The Old Testament's Made Up Camels are a problem for Zionism

The Old Testament's made-up camels are a problem for Zionism
The earliest camel bones have been dated at 1,500 years after Genesis – which undermines Zionists' promised land narrative

There are 21 references to camels in the first books of the Bible, and now we know they are all made up.

Some of them are quite startlingly verisimilitudinous, such as the story of Abraham's servant finding a wife for Isaac in Genesis 24: "Then the servant left, taking with him 10 of his master's camels loaded with all kinds of good things from his master. He set out for Aram Naharaim and made his way to the town of Nahor. He made the camels kneel down near the well outside the town; it was towards evening, the time the women go out to draw water."

But these camels are made up, all 10 of them. Two Israeli archaeozoologists have sifted through a site just north of modern Eilat looking for camel bones, which can be dated by radio carbon.

None of the domesticated camel bones they found date from earlier than around 930BC – about 1,500 years after the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are supposed to have taken place. Whoever put the camels into the story of Abraham and Isaac might as well have improved the story of Little Red Riding Hood by having her ride up to Granny's in an SUV.

How can you tell whether a camel skeleton is from a wild or tamed animal? You look at the leg bones, and if they are thickened this shows they have been carrying unnaturally heavy loads, so they must have been domesticated. If you have a graveyard of camels, you can also see what proportion are males, and which are preferred for human uses because they can carry more.

All these considerations make it clear that camels were not domesticated anywhere in the region before 1000BC.

Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef, the scientists who carried out the research, point out that the domestication of camels was hugely important economically, because they made trade possible over much larger regions of the Arabian peninsula. But that is not what has provoked excitement about their claim.

Obviously it has upset fundamentalists. Everyone else has known for decades that there is even less evidence for the historical truth of the Old Testament than there is for that of the Qur'an. But the peculiarly mealy-mouthed nature of the quotes they gave the New York Times (which is not much concerned with the feelings of Christian fundamentalists) shows where the real problem is.

The history recounted in the Bible is a huge part of the mythology of modern Zionism. The idea of a promised land is based on narratives that assert with complete confidence stories that never actually happened. There are of course other ways to argue for the Zionist project, and still further arguments about the right of Israelis to live within secure boundaries now that the country exists. But although those stand logically independent of the histories invented – as far as we can tell – in Babylonian captivity during the sixth century BC, they make little emotional sense without the history. And it is emotions that drive politics.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2014/feb/13/old-testament-camels-zionism-genesis

That's the trouble with believing in myths.

and this is the same carbon dating that said a dog who died two days earlier was hundreds of thousands years old...right...

really, prove evidence of that, not made up stories.

http://www.chcpublications.net/radcarbn.htm not exactly what i was looking for but i guess it helps..

Doesn't help at all.  Verifiable scientific source please, not some Central Highland Christian Publication  

Sassy wrote:Doesn't help at all.  Verifiable scientific source please, not some Central Highland Christian Publication  

oh i see you want something you agree with..lol heard that before, try reading it anyway you might learn something.. :D 

No, I want something from someone who knows what they are talking about.

Sassy wrote:No, I want something from someone who knows what they are talking about.

so you didn't read it..lol...no you just want evidence that agrees with you, go fish.. :D 

I did read it. Got half way down and thought whoever this is, they don't know what they are talking about and are mixing up religion and science, went to the bottom and thought, yea, that'll be why.

The world wide Flood which occurred in the days of Noah (Genesis chapters 6 to buried nearly all of the organisms which had lived on the earth before the Flood. The burial of these organisms also meant the burial of the carbon that they contained, leading to formation of our coal, oil and natural gas deposits. As the rate of C14 formation is independent from the levels of normal carbon, the drop in available C12 would not have reduced the rate of C14 production. Even if the rate of C14 formation had not increased after the Flood, there would have been a fundamental shift in the ratio towards a relatively higher radiocarbon content.


  ://?roflmao?/: ://?roflmao?/: ://?roflmao?/: 

Yeah, that source is ridiculous. Don't they run against the Christian spirit of blindly accepting the Bible on faith by trying to provide proof of it, by the way?