you would like this to go. No religious beliefs are any more or less correct than any others, therefore feel free to “have faith” in whatever appeals to you.
I would rather stand or fall with evidence - but evidence that is indubitable, not merely apparent.
As a “journalist,” you, of all people, should understand the value of truth and where claims are made that are beyond what the evidence warrants. The fact that you can “let slide” an obviously deficient claim as if it established definitively what the authors claim, when in fact it does not, puts into question your credentials as a journalist. What other perspectives or issue claims have you accepted as definitive when the justification just wasn’t there?
We have gone through approximately a hundred years of Biblical scholarship that has accepted as “gospel” a method (form criticism) that has mislead generations of academics and thinkers into accepting very tenuous claims about the reliability of Scripture. Merely for the sake of good scholarship, all claims, especially those that attempt to draw definitive conclusions, should be viewed with a reasoned and diligent degree of skepticism. You, again as a journalist of credit, ought to be one of the first to see things this way.
Regarding your claims about the reliability of the New Testament, I strongly suggest you do some real research into the matter, paying special note of the case for the reliability of the New Testament put forth by Richard Bauckham in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.
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pnewton
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Understand that I question the premise here, of things that are not historically possible. Too many of the “impossibilities” are based on similar flimsy logic. A few hundred acres of archeological excavations out of millions of square miles of land do not reveal camel bones. If there was ever a situation where absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, it is in this very situation. Any unbiased scientist would know better. It is like me looking out the door, noting there are no Asian-Americans, then concluding no Asian-Americans exist in my state. It is a totally illogical and unfounded conclusion that was reached.
BTW - Baby camels come from mommy and daddy camels. Any bones found will not be the oldest camels.
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