Biblical Views: Did Abraham Ride a Camel?

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Many children (and adults) know the stories in Genesis involving Abraham and his descendants owning and riding camels. Abraham’s servant drove 10 camels to upper Mesopotamia and took great pains to water them there (Genesis 24:10–11). Even Rachel, wife of Jacob, rode a camel while in Upper Mesopotamia (Genesis 31:34). The events in these accounts have been traditionally dated c. 2000–1600 B.C.E.

However, Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef in a recent study in the Israeli journal Tel Aviv claim that the camel was not domesticated in the southern Levant (i.e., Israel) until the late 10th century B.C.E.¹ While Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef do not discuss the Bible, Mairav Zonszein concluded in a 2014 piece for National Geographic News that the accounts in Genesis concerning camels are anachronistic. The camel had not yet been domesticated.

This, of course, is not a new idea. More than 70 years ago, William Foxwell Albright, the greatest Biblical scholar of the 20th century, proclaimed on many occasions that the narratives concerning camels in the period of Abraham were a blatant anachronism, as they were not domesticated until centuries later. Albright’s strong statements have, over the years, become accepted dogma and have rarely been critiqued.

While I find no fault with the findings of Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef, it is not the whole story. A close inspection of Genesis 11–12 leads to the conclusion that Abraham was not from Israel, but Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and inland Syria). Scholars studying this area know of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence for camels long before the supposed time of Abraham and his family. Moreover, the sporadic accounts in Genesis concerning camels usually occur outside Israel in northern Mesopotamia (and occasionally when they travel to Egypt), precisely where much of our external evidence comes from.

As early as the fourth millennium B.C.E., a Bactrian (two-humped) camel is depicted on a sherd from Tepe Sialk in eastern Iran. Furthermore, we find additional archaeological evidence of camels at Shahr-i Sokhta, a Bronze Age settlement in southeastern Iran: There skeletal remains of camels (probably Bactrian) have been found dating to the mid-third millennium B.C.E. These pieces of information simply provide evidence that the Bactrian camel, most likely indigenous to Central Asia, had expanded into Iran at this time. It is impossible, however, to say to what extent the camel had been domesticated by this period.

Lexical evidence for the camel (am.si.harran; roughly translated in Sumerian as “humped quadruped that goes by the road [i.e., caravan]”) exists by the Sumerian Early Dynastic Period (c. 2400 B.C.E.) in a list of animals from the Sumerian city of Shuruppak. The same term is found in the 18th-century B.C.E. lexical series Urra=hubullu (a064 group of Old Babylonian texts roughly equivalent to our concept of a bilingual dictionary), along with two other terms that are translated into Akkadian as ibilu (generic word for camel).² Once again, the evidence is not conclusive as to the type of camel or whether it was fully domesticated.

The am.si.harran are found in a Sumerian love song from Nippur, also dated to the 18th century B.C.E. (from an Old Babylonian copy of a third millennium B.C.E. original), which states “the milk of the camel is sweet.”³ Though in a mythical context, myths often depict normal social reality. There is nothing mythical (or even magical) about drinking camel’s milk. Having walked in many surveys through camel herds in Syria along the Middle Euphrates River, I believe that this text is describing a domesticated camel; who would want to milk a “wild camel”? At the very least, the Bactrian camel was being used for dairy needs at this time.

A mid-third-millennium B.C.E. plaque from the Sumerian city of Eshnunna along the Diyala River in Iraq depicts a rider on a Dromedary camel.⁴ A Sumerian Ur III (c. 2100–2000 B.C.E.) text from Puzrish-Dagan records deliveries of an animal that Steinkeller posits is a Bactrian camel.⁵ These deliveries (perhaps gifts for King Shulgi of Ur) came from Anshan, a major state in southwestern Iran.

A grain distribution list concerning a royal journey from 17th-century Alalakh, a Mesopotamian town along the Orontes River in present-day Turkey (not far from Harran, where Abram relocated), lists camels among other domesticated animals requiring food resources.⁶ Moreover, the late Edith Porada of Columbia University found a depiction of a two-humped (Bactrian) camel with two riders on a cylinder seal she dates to about the 18th century B.C.E.. The seal, presently in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, looks much like seals found at the aforementioned city of Alalakh of about the same period.⁷

The evidence for camels in Egypt is not as compelling, but it does exist. The Bible mentions Abraham bringing camels to Egypt; they were certainly not indigenous to the area (Genesis 12:14–16). It is probable that the camels mentioned in Genesis are the Bactrian variety. The fact that they are mentioned in Mesopotamian lexical lists and ration reports is interesting; it was a beast of burden for travel and probably not used extensively in urban environments.

Though not exhaustive, these examples provide evidence that at the very least, the Bactrian camel was already known and domesticated in065 Mesopotamia by the time of Abraham. The relatively poor representation of camels in these texts does not imply their relative rarity; they may have been prestigious. So the Biblical writers may have been highlighting Abraham’s great wealth by mentioning camels. I think this evidence is more than enough to discount the idea that the Genesis source superimposed camels in the patriarchal narratives. The writer of Genesis wrote about camels anecdotally; they add little to the narrative, except for implying Abraham’s wealth.

In fact, anecdotal statements are the stuff of history; they provide information that betrays bits of social and cultural information that are essential for understanding the context of the writing and perhaps the time period that is written about.

So did Abraham ride a camel? Not only did he likely ride a camel, perhaps he drank from one, too!

Many children (and adults) know the stories in Genesis involving Abraham and his descendants owning and riding camels. Abraham’s servant drove 10 camels to upper Mesopotamia and took great pains to water them there (Genesis 24:10–11). Even Rachel, wife of Jacob, rode a camel while in Upper Mesopotamia (Genesis 31:34). The events in these accounts have been traditionally dated c. 2000–1600 B.C.E. However, Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef in a recent study in the Israeli journal Tel Aviv claim that the camel was not domesticated in the southern Levant (i.e., Israel) until the late 10th century B.C.E.1 While Sapir-Hen […]