No Camels?
Camels and Sarah’s Beemer
Ah, I love this sort of thing with Bible study, discovering an anachronism, this latest about domesticated camels not fitting into what we may always have imagined about the life and times of Bible heroes. Admittedly, I love it less that sensationalist media seeking readers pick up a tidbit and suggest that a new discovery trashes everything, but that’s the way life is, and we love excitement, and we especially love a scandal if we can stir one up, and besides it makes for discussion in Sunday School. Nothing makes Sunday School more fun than an unanswered question and lack of consensus.
The press has taken us here before. Recently, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene was interesting but not as sensationalist as was hyped, same with the Gospel of Judas. A truth is that we have dozens of gospels, and they are fascinating to read and explore and figure out why they may have been read early on but later excluded from the canon. In one resurrection story, three men come out of Jesus’s tomb, men so tall they reach up to the sky, and the middle one higher than the sky, and the cross walks out behind them. When a voice asks a question, the cross answers “yes,” and that interesting eccentricity doesn’t even seem to be the reason that gospel was not included in the Bible, the reason seems to have been an inference that Jesus suffered no pain, where rejecting a heresy was even more important than scoffing at walking talking objects! After all, if a jackass can talk, a cross can talk, and that isn’t what the story was about anyway; but it is about the suffering Savior.
In another gospel, Jesus and other children are playing with mud, and He fashions birds out of the mud, then when His father Joseph scolds Him for doing manual labor on Sabbath, He claps His hands and they fly away. The details have slipped my mind and I’m not going back to find it, but in the past year or two there was a piece of manuscript about the size of a postcard saying something about Jesus’ wife. What a load of it, but somebody got a flash of fame and glory and lecture invitations and cash out of it, and a lot of people were titillated, and I even enjoyed stirring it up with a “why not?” myself. Such things never rubbish the Sunday School story, just opens up yet more things to explore and learn about the cultures of ancient ages, not only about the characters in the stories, but even more about the folks who told the stories, and those who listened to the stories, and those who later wrote them down, and what they meant to convey. (Thanking Jane) did you know that the Bible doesn’t say the Holy Family were sent to the stable for the birth of the Christ Child? Does that destroy Christmas for you? Are you going to trash your little Nativity scene? In seminary, about the first new term that we learn the very first week of our first Bible course is situs im leben, which means that as well as a story itself we are interested in learning about the situation in life at the time. Not only life at the time within the story, but the life and times of what we may have dug up about the storyteller and the audience and what they were afraid of and what they chortled over. Many a keg of beer was tapped, and chip and dip scarfed down, sitting around the campfire snickering about how stunned Jacob was to wake up at the first light of dawn only to see that he’d been tricked into spending all his wedding night getting the ugly one pregnant and it's too late now, Baby. As it turns out, if he wants more children, Jacob's going to have to spend a lot more dark nights in her tent, while the pretty one sulks. The burly one doesn't shave her legs like the pretty one does, but at least she has beautiful eyes, and man can she push out them sons.
As for this week’s supposedly shocking revelation, I never imagined Abraham the wandering Aramean as moving about with camels anyway. Camels would have been an expensive means of traveling from Point A to Point B and transporting merchandise. In my mind, Abraham and company would not have been traveling from Point A to Point B, they would have been moving livestock around for grazing.
My favorite anachronism is a sketch in, I think it’s one of Frederick Buechner’s books. There’s an essay about Abraham and Sarah, a wealthy young couple about town, called by God to leave home and go off into the doubtful future that God has in mind for them. Early entrepreneurs. Depicting the event is an artist’s sketch of a couple driving off toward the horizon in their 3-Series BMW. If you can’t tell a Beemer from a Benz, that’s your problem, Bubba can tell, and it's either a 2002 or a 3-series. Anyway, remembering something of my own family history as told to me by my father, Abraham and Sarah’s car would have been loaded with their possessions. On the roof of the BMW would have been a wire cage full of chickens. For obvious reasons, the sunroof would have been closed. A discovery about the domestication of camels no more spoils a Bible story than my realization that Abram and Sarai couldn’t have driven out into the desert like that, because the roads weren’t paved and the early 3-Series wasn’t a 4WD.
That’s an actual pic of Sarai’s Beemer above, stick shift, red, parked at her country club while hubby is at Rotary. The Bible doesn't say so, but I'll bet it nearly killed her to have to sell it.
Sarai was the sport. Most scholars believe that Abram the Nerd drove an Oldsmobile sedan. Black, WSW, R&H.
The Bible is not a history of camels and not-camels. It's wonderful stories about God who loves us. And it's as true today as always and ever.
Here’s a worthy link, and thanks, Ed!
TW+