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.

Out of the Ashes

It’s not often that two of my interests – computer technology and the Bible – intersect, but they did in a science discovery announced this week. A team of computer specialists at the University of Kentucky were able to read the writing on a 1700-year old Torah scroll that had been turned into charcoal by a fire in 600 CE. How this miracle of science was accomplished and what it uncovered is fascinating.

The Spring of the Young Goat

The story begins on the Western shore of the Dead Sea, a barren desert without tree or shrub except for those around oases such as the one at En-gedi, 35 miles southeast of Jerusalem. En-gedi (the name means “spring of the young goat”) is mentioned a few times in the Bible, most notably as one of the spots where David fled from Saul (1 Sam 24). It was the site of a Jewish community beginning in the 8th century BCE and by the 4th century CE, it was a large Jewish city with at least one synagogue. The city was destroyed by fire in the 7th century during the Arab conquests.

Archaeological excavations in 1970 uncovered the Holy Ark in the ruins of the city’s synagogue. The Holy Ark is a cabinet in a synagogue that holds the scrolls used for synagogue readings. Inside the En-gedi Ark were the charred fragments of its Torah scrolls. The blackened lumps of charcoal fell apart at the touch and there was no way to unwrap them, so the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) preserved them on the chance that some future technology would allow them to be read.

Start with a Good Scan

Did the charred scrolls contain any writing at all or were they a total loss? Sefi Porat, one of the excavators who worked on the En-gedi synagogue, asked his colleague, Pnina Shor, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) Project at the IAA, if she could scan the En-gedi scrolls as part of the project to create images of all DSS material.

Modern X-ray-based micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scans of the En-gedi scrolls can reveal there was writing on the layers inside because the ink, containing metals like iron or lead, is denser than the parchment on which it was written and provides a good contrast. The micro-CT scan, designed for high-resolution scanning of biological tissues, can also visualize the layers in the scroll.

But it was impossible to decipher the writing. The Hebrew letters appear on a 3D cylindrical image and cannot be read without conversion to a 2D image. It would be as if you wrote a message on a piece of paper, rolled it up and tried to read it by holding it up to a light. The letters on one layer would be superimposed on the letters on the other layers.

Computer-Assisted Archaeology

This is where the University of Kentucky comes in. Similar charred scrolls were unearthed in the library of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law in Herculaneum, destroyed along with Pompeii in 79 CE. W. Brent Seales, professor and chairman of the computer science department at the University of Kentucky, has spent the last 13 years working on ways to read such damaged scrolls. Dr. Seales and his team developed a technique to “virtually unwrap” the charred scrolls once they had been scanned.

Learning of Dr. Seales’ work, Dr. Shor sent him the micro-CT scan of one of the En-gedi scrolls and asked if he could analyze it.

The program developed by Dr. Seales’ team builds a triangulated surface mesh to identify the layers of material in the scroll. The team identified five complete revolutions of parchment in the scroll. Once the layers had been identified and modeled, the program renders readable textures on the layers by assigning a “brightness” value from the appropriate layer of the CT scan to each point on the segmented surface in the computer model.

Video from The New York Times describing the technique.

Because the layers were rolled-up in the scan, the next step was to flatten the segments. This was done via common 3D-to-2D mapping techniques. The final step was to merge the flattened segments into a composite image. The final image revealed the scroll to be two columns of text that include 35 lines (18 preserved and 17 reconstructed) of Hebrew text from the first two chapters of Leviticus, the third book in the Torah.

A composite image of the completed virtual unwrapping of the En-gedi scroll (source: B. Seales)

The Findings

Radiocarbon results date the scroll to 3rd-4th century CE. This puts the En-gedi scroll a century or two after the period of the Dead Sea Scrolls (3rd century BCE to 2nd century CE) and centuries before medieval biblical fragments found in Cairo dating to the 9th century CE.

The text on the En-gedi scroll is identical to the Masoretic Text (MT). The MT is the text printed in most modern Hebrew Bibles and used as the source for translations into English. This is interesting because the DSS written just one or two centuries earlier reveal some variations in the biblical texts. This discovery pushes back the date for the standardization of the MT to the 3rd-4th century CE.

The work of Dr. Seales and his team was financed by a government grant. The suite of software programs, called Volume Cartography, will be released as open source once the grant ends. Use of the software on the damaged scrolls from the Herculaneum library could re-discover long-lost works of Latin and Greek literature. It is a remarkable accomplishment.

Details of the “virtual unwrapping” technique are detailed in an article published in the 21 Sept 2016 issue of the journal Science Advances.