The Camel's Nose Under Moses' Tent

A popular trope in the media is the science-proves-the-Bible story and I reviewed a couple of those (Sodom destroyed by meteor and Joshua witnessed an eclipse) recently. Not quite as popular is the science-disproves-the-Bible story and we have a recent example of that from 2013 where two researchers from Tel Aviv University dated the introduction of domesticated camels in the area south of the Dead Sea to the latter third of the 10^th century BCE.

How does this disprove the Bible? Well, camels are featured prominently in some of the stories in Genesis and these stories supposedly took place hundreds of years before the Exodus. Yet the scientific evidence shows domesticated camels only came into widespread use after the time of Solomon.

The article itself doesn’t address the anachronistic reference to camels in Genesis. That was brought out in media reports in early 2014 such as the one in the New York Times: “Camels Had No Business in Genesis”. Reports like this in the popular media unleashed a wide range of critics questioning the original research in order to defend the accuracy of Genesis.

The problem, though, is that camels aren't the only anachronisms in Genesis.

Handler offering camel rides in the Australian Outback. Camels are not native to Australia. They were imported in the 1800s for use as transportation in the desert. When the camels became displaced by motorized transportation in the 1920s, they were released into the wild. (photo by author, 2012)

Who Wrote the Five Books of Moses?

Traditionally, Genesis and the other four books of the Torah (or Pentateuch) were attributed to Moses. That’s why they are called “the Five Books of Moses”. And when I say “attributed”, I don’t mean people only thought the traditions in them go back to Moses. No, the commonly-held view for centuries was that the Torah was entirely penned by Moses. Some allowance was made for Joshua recording the events of Moses’ death and burial (for obvious reasons) but that was it.

However, over the centuries astute students of the Torah noticed Moses was unlikely to have called himself “more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth” (Num 12:3). That’s not the sort of thing a humble man would say.

Other verses point to the Torah having been written long after Moses:

• “Canaanites were then in the land” (Gen 12:6) implies that Canaanites were no longer in Canaan
• “before any king ruled over the Israelites” (Gen 36:31) implies that kings had ruled over Israel at the time this was written
• “since then, no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses” (Deut 34:10) implies that the present time of the author is long after that of Moses

In addition to the aforementioned camels, references to “Philistines” in the Torah are out of place as the Philistines did not arrive at the coastal areas of Canaan until around 1200 BCE (more than a century after Moses). Genesis 11:28 refers to “Ur of the Chaldeans” but the Chaldeans did not occupy the region containing the city of Ur until about 1000 BCE.

Clearly, the Torah wasn’t written in Moses’ time. Nor, as we have seen from studying the creation and flood stories, was it written by a single author. There was a Yahwist source (J) and a Priestly source (P) who contributed the bulk of Genesis through Numbers with the Deuteronomist (D) who was largely responsible for Deuteronomy. Based on internal clues, J’s setting best fits in the 9^th/8^th centuries BCE and P belongs to the 6^th century BCE (after the fall of Jerusalem).

Writing in the 9^th or 8^th century BCE, the author would be familiar with the idea of domesticated camels. Camels would have been part of the cultural milieu for one or two centuries. Writing down a story about Abraham or Isaac, the Genesis author would have naturally assumed the patriarchs used camels as well.

Cultural Memories

Unlike stories of the exodus or conquest that could be proven or disproven by archaeology, the patriarchal narratives of Gen 12-50 are family stories and, barring the excavation of a clay tablet recording Abraham’s purchase of a burial plot or an inscription announcing the appointment of Joseph to pharaoh’s court, verifying the existence of individuals through archaeology is next to impossible. The destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone would be one possible avenue to archaeological verification, but the evidence presented so far seems extremely weak.

True, just because the patriarchal narratives were written down hundreds of years after they occurred doesn’t mean truly old traditions couldn’t have been handed down orally for generations. But I think we need to be very modest as to what can reasonably go back to the period of 2000-1500 BCE. Details of individual events will be lost after a few generations, but events happening in the longer timescales of society, religion, and ethnicity are more likely to be recalled centuries later.

Given all this, what aspects of the patriarchal narratives may go back to a pre-Israelite period? Two things stand out: the location of the ancestral home in the Haran region and worship of the Canaanite god El.

The older J source places Abraham’s home in Haran, a city in upper Mesopotamia. The names of Abraham’s ancestors – Serug, Nahor, Terah – are all place names in the region around Haran. The P source overwrote the tradition of the ancestral home of Haran with “Ur of the Chaldeans”, a major city in lower Mesopotamia, but still retained Haran as a stopover point. Abraham’s relatives (including Laban) remained behind in Haran when Abraham continued his journey to Canaan.

By the time the stories were collected into the Torah, Arameans occupied the ancestral homeland. That’s why we see references to “Laban the Aramean” (Gen 25:20; 31:20, 24) and “my father was a wandering Aramean” (Deut 26:5). The current occupants of the Haran region were assumed to have existed at the time of the patriarchs just as camels were.

The other element of pre-Israelite cultural memory is the worship of the Canaanite God, El. The P source is quite clear that YHWH was known to the patriarchs only as El Shaddai (Ex 6:2-3). Bethel and Penuel, two prominent cultic sites in the patriarchal narratives are compounded with the name El, as is the name Israel itself. Although the J source insists that the name YHWH was invoked from almost the very beginning, there are no names compounded with YHWH until the era of Moses (Jochebed and Joshua are the first).

In my view, it is clear that the stories in Genesis were written centuries after the time they supposedly took place. The patriarchal narratives may retain some accurate cultural memories of an ancestral homeland in Haran and the worship of the Canaanite god El prior to the introduction of the YHWH cult. But the individual stories of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph are simply not historical in the same sense as those pertaining to David, Jeremiah, and other figures appearing later in the Bible.

