No Place for Camels in Genesis

Apparently on that morning at the well, Rebecca did not originally offer to water camels after all.

According to a recent article in The New York Times, archaeologists at Tel Aviv University say they have found evidence that camels were not yet domesticated in Israel at the time of Abraham, but came much later, when our oral tradition was being committed to writing.

The finding supports the conclusion that our traditions were "reformulated in relatively late periods after camels had been integrated into the Near Eastern economic system," according to Dr. Noam Mizrahi, a professor of Hebrew culture studies at Tel Aviv University. Thus, claims Dr. Mizrahi, the over 20 descriptions of camels as pack animals in the early books of the Bible were as anachronistic as saying that "people in the MIddle Ages used semitrailers in order to transport goods from one European kingdom to another."

The evidence comes from two archaeologists who studied camel bones found in an ancient copper smelting camp in the Aravah Valley in Israel, and recently published their results.

Click here to read the full article from The New York Times.