(February 6, 2014 at 2:51 am)max-greece Wrote: The earliest reference I can find to camels in the Bible is in Genesis 12, 16.If Ur was located somewhere in the area where Iraq is today, then that was quite a long trip to make on foot during a famine. It's interesting to see that Abram has such little faith in god at this point that he decides he'll lie to Pharaoh to avoid being killed, and winds up making out like a bandit. The story could be interpreted to show that he kept all of the gifts he received as a sort of dowry for his "sister."
According to the story Abram has left Canaan during a famine and gone to stay in Egypt:
It should be obvious that a person writing these stories many centuries after the period in question would mention camels in Egypt. And if writing these as moral tales, would not worry about having an elderly couple drag their large entourage 400-800 miles across a pretty inhospitable land during a famine. If this is what passes for putting those uppity atheists in our place, it's a pretty poor effort.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
