Liberal biblical scholars are not honest brokers in pursuit of an objective truth about the Bible. They are dishonest truth suppressors peddling a false alternative religion. They don’t want the Bible to be true. If it were true, it would get in the way of their pursuit of their own sinful agenda, a pursuit which is generally financed by the legacy of faithful Christians long departed. Liberal theology is the voice of the serpent in the garden hissing the words “Hath God really said…?” It behooves the child of God to be aware of that fact.

I live in a small town in western South Dakota. I have an ’02 F-250 Powerstroke diesel pickup. It’s got something called a diesel dual fuel. It runs part of its fuel load on compressed natural gas (CNG) and part of its fuel load on diesel fuel at the same time. I can get 45 miles per diesel gallon out of it driving on the interstate highway.

Let’s suppose that I become famous and some biographer writes a book about me long after I’m dead. Let’s further suppose that he mentions in passing that I owned a diesel/CNG pickup. Now, let’s suppose that 4,000 years from now an archaeologist with an interest in the history of transportation comes across that statement in my biography. He might be skeptical of that claim for the following reasons:

1. Diesel pickups are expensive to buy, expensive to repair, and expensive to operate. Adding CNG technology to the pickup adds many thousands of dollars to an already expensive item. Nobody owns a diesel pickup who doesn’t need one for hauling. Since I am a minister in a small church in a small town, I do not make very much money and I do not haul things. Therefore it is unlikely from an economic perspective that I would own a diesel/CNG pickup.

2. South Dakota has no CNG stations in existence right now. There is no obvious place to fill up my CNG tanks.

3. Although home CNG compressors exist, they are expensive. This further bolsters the economic argument that I would be unlikely to own such a pickup.

4. CNG vehicles in general are very rare on American roads. Very few people of any type own them.

So let’s say that the archaeologist decided to do some more investigating. Suppose he comes to western South Dakota and excavates two auto salvage yards dating from the early 21^st century. After extensive and painstaking excavations, he finds the remains of precisely zero CNG vehicles.

This is not an unexpected outcome. As unlikely as it may seem given the facts laid out in items 1-4 above, I do actually own a diesel CNG pickup. There are three CNG vehicles that I know of in the whole state of South Dakota. One is an old Chevy Cavalier in Rapid City, one is an 18 wheeler in Corsica, SD, and then there’s my pickup. Mine is the only diesel/CNG pickup in the whole state.

That set of circumstances makes it very difficult for any future archaeologist to verify this fact. He basically would have to stumble upon the remains of my pickup in some excavated junkyard 4,000 years from now. This would also require that the pickup and the constituent elements of the natural gas conversion kit all survive for 4,000 years. This is most unlikely.

One would think, therefore, that the proper response of any future archaeologist would be agnosticism. “We have no evidence to support the claim that Rev. Brian Carpenter owned a diesel/CNG pickup, but neither can we refute the claim” would be a reasonable thing to say. “Scientific investigations by Archaeologist proves that account of Rev. Brian Carpenter’s life is full of lies” would be an unreasonable thing to say.

And yet that unreasonable thing is exactly what’s being said today in all sorts of places concerning the biblical Patriarchs and their camels. Israeli archaeologist have unearthed the oldest known bones of domesticated camels from two sites in Israel and carbon 14 dated them. They all date back approximately to the time of David. And what does everyone conclude from this fact?

They conclude that the camels mentioned in the narrative of the Patriarchs in Genesis are anachronistic insertions ignorantly committed by a post-exilic compiler. Therefore the Word of God has got serious problems. Therefore we Bible-believing Christians are simply clinging to a worldview that is hopelessly erroneous and probably even dangerous. We’re certainly retarding the progress of society.

But do the facts support those conclusions? Not remotely. It’s quite probable that the Canaanites from the time of the Patriarchs did not use camels as beasts of burden. There is some evidence that camels may have been domesticated in Egypt as far back as 3,000 BC, a full thousand years before Abraham, but it’s not conclusive and it’s a pretty good bet that even if they were domesticated, they weren’t widely utilized there. It does appear from the current state of archaeological investigation that the widespread domestication of the dromedary camel took place on the Arabian Peninsula a little before the time when they showed up in the Israeli archaeological record.

However, it has also been shown that the Bactrian (two humped) camel was domesticated in the middle of the 3^rd millennium BCE in the area that composes modern Iran, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan. Small clay figurines of camels attached to clay carts suggest that the two humped camel was employed as a draught animal by the early 3^rd millennium BC. (Peters/von den Driesch, 1997, 658-660; Kohl, 1984, 186.) This predates Abraham by 700-800 years.

