Bobzammel

As for the Pagan influence, while most of the "lists" posted on the net are poorly researched, there is still enough evidence in Zoroastaranism, Greek philosophy and some of the Eastern religions that seem to point to some kind of influence. These are elaborated on in other threads, though.

Amergin

http://www.apologeticspress.org/bibb...2/bb-02-42.htm

REFERENCES

“Animal Kingdom” (1988), The New Unger’s Bible Dictionary (Electronic Database: Biblesoft).

Cansdale, George (1970), All the Animals of the Bible Lands (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan).

Cheyne, T.K. (1899), Encyclopedia Biblica (London: A. & C. Black).
Clayton, Peter A. (2001), Chronicle of the Pharaohs (London: Thames & Hudson).

Finkelstein, Israel and Neil Asher Silberman (2001), The Bible Unearthed (New York: Free Press).

Free, Joseph P. (1944), “Abraham’s Camels,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 3:187-193, July.

Kitchen, K.A. (1966), Ancient Orient and Old Testament (Chicago, IL: InterVarsity Press).

Kitchen, K.A. (1980), The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ed. J.D. Douglas (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale).

Tobin, Paul N. (2000), “Mythological Element in the Story of Abraham and the Patriachal Narratives,” The Refection of Pascal’s Wager [On-line],
URL: http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/abraham.html.

Younker, Randall W. (1997), “Late Bronze Age Camel Petroglyphs in the Wadi Nasib, Sinai,” Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin, 42:47-54.

Younker, Randall W. (2000), “The Bible and Archaeology,” The Symposium on the Bible and Adventist Scholarship [On-line],
URL: http://www.aiias.edu/ict/vol_26B/26Bcc_457-477.htm.

There was no way with my work hours that I could possible read all of this shite.

As a matter of fact, I am amazed at the huge forum with incredibly long posts daily. Because I am a physician, I cannot do this every day. So when I post something, the next time I look, two or three more pages of posts have followed. Any comments to my posts are buried in the debris. Don’t any of these wankers have regular jobs?

Amergin

jayh

The BIG problem with these quotes, is the SAME problem with the OT quotes, they were written centuries, even millenia after the events described. (ranging from Aeschylus born 525 BCE to Tacitus writing in 100 CE). These writers were familiar with camels as far back as anyone could remember and quite likely they may not have realized there was EVER a time when camels were not domestic (even today most people think of domestic plants and animals as always having been that way).

The best evidence for domestication of camels is, as Finkelstein points out, datable camel bones in city dumps (these occur quite suddently) which indicate actual domestic USE of the animals This would be necessary for the Abraham stories... camels as described there were a major coveted component of wealth, not just a novelty. For that to be the case, they would need to be in relatively common use among the wealthy class, and the bones would be very evident (not unlike the abrupt appearance of auto junkyards in our own era)

I suspect, that possibly Abraham is himself an amalgam of ancient hero tales, it would make better sense of the inconsistent stories about him.

Jay

Peter Kirby

They do fine to show that it is false that the camel was domesticated "between 700 and 1000ad."

best,
Peter Kirby

jayh

>>They do fine to show that it is false that the camel was domesticated "between 700 and 1000ad." <<

The point is they don't. They are oral traditions recorded centuries later, we have no validation as to the original state of the storie. Since the oral history is contradicted by physical evidence, it is subject to question.

More significantly though is the supposed dates of Abraham, who allegely had herds of domesticated camels about 2100 BCE, long before any physical evidence exists of such large scale domestication (in the context of the story, Abraham was noteworthy for his wealth, not his use of camels).

Where is the evidence?

j

Peter Kirby

Notice the two letters 'ad' in the quote? Unless the works of these Greek historians were fabricated by monks in the middle ages, this shows that camels were domesticated before the turn of the common era, i.e. before the time of the writing of these stories. This requires no assumptions about the historical value of the accounts, merely that camels were domesticated at the time of writing. I make no assumption about the domestication of camels in the alleged time of Abraham; and indeed I think it is likely that the entire story of the patriarchs is made up. But the person quoted in the original post was trying to make some bizarre argument that the New Testament was written around 1000 CE because of the camel thing--clearly the person who made that argument had gotten mixed up.

best,
Peter Kirby

jayh

whoa I guess I missed your point totally.

sorry

NOGO

Interesting. Just curious ...
Do you place this evidence above the archaeological evidence?
This is not a general question but rather for this particular issue and these particular quotes.

Peter Kirby

What archaeological evidence?

The debate among archaeologists concerns whether the camel was domesticated in the first millennium BCE or earlier in the second millennium BCE. The person who was quoted in the original post had just gotten confused; while a normal statement is that the camel was domesticated 1000 to 700 BCE based on (alleged) archaeological evidence, the person quoted had thought that this date was after the common era (700-1000 AD) instead of before. That the person who made this argument for dating the NT around 1000 CE was confused should be blatantly obvious.

best,
Peter Kirby

NOGO

Peter,

Sorry.
I thought that you were disagreeing with Finkelstein.
I missed he "ad" part but I should have known since the dates are inverted (700-1000ad instead of 1000-700 BCE)

I thought that you had some insight into the subject which contradicted what Finkelstein stated in his book.