Total Eclipse of a Farce

While researching the claim that a meteor destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, I ran across a reference to another celestial event “proving” the Bible: a solar eclipse in the time of Joshua.

According to a paper by Colin Humphreys and Graeme Waddington published in the October 2017 issue of Astronomy & Geophysics, the biblical event where Joshua orders the sun and moon to stand still (Josh 10:12-14) refers to a solar eclipse and this can be dated to 30 October 1207 BCE. Previous researchers had looked for a total solar eclipse over Canaan during the expected time frame and didn’t find one.

Humphreys and Waddington thought, “What about an annular eclipse?” In an annular eclipse the moon is a bit further from Earth and therefore its disk is smaller and does not completely block the sun. There would still be a narrow ring of sunlight along the edges of the moon’s disk. When Humphreys and Waddington wrote a program to calculate annular eclipses over Canaan in the expected time frame, they found one in 1207 BCE.

Another team of Israeli researchers (physicist Ḥezi Yitzḥak, biblical scholar Daniel Vainstub, and archeologist Uzi Avner) independently reached the same conclusion and published their findings in January 2017 in the Hebrew journal Beit Mikra. Coincidences like this happen frequently in science. Because I don’t have access to that paper, I’ll restrict my discussion to the arguments presented by Humphreys and Waddington.

An annular eclipse, photographed on 10 May 2013. (Image: Fabrizio Melandri)

Not Enough Hours in the Day

As many critics have commented, Joshua 10 does not seem to be describing an eclipse at all. The chapter recounts a battle that Joshua’s army fought after an all-night march from Gilgal. The way the story is traditionally read, Joshua just didn’t have enough hours in the day to completely defeat all his enemies. So Joshua spoke to YHWH and the sun and moon stopped in the sky, giving him enough time to win the battle.

Arguing that the celestial event being described is an eclipse, Humphreys and Waddington point to the word usually translated as “stand still” saying it really meant “stop shining” not “stop moving”.

But a solar eclipse in the late afternoon would have given Joshua less daylight hours for his battle, not more. Also, when you read the text, Joshua calls for the sun to stand still at Gibeon and the moon to stop in the valley of Aijalon. Gibeon and Aijalon are ten miles apart on an east-west axis. In other words, the sun and moon appear to be in opposite sides of the sky, which makes an eclipse impossible since the moon needs to be in front of the sun for that to happen.

Poetic License

The story of the sun and moon standing still come from vv. 12-14. These verses seem very intrusive to the story presented in the rest of Josh 10:1-15. You could remove them and nothing would be missed.

To recap the story, in vv. 10-11 the combined army of five Canaanite kings (referred to as the Amorites) is fleeing, under constant attack from Joshua’s forces. YHWH gives the Israelites a bit of help by lobbing hailstones at the Amorites. The Bible reports more of the Amorites were killed by the hailstones than by the Israelites. It seems like the battle is over. If we skip over to v. 15, Joshua’s victorious army returns to Gilgal. It seems like a natural conclusion to the battle story, no eclipse needed.

In contrast, vv. 12-14 is a self-contained unit. After a brief introduction in v. 12a, vv. 12b-13a recite a bit of poetry taken from “the Book of Jashar” (or “the Book of the Upright” if “Jashar” is not a proper name). The rest is an elaboration on the poetic passage. Since these poetic verses come from a different source, they don’t necessarily refer to this specific battle. 

We don’t know if these verses are older or younger than the source for the rest of Joshua 10. In the main battle story, YHWH had already provided divine aid in the form of accurately targeted hailstones. The reference to an extraordinary celestial event such as stopping the motion of the sun and moon seems like a later legendary enhancement.

The Merneptah stele is a 10-foot (3-meter) slab of black granite recounting the pharoah's victories over Libya and its allies. The reference to "Israel" appears on line 27 (highlighted).

It’s About Time

The solar eclipse hypothesis is already looking shaky. But the title of the article by Humphreys and Waddington is “Solar eclipse of 1207 BC helps to date pharoahs” and therein lies another problem.

Historians agree that the first mention of Israel outside the Bible is in the victory stele of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah (reigned 1213-1203 BCE). Dated to Merneptah’s fifth year, it recounts his recent victory over neighboring peoples, one of them being “Israel”. Arguing that the confrontation with Israel would have happened a year or two before the victory stele was created, Humphreys and Waddington state that the 1207 eclipse would allow us to place the start of Merneptah’s reign as 1210 ± 1 year.

I had to read this part of their paper several times because I thought I missed something. But I didn’t. For some reason known only to them, Humphreys and Waddington equate the eclipse of 1207 BCE to Merneptah’s victory over Israel. But according to the Bible, Joshua was doing battle with five Amorite kings, not Egyptians. And Joshua won the battle, to boot! I’m really at a loss to understand how they put 2 and 2 together and got 5.

Even if you accept that the event cited in Josh 10:12-14 refers to a solar eclipse – and that’s a big “if” -- there is absolutely no connection between that and a victory of the Egyptians over Israel referenced in the Merneptah stele.

Where does this leave us?

There’s little doubt that an annular solar eclipse transpired on 30 October 1207 BCE in Canaan. You can check it out for yourself using the NASA eclipse calculator. The claim that Josh 10:12-14 refers to an eclipse depends on a debatable understanding of the Hebrew, and the reference to the sun and the moon in opposite parts of the sky seems to rule it out. The verses about the sun and moon are also not original to the rest of the story in Josh 10:1-11, 15.

Other than an interesting astronomical factoid, the eclipse of 30 October 1207 BCE doesn’t tell us anything about Egyptian chronology or the veracity of the Bible.