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Carbon Dating on Camel Bones Contradicts Bible's Accuracy

Orphia Nay

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Orphia Nay
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"Archaeologists at the Tel Aviv University claim that camels were not domesticated in Israel during the time period mentioned in the Bible. Carbon dating on camel bones reveals that camels were not domesticated in Israel until the 9th century BC.

"According to the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, camels are mentioned as pack animals in the The Old Testament stories placed in the time periods between 2000 and 1500 BC. But in the new finding, Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef and Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures, claim that camels were not domesticated until hundreds of years after what is mentioned in the Bible, thus challenging the accuracy of the Bible and also revealing that it was written long after the event it describes.

"Using radiocarbon dating on camel bone, the archaeologists have mentioned the precise date when the domesticated camels arrived in southern Levant. It is the 9th century and not the 12th as mentioned previously. This defines the turning point in Israel's involvement with the world."

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/a...on-camel-bones-contradict-bibles-accuracy.htm

+1 to the thousands or probably millions of facts contradicting the Bible.
 
Maybe that`s only because they found 9th century BC bones. And porcupines ate the earlier ones. Hahaha.
But regarding my first sentence; I`m really not sure what they are basing their claim on that conclusively rules out any earlier bones. Is it common to find camel bones from almost 3000 years ago? Is it more common in that particular part of the world due to the climate or something? Is there a presumption that if bones can be found say in good enough condition from about 3000 years ago to test...that bones should also exist from a measely 500 years earlier?
 
Orphia Nay said:
"Archaeologists at the Tel Aviv University claim that camels were not domesticated in Israel during the time period mentioned in the Bible. Carbon dating on camel bones reveals that camels were not domesticated in Israel until the 9th century BC.

"According to the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, camels are mentioned as pack animals in the The Old Testament stories placed in the time periods between 2000 and 1500 BC. But in the new finding, Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef and Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures, claim that camels were not domesticated until hundreds of years after what is mentioned in the Bible, thus challenging the accuracy of the Bible and also revealing that it was written long after the event it describes.

"Using radiocarbon dating on camel bone, the archaeologists have mentioned the precise date when the domesticated camels arrived in southern Levant. It is the 9th century and not the 12th as mentioned previously. This defines the turning point in Israel's involvement with the world."

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/a...on-camel-bones-contradict-bibles-accuracy.htm

+1 to the thousands or probably millions of facts contradicting the Bible.
Click to expand...

'Cos they were tapirs, then...(before ye fludde).
 
Because in those days the word for velociraptors was camel, DUH
Did'nt the Creation Museum learn you nutt-in
 
Don't worry, bible literalists will come up with some means of threading a camel through the eye of a needle
 
Orphia Nay said:
"Archaeologists at the Tel Aviv University claim that camels were not domesticated in Israel during the time period mentioned in the Bible. Carbon dating on camel bones reveals that camels were not domesticated in Israel until the 9th century BC.

"According to the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, camels are mentioned as pack animals in the The Old Testament stories placed in the time periods between 2000 and 1500 BC. But in the new finding, Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef and Dr. Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures, claim that camels were not domesticated until hundreds of years after what is mentioned in the Bible, thus challenging the accuracy of the Bible and also revealing that it was written long after the event it describes.

"Using radiocarbon dating on camel bone, the archaeologists have mentioned the precise date when the domesticated camels arrived in southern Levant. It is the 9th century and not the 12th as mentioned previously. This defines the turning point in Israel's involvement with the world."

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/a...on-camel-bones-contradict-bibles-accuracy.htm

+1 to the thousands or probably millions of facts contradicting the Bible.
Click to expand...

This is but one of many anachronisms found in the biblical text. Here's another (Gen. 11:31, bolding added):

And Terah took Abram his son and Lot, the son of Haran, his son's son, and Sarai, his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; and they came to Haran and dwelt there.

Ur, a city originally built by the Sumerians, was not in Chaldean hands until ca. 800 BCE. Therefore, Abram (Abraham), supposedly living well before the Exodus, variously dated to the 1400s and the 1200s BCE, could not have been living in a Chaldean city. Also, had the Torah been written by Moses, living either in the 1400s or 1200s, he would not have referred to Ur as "Ur of the Chaldeans."
 
I had just read this story on Yahoo news, the commenters were not amused.
 
This raises Joseph Smith's stock. Apparently, placing domesticated pack animals before their time is a Biblical tradition.
 
sphenisc said:
The article fails to identify any specific Biblical inaccuracy.
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True.
Here's a blog which goes into further detail:
"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. [...]"
http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...4/feb/13/old-testament-camels-zionism-genesis

ETA
It appears this discovery only confirms what some scholars have thought for years and years.
Here's an article on the subject from 1944
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.23...id=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103444363487
 
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Except for bible litteralist, is there anybody pretending the bible is accurate in anything whatsoever ? Heck even the spelling of word is supposed to have been corrupted and innacurate in teh following hudnreds of years of mistranslation.
 
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The article doesn't seem to prove its point very conclusively. They seem to be assuming that the earliest camel bones found in that one site represent the earliest domesticated camels in the region.

They may be right - but it seems like suggestive evidence rather than hard fact.

It seems there is evidence there were domesticated camels in whats now iran around 2600bc (http://archaeology.about.com/od/cterms/g/camels.htm).

Also there is some question mark over whether the hebrew word used really refered to what we today call camels :
comment by lzalesch on http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/science/camels-had-no-business-in-genesis.html?_r=0 said:
]The flaw in the research here lies in its apparent assumption that the Hebrew word used in Genesis for the animal under discussion, "Gamal," was always meant to refer to the animal we call a camel. But traditional Jewish Rabbinic sources have always admitted to their own confusion about the correct translation of the animals referred to in the bible, particularly in Leviticus 11. The contemporary translations of many of those animals is entirely unclear. The fact that Ben Yehuda, in constructing modern Hebrew, decided to call a shafan a "rabbit" does not necessarily mean that the shafan in Leviticus 11 is actually a rabbit. Likewise, the gamal referred to in Genesis is as likely today's "camel" as it is a horse or some animal we are unaware of today. Basing archaeological conclusions on the vagaries of modern Hebrew usage discounts the often arbitrary nature that went (and goes) into the construction of modern Hebrew. In this particular case, Ben Yehuda may have thought the "G" of gamal and "C" of camel somehow made it an easy match, and I can relate to that temptation on his part, but it was probably either a guess or, at best, a tenuous connection. Any Rabbinic scholar who was showed this article or the research would say, "So what? Whoever said a gamal is a camel? Let it be a horse." Translation is always inherently flawed and necessarily inaccurate.
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Don't misunderstand me - it seems very plausible that camels were introduced to the region much later than the supposed era of the events in the early parts of the bible - and that the word used only ever referred to what we today call a camel.

However I think there is too much uncertainty for this point to be used as an outright contraction of the bibles accuracy. There are plenty of much stronger points which do that.

- Drelda
 
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