Camels (Gen 12:16)

Down to Egypt

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¹⁶ He had flocks, herds, and he-asses, he-slaves and she-slaves, she-asses and camels.

וַֽיְהִי־ל֤וֹ צֹאן־וּבָקָר֙ וַחֲמֹרִ֔ים וַעֲבָדִים֙ וּשְׁפָחֹ֔ת וַאֲתֹנֹ֖ת וּגְמַלִּֽים׃

Yes, it’s those pesky camels again; we just can’t seem to get rid of them. (Don’t stand in front of them, they’ll spit at you!) Here’s what the great Jewish commentators of the medieval era have to say about them:

• Rashi: —

• Rashbam: —

• Ibn Ezra: —

• Nahmanides: —

• Kimhi: —

I could go on, but you get the idea. Starting a little more than a hundred years ago, Genesis commentaries do begin to say a few words specifically about the camels:

• The animals mentioned were all known in ancient Egypt, except the camel, which is neither represented nor named in the monuments before the Greek period. (John Skinner, ICC, 1910)

• The mention of camels, moreover, although by no means isolated in the patriarchal narratives (see 24:10), is chronologically suspect, since camels did not become an economic factor until the end of the second millennium. The author may thus be guilty of an anachronism. Alternatively, the camel may have come into limited use at an earlier time (as did also the horse), but required centuries before it ceased to be a luxury. (E. A. Speiser, AB, 1964)

• The enumeration of the presents … is to be understood functionally, not statistically, and is meant to portray the wealth of the patriarchs for listeners of a later age; the later elaboration and the anachronism (camels) are to be explained in the same way. (Claus Westermann, BKAT, 1981; trans. John J. Scullion, 1985)

Robert Alter in his Genesis commentary (1996; complete Bible, 2019) and Jon Levenson in the Jewish Study Bible (2004; 2^nd ed., 2014) — Jewish scholars both — say nothing whatsoever about these camels. Yet Nahum Sarna, in the Genesis volume of the JPS Torah Commentary series (1989), devoted 3 paragraphs and 450 words to the subject. Here’s about half of those 450 words:

The presence of the camel in this and other lists raises a complex problem … The camel does not figure in Egyptian texts and art until the Persian period. It is conspicuously absent from the published Mari texts from Mesopotamia, which are replete with information about pastoral nomadic groups and their way of life. Thousands of commercial and administrative texts from the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 1950–1530 B.C.E.) maintain complete silence on the existence of this animal. All available evidence points to the conclusion that the effective domestication of the camel as a widely used beast of burden did not take place before the twelfth century B.C.E., which is a long time after the patriarchal period.

It cannot be denied, however, that mention of the camel in the Abrahamic and Jacob narrative cycles is integral to the stories, at least in chapters 24 and 31, and cannot be the work of a late glossator. On the other hand, to regard these narratives as anachronistically late productions from a time when the camel was already widely known is to leave unexplained why that beast, which figures so infrequently in biblical historiography, should have been put into the patriarchal stories, while the horse, which figures far more frequently, is totally absent.

His conclusion:

A wealthy man might acquire a few as a prestige symbol for ornamental rather than utilitarian purposes. This would explain their presence in Abraham’s entourage, their nonuse as beasts of burden, and their special mention in situations where wealth and honor need to be displayed.

What’s going on here? What’s going on, of course, is that Rashi & Co., innocently enough, believed that if the Torah said Abram had camels, then obviously he had them — nuf sed. And why shouldn’t he?

The answer to that last question is that (unlike the medievals) we now have extensive information dating from Abram’s Bronze Age Near East and onward, contemporary information, telling us that no one in his time or place would have had a camel.

Or do we? The topic of camels in the ancient Near East has not gone away. Here’s Wayne Horowitz of the Hebrew University in the “e-Review” of the Bible Lands Museum (2014):

The evidence presented above [from Sumerian texts] demonstrates that the two-humped camel was fully domesticated for riding and other purposes, for example milking, by the Middle Bronze Age, while the textual evidence for the one-humped Arabian camel before the Late-Bronze Age is less conclusive. Thus, for now, one may place the Patriarchal Narratives in a Middle Bronze Age historical context as long as one assumes that the Genesis narrative originally referred to the Bactrian camel rather than the Arabian dromedary.

TIL (as the expression goes) that “dromedary” in English always refers to the one-humped animal; “camel” can refer to both. For the latest information I’ve found — and a host of wonderful photographs — see Heide and Peters, “Camels in the Biblical World of the Ancient Near East,” in the ANE Today newsletter of the organization formerly known as the American Society for Oriental Research (now “of Overseas Research”) from September 2022.

It’s all an interesting, indeed fascinating, case study in how our increasing knowledge of the ancient world changes the questions we ask about the Bible. My own experience — as a learner, a teacher, and a researcher — tells me that modern commentators are just as likely to ignore the questions that occur to me as the medievals, sometimes more likely. When we next encounter camels in Genesis, in ch. 24, it will be clear that they are no afterthought, as perhaps they might be in our verse.

Meanwhile we have left Sarai and Pharaoh cooling their heels (if indeed that’s what they have been doing) back in the palace for more than a week now. It’s time to check in on them, which we’ll do on Tuesday.