Episode #15 Camels and Philistines

In this episode, Rabbi Reinman defends the authenticity of the biblical narratives and investigates the identity and origin of the Philistines.

Chapter Fifteen

Camels and Philistines

In this chapter, we will focus on the first fifty years of Abraham’s presence in Canaan and its environs and examine some of the arguments of the Bibliophobes against the authenticity of the narrative. I refer to these academics as Bibliophobes. A bibliophobe is someone who fears and hates books. A capitalized Bibliophobe fears and hates the Bible. Before we present the arguments and their refutation, we will summarize briefly the events of that period.

Shortly after Abraham first arrived in Canaan, there was a famine, and Abraham and Sarah headed down to Egypt, which had abundant food. The rapacious kings in ancient times, and in modern times as well, had roving eyes and often took women that caught their attention. If those women happened to be married, they were likely to kill the husband to avoid complications.

Sarah was an extraordinary woman, exceedingly beautiful, gracious and personable, and Abraham feared that the Pharaoh, as the Egyptian kings were called, would kill him and take Sarah. He therefore asked her to present herself as his sister rather than his wife. As expected, Pharoah took Sarah, but things did not go as expected. Eventually, he discovered the subterfuge and sent husband and wife away with lavish royal gifts, including sheep, cattle, donkeys and camels.[1]

Upon the family’s return to Canaan, Abraham and Lot parted ways. Abraham to Bethel and Lot to the Sodom area. Lot was carried off in captivity when the Babylonian kings sacked Sodom, and Abraham came to his rescue, as described in the previous chapter.

Abraham and Sarah were childless for many years. Ten years after they arrived in Canaan, Sarah presented her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abraham and said, “God has prevented me from giving birth. Take my maidservant. Maybe I will be built up through her.” Abraham took Hagar as a concubine, and she bore him a son named Yishmael, who would become the patriarch of the Arab world. Incidentally, it is interesting that Sarah gave her servant to Abraham so that “perhaps she would be built up through her.” Jacob’s wives did the same. This was a very ancient Mesopotamian custom, only recently discovered in buried cuneiform tablets. How would a later writer have known about it? This is just one of many proofs that places the time of writing exactly when it claims to be.

Not long thereafter, God destroyed Sodom, the appalling den of iniquity. Lot and his two daughters were the only survivors. Thinking that all of humanity had been destroyed, Lot’s daughters seduced him, and both gave birth to sons. One named her son Moav, the other named her son Ammon. These were the progenitors of the nations of Moav and Ammon.

Abraham decided to put more distance between himself and his disreputable nephew, and he moved to the Philistine city of Gerar. When he arrived in Gerar, history repeated itself. Avimelech, as the Philistine kings were called, abducted Sarah and took her to his palace, but in a dream, God warned him not to touch Sarah. Avimelech apologized to Abraham and gave him a gift of sheep and cattle and a sizeable amount of money for Sarah. He also invited Abraham to settle in the land of the Philistines.

Abraham accepted the invitation and lived there for many years. During this time, Abraham and Avimelech made a pact of coexistence. This pact would play a significant role in the future.

Sarah did eventually present Abraham with a son named Isaac. When Isaac was in his thirties, God tested them by commanding Abraham to take Isaac to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him. They both passed the test by submitting to God’s will without question or hesitation, and at the last possible moment, God rescinded His command.

After this seminal event in Jewish history, Abraham decided it was time for Isaac to get married. He sent his servant Eliezer to Harran with ten laden camels to the house of his uncle Besuel. Eliezer met the young Rebecca and asked her if she would come back with him, and she agreed.

This is a very brief synopsis of the biblical narrative from the point where Abraham steps onto the stage of world history until the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca. From this point on, the biblical narrative shifts from Abraham and follows the life of Isaac, who would become the second patriarch of the Jewish people. The entire story in full detail appears in the Book of Genesis. I chose to mention these events because they are the focus of some of the attacks of the Bibliophobes. We will discuss their theories at length when we get to the nineteenth century, but in the meantime, it is worthwhile to make a few points while we are still in the biblical era.

One of the Bibliophobe arguments against the authenticity of the Torah is the appearance of doublets, the repetition of the same story in different forms. The story of Sarah’s abduction in Egypt, and the story of her abduction in the land of the Philistines is undoubtedly, they claim, the same story as it appears in different documents written in late antiquity and combined by an unidentified redactor. For some reason, they are unwilling to accept that there may have been more than one rapacious king in deep antiquity.

Imagine scholars reading history books from our time and discovering two stories about an American president named George W. Bush who put together a coalition to fight a Persian Gulf war against Iraq, whose president was a man named Saddam Hussein. One story is said to have taken place in 1991. The other is said to have taken place in 2002. Surely, these stories are one and the same, except that they are not.

