Fun with Assumptions

The title of the article immediately caught my eye – The Bible’s Anachronistic Camel Problem.  I mean, how can you resist a title like that?  Doesn’t it just grab you and refuse to let you go?  

Welcome to my world.

Not surprisingly, the article posits a problem with the Biblical Old Testament narratives in Genesis and beyond that refer to domesticated camels.  More accurately, the article summarizes this article, reporting the problem that archaeologists haven’t discovered definite proof of camel domestication as early in the Levant (a historical term for the Middle East) during that time frame.  If we assume that the Patriarchs lived somewhere around 2000 BC or so, archaeology can only qualify camel domestication almost a thousand years later.

Further proof that the Bible is either wrong, or that early writings were edited and updated by later groups, resulting in anachronistic errors and unfactual additions.  Which means we can’t trust the Bible.

Or does it?  A few thoughts.  

First off, while I’m no archaeologist by a long shot, my understanding is that finding stuff is hard to do.  Meaning, it’s the exception rather than the rule to find stuff that was intentionally buried or preserved, and has remained buried or preserved for thousands of years.  The fickleness of natural events combined with the avarice of relic-hunters means that finding archaeological stuff is really a big deal.  Not very much stuff survives identifiably intact for thousands of years.  

So the first problem is the assumption that just because we haven’t found evidence of camel domestication from the period of the Patriarchs in the Levant, that there wasn’t, in fact, at least some domestication of camels.  

This problem leads into the second problem.  The second article states that camels are thought to have been in the Levant since perhaps 10,000 BC or earlier.  They’ve even apparently found archaeological evidence to support this.  But the assumption is that these earlier camel bones weren’t domesticated camels.  

So, we know camels were in the area long before the Patriarchs.  We’ve got evidence of this.  But still the reasonable assumption is that they weren’t domesticated until the earliest archaeological evidence proving this – 9000 years later or so?  This is the evidence that supposedly discredits Biblical authority?

Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to say: Hey, we know camels were in the area at the time.  We’ve found bones that are that old, but we haven’t found any direct evidence of their domestication.  But it seems odd that these animals would be running around wild without anybody attempting to domesticate them for thousands of years, doesn’t it?  We probably just haven’t found the evidence yet – and we might not.  That was a long time ago!  But it doesn’t require us to label the Biblical narrative a lie.

Just because you haven’t found corroborating evidence yet of something reported 4000 years ago doesn’t necessitate that the report be untrue.  Domestication could have been on a very small scale.  People m  This might even account for why the Bible would make mention of camels specifically in this capacity – it was unusual and a further demonstration of divine blessing through Abraham and his family.