The World of Abraham

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Shortly after Abraham arrived in Canaan, the country was hit with a famine as it often was. He did what Semites had been doing for centuries, He went to Egypt. The Egyptians had always let nomads into the Nile delta to escape famine and several inscriptions attest to the fact that Egyptian kings and officials took pride in doing what was good for the people.
The inscription of Ameni testifies:
“There was no citizen's daughter whom I misused,
there was no widow whom I oppressed,
there was no [peasant (?)] whom I repulsed,
there was no shepherd whom I repelled”

   During the time of the Patriarchs and for centuries after Canaan was a vassal of Egypt. The Asiatics were treated as well as the Egyptians, with the exception of the “sand dwellers” from the eastern desert who seemed to give Egypt problems regularly. The Egyptians did not abhor shepherds as the Bible seems to indicate:
Genesis 46:34:

"That Ye shall say, Thy servants trade hath been about cattle
from our youth even until now, both we and also our fathers:
That Ye may dwell in the land of Goshen, for every shepherd is
 an abomination unto the Egyptian."

   The above Scripture may have been mistranslated or perhaps the Hebrew scribes misunderstood the Egyptians. There were Egyptian shepherds living in the Nile delta as well as central Egypt, although Egypt’s economy was based on agriculture. The Egyptians worshipped many animals, but they raised sheep for their wool. The Nile delta was the only place, in Egypt, where stock could be pastured. Farmers were forbidden by law to seize pasture land and plow it up. Farmers despised the law and thus the shepherds. The inscription of Ameni was referring to past times when it was necessary to regulate the number of Asiatics that were allowed into the Delta. That was usually at times when Egypt was experiencing a drought and food was not plentiful enough for the Egyptians and Canaanites both.

   There are several inscriptions attesting to Egyptian rulers and officials taking pride in letting Asiatics into Egypt “in order to keep alive their stock.”The only thing different about this time was that the King traded livestock for Abraham’s wife who had been introduced as His sister. The Bible tells us that among the stock were camels, which critics claim could not have been possible. At one time that was thought to be true but Archeologists have since proven it was very possible for Abraham to have owned camels. Images and figurines of domesticated camels have been found in Iran that date to 2400 bce, 400 years before the time of Abraham. The making of figurines would indicate the importance of camels at that time. The archaeologist Kenneth A Kitchen, has shown that camels were used as beasts of burden in Mesopotamia and Syria by 2000 bce. The Bactrian was domesticated independently from the Dromedary in Northern Iran, Afghanistan or Turkestan, sometime before 2500 bce, 500 years before Abraham was born. Some of the artifacts showing domesticated camels were:
A 3.5 ft cord of camel hair from Egypt, dated around 2500 BC.
A picture of a camel, with a rider on its back, from the ruins of Tall Halaf in Iraq, which dates back to between 3000 and 2900 BCE.
A bronze figurine from the temple of Byblos in Lebanon that is in a foundation with strong Egyptian flavoring, and is dated before the sixth Egyptian
Dynasty (before 2182 BC) While it’s true that the Egyptians saw gods in some wild animals the camel was not one of them. The Syrians didn’t worship animals and had no reason to make idols of any wild animal. Neither the Egyptians nor the Syrians bothered to make figurines of something that meant little to them.

   In Byblos, Lebanon, small Egyptian figurines of camels have been found that dates back to around 2500 bce. There are two carvings from Kilwa in Jabal Tubayq on the eastern boarder of Jordan. In one of the inscriptions the camel appears clearly in the background behind an ibex, and is of the same single humped variety known today as the Arabian camel. It was dated to the Stone Age. An eighteenth century B.C.E. Canophorin tablets in Northern Syria which list the domesticated animals and in which the camel is specifically mentioned. There is 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.) Camel bones in household ruins at Mari in present-day Syria that are believed to be at least 4,000 years old.

   Randall Younker discovered a gold camel figurine in a kneeling position from the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (2070-1960 BC) He also found a petroglyph at Aswan in Egypt which shows a man leading a camel by a rope, dated to 2423-2263 bce, A figurine from Aabussir el Melek, Egypt showing a camel carrying a load dated to the 3rd millennium BC and a figurine from the 2nd millennium from Hama in Syria. According to Yonker:

“This is not to say that domesticated camels were abundant and widely used
everywhere in the ancient Near East in the early second millennium.
However, the patriarchal narratives do not necessarily require large numbers of camels….
The smaller amount of evidence for domestic camels in the late third and early second millennium B.C.,
 especially in Palestine, is in accordance with this more restricted use” (1997, 42:52).

According to Israel Finkelstein, who co authored “The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts”, with Neil Asher Silberman:

”We now know through archaeological research that camels were not domesticated as beasts of burden earlier than the late second millennium and were not widely used in that capacity in the ancient Near East until well after 1000 BCE”, p. 37.

That was based on no evidence rather than actual research and even if they were not used extensively it would not have been impossible for the King of Egypt to have owned them. The Bible does not claim that Abraham had camels prior to going to Egypt, only that He was given camels by the King of Egypt. Camels were used by the Arabians to carry myrrh to Egypt as early as the 16th century bce, which was important in the embalming process.

   The Arabians have a rather strange legend giving credit to the Jews and not the Bedouins for being the earliest to use camels. The legend claims that the Arabs discovered the camels while raiding the Jewish homes. The Jews lived in the mountains of the Hijaz, while the Bedouins lived in the deserts. The Bedouins conducted raids on horse, but avoided the mountains, until they ran across a guide who claimed to be familiar with the mountains. The guide became lost and the Bedouins ate their horses to keep from starving. They came upon a traveler who led them to the Jews camp, where they discovered the strange animals they called “al-vil”. The Bedouins raided the camp and when the Jews fled with their female camels. The raiders took the camels that were left behind and chased the Jews. They caught up with them, defeated them and took their female camels. The Bedouins claim that the Jews, having no camels to breed, used to fill containers with water hoping the camels would return. That is believed to be the source of the ancient Bedouin proverb for something one does not expect to attain or achieve, rajw al-hihuud min al-bil, or "the Jews hope for the camels."If there is any truth to the legend it would indicate that the Israelites were using camels as pack animals before the 16th century bce. That would be no later than the time of Isaac. Such a strange story making giving the Jews credit for the first domesticated camel is probably rooted in some truth. It does not seem likely that the Bedouins would invent a story giving credit to the Jews for something the world believes the Bedouins had done. In fact the word camel is not of Arabic origin, but comes from the Hebrew word gamel. The ancient Bedouins apparently had never seen a camel as their surprise at seeing them in the Jewish camp seems to indicate.

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