Israeli archeologists’ discovery suggests the Bible is wrong about camels BY CAROL KURUVILLA / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

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Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University claim camels came to biblical lands centuries after the time of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph; scholars debate impact on historical accuracy of the Bible. New archeological evidence is throwing cold water on the biblical image of Abraham, Jacob and Joseph riding camels through the desert. A team of Israeli archaeologists has studied the oldest-known camel bones from this ancient period and the results are in — camels reportedly started plodding around the eastern Mediterranean region centuries after the Bible tells us they did.
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New archeological evidence is throwing cold water on the biblical image of Abraham, Jacob and Joseph riding camels through the desert.
A team of Israeli archaeologists has studied the oldest-known camel bones from this ancient period and the results are in — camels reportedly started plodding around the eastern Mediterranean region centuries after the Bible tells us they did.

After analyzing the facts from radioactive-carbon dating, Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University claim the domesticated animal arrived on the biblical scene near the 10th century B.C. Scholars believe Abraham lived at least six centuries before that, Time reports.
Some scholars took these anachronisms as proof that the Bible was written centuries after the events that they talk about. Stories about camels in the Bible “do not encapsulate memories from the second millennium,” said Noam Mizrahi, an Israeli biblical scholar, “but should be viewed as back-projections from a much later period.”

For the study, Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef dug through the remains of an ancient copper smelting camp in Israel’s Aravah Valley and in Jordan’s Wadi Finan. The bones they found deep under the ground belonged to wild animals that the ancients used to hunt for meat. The domesticated camels could be identified by signs in their leg bones that indicated they carried heavy packages.
The research suggests that camels were introduced to the region suddenly, perhaps as Egyptians traveled along the Mediterranean trade routes.

But Bible defenders claim that even though the findings challenge the ancient text’s time line, they do not detract from the overall spiritual message.
“If the biblical writers are not interested in the facts, but rather in getting a message across, then people of faith can concentrate, instead of trying to verify every last item in the Bible, on what the overall message of the story is, not whether it is historically true,” said Carol Meyers, a religion professor at Duke University.

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