Another Bibliophobe attack on the authenticity of the Torah is the discovery of seeming anachronisms. This means that details of a story that only existed at a later time undermine the credibility of the story. If we are told that Alexander the Great attacked the Persian Empire with tanks and fighter jets, we have to suspect that the story is fabricated.

One supposed anachronism in the Torah is the appearance of camels in the patriarchal age. Archaeologists have not found camel bones in archaeological digs dating back to that time. Camel bones are found only in the ruins of civilizations nearly a thousand years later. Therefore, they conclude that camels had still not been domesticated then. And yet, we find Eliezer going to Harran with ten camels. Clearly, this was written at a much later time, and the writer did not know that camels were a late arrival.

This is a good question, and it deserves a good answer. Actually, there is some evidence of camels from those times, but how do we account for the lack of bones in the archaeological digs?

The answer lies in the text itself. Camels are first mentioned in the Torah among the parting gifts Pharoah gave Abraham. The camels were a royal gift, a luxurious form of transportation enjoyed only by royalty and the ultrarich, the ancient equivalent of a Rolls Royce. Avimelech’s gift did not contain camels, because he was just a minor king. Pharoah, however, was the king of the Egyptian Empire. He had camels.

Abraham did not use the camels for ordinary transportation, even though they must have been a great convenience. When he took Isaac to Mount Moriah they went by donkey. The camels remained in the garage. He bred them because they were very valuable, but he did not use them.

When Jacob sent a gift to mollify Eisav, his brother, he also sent some camels, but when he sent his sons to Egypt to buy food during a famine, they went by donkey. Again, we see that camels were not for everyday use.

However, when he sent Eliezer to find a bride for Isaac, he wanted to impress the prospective in-laws, so he sent him with ten camels. That probably sealed the deal.

The Bibliophobes also point to another supposed anachronism. According to the Torah, Abraham lived for a while in the land of the Philistines. The problem is that the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region until about a thousand years later. Ancient Egyptian records report that the Sea People colonized the Mediterranean coast in what is now the Gaza Strip and built five cities Gaza, Gath, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron. The biblical writer, the Bibliophobes claim, was not aware of the late arrival of the Philistines and wrote them into the story.

These five cities are mentioned in the Book of Joshua, but Gerar is not mentioned. And nowhere are the five cities mentioned in the Chumash. What does that tell us?

The answers once again are in the text. In the genealogy of Parashas Noach, we read, “And the Pasrusites and the Kasluchites from whom the Philistines descend, and the Kaphtorites.”[2] Clearly, the Philistines and the Kaphtorites are two distinct group. But who are the Kaphtorites?

Yirmiyah says, “For God will destroy the Philistines, the remnants of the isle of Kaphtor.”[3] The Kaphtorites are Philistines who come from the isle of Kaphtor somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The Kaphtorites are the Sea People. Amos says, “For I have brought forth Israel from the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Kaphtor.”[4] Again, we see that the Kaphtorites are Philistines, and it seems that they arrived at about the same time as the Jewish people. Why did they arrive at the same time?

When Moses stood on the threshold of Canaan, he described the political and ethnic lay of the land to the Jewish people. “And the Avites who dwell in open cities until Gaza, the Kaphtorites who came out of Kaphtor destroyed them and dwelled in their place.”[5] Rashi explains that the Avites were also Philistines, as they are mentioned together with the five Philistine cities in the Book of Joshua.[6] But their pact of coexistence with Abraham prevented a Jewish conquest of their land. Therefore, God sent Kaphtorites, a second wave of Philistines from a different tribe, to take the land from the Avites, thereby allowing the Jewish people to conquer it.

Now we have identified the Gerarites. They were the Avites who established a large kingdom south of Canaan more than a thousand years before the Kaphtorites arrived. They occupied the Gaza Strip and also a broad swath of land south and west along the mediterranean coast. Their capital was Gerar, and they had a pact of non-aggression with the Jewish people. The Kaphtorites established the five cities on the Gaza Strip, and they were the sworn enemies of the Jewish people.

This helps solve another problem. When the Jewish people were emerging from Egypt, the Torah tells us that the Lord did not guide them along the short route to Canaan through the land of the Philistines because they might lose heart and return to Egypt. But how could He have taken them directly through the land of the Philistines? That would lead them deep into Canaan, practically to Jerusalem. When would they go to Mount Sinai to receive the Torah?

Clearly the Torah is referring to the land of the Avites to the south of Gaza Strip. They could have gone along the Mediterranean coast through Gerar and turned south into the desert straight to Mount Sinai.

[1] Bereishis 12:16.

[2] Bereishis 10:14.

[3] Yirmiyahu 47:4.

[4] Amos 9:7.

[5] Devarim 2:23.

[6] Yehoshua 13:3.