Furthermore, it is widely understood that there was a robust trade network between what is today western China and Mesopotamia, where Abraham was born and raised. There is ample evidence to suggest that this trading activity introduced the camel as a domesticated animal into Mesopotamia before Abraham was born. Archaeologists have found a Sumerian clay tablet written in approximately the time of Abraham which contains a love poem between Inanna and Dumuzi, two mythological figures. The poem reads, in part:

“Make the milk yellow for me, my bridegroom… O my bridegroom, may I drink milk with you, with goat milk from the sheepfold… fill the holy butter churn… O Dumuzi, make the milk of the camel yellow for me- the camel, its milk is sweet… It’s butter-milk, which is sweet, make yellow for me.” (M. Heide, 2011, 356)

Not to belabor the obvious, but people don’t milk a 1500 lb wild animal. You only milk domesticated animals.

Abraham would have had ample opportunity to acquire camels in either Ur or during his extended stay in Haran, since they would have been known in either place.

The Genesis narrative does not make any sort of claim as to how widespread camels were in either Egypt or in Canaan. It simply says that Abraham possessed some of them. They may have been as rare then as diesel/CNG pickups are in South Dakota today.

It is notable that the camel disappears in Genesis by the time of Jacob’s move to Egypt. Perhaps the herd died out from disease. Perhaps they were sold to traders from the east. There would be no more trips to Ur of the Chaldeans for Jacob and his offspring. There was, therefore, little need for them. Donkeys were preferable.

There is one mention of camels early in the Exodus narrative. It reappears in Judges as the animal which the Midianite warriors employ in their invasions of Israel, but we don’t see the Israelites owning them until the Davidic narrative in 1 Chronicles 27. Interestingly, the man put in charge of David’s camels in 1 Chronicles 27 was an Ishmaelite, indicating perhaps an inexperience with keeping and breeding them, along with perhaps an aversion to an unclean animal. Camels were not employed in any widespread way in ancient Israel until David and Solomon began to develop trade networks. This, of course, is perfectly consistent with the archaeological findings.

It is irksome in the extreme when these things are used to undermine the confidence God’s people have in his Word. Any student of the history of liberal theology knows that these sorts of things have been bandied about for more than a hundred years. Many of the claims have been refuted by subsequent archaeological findings. For instance, liberal scholars panned the gospel of Luke because he mentions a certain Lysanias as the tetrarch of Abilene in 3:1. They were certain that this proved that Luke was written at a much later date, since the real Luke would have known that Lysanias was the tetrarch of Abilene 50 years before John the Baptist came on the scene. Until they found an inscription that conclusively proved that there was a second man named Lysanias who was the tetrarch of Abilene between AD 14 and AD 29, which perfectly meshes with the description in Luke’s gospel.

There are three parties at work in this process: archaeologists, liberal biblical scholars, and the news media. Archaeologists can sometimes make fairly firm statements about something that did happen. Only rarely can archaeologists make categorical statements about what did not happen. The best they can usually say is “We haven’t found any evidence for this event yet.” The evidence may lie undiscovered. It may also have been destroyed.

Liberal biblical scholars are not honest brokers in pursuit of an objective truth about the Bible. They are dishonest truth suppressors peddling a false alternative religion. They don’t want the Bible to be true. If it were true, it would get in the way of their pursuit of their own sinful agenda, a pursuit which is generally financed by the legacy of faithful Christians long departed. Liberal theology is the voice of the serpent in the garden hissing the words “Hath God really said…?” It behooves the child of God to be aware of that fact.

As for the news media, what can we say? The more I read in the media about things I know quite a bit about, the more skeptical I become of almost everything they write. A novice on a given subject has to come up with some sort of comprehension of that subject on short notice to produce a story which will, in all likelihood, be forgotten by next week. It is not a recipe for transmitting a good understanding of the facts. If you add any biases on the part of the reporter to the mix, you get an even worse result.

Let the faithful Christian not be discombobulated by the latest “assured results of modern biblical scholarship.” A quiet confidence in the Word of God is more than warranted by the facts. Remember that Marcus Borg or John Dominic Crossan or Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza show up on your TV screen around Eastertime this year.

Brian Carpenter is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as pastor of Foothills Community Church in Sturgis, S.D.

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