Anachronism, Historicity, and Sacred Literature
The Genesis account portrays Abraham as a wealthy man, with sheep, goats and camels -- except there's one big problem with this account. There is no archeological evidence of the domestication of camels until some centuries later than the latest possible date for the Patriarchs. Even then, it was in the Arabian peninsula, not the Levant.
This is a serious problem for faith communities that place a significant weight on the concept of Biblical inerrancy -- that every word of Holy Scripture is literally true. If Abraham is portrayed as owning camels, suggesting that he couldn't have is tantamount to blasphemy, or at least to dismissing the sacred books as a collection of myths and fables.
However, the people of the times in which those texts were written did not think of history and historiography in the way we moderns do. Our views are heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and place a strong emphasis on factual accuracy of the descriptions of the past, and particularly a faithful representation of the world and events as the participants would've perceived them.
By contrast, to many of the ancient writers, it was perfectly natural to write of figures centuries in the past in terms of the writer's present. If the camel was a symbol of wealth in the writer's time, then camels would be included in the possession of someone being portrayed as a man of great wealth, even if that person lived centuries earlier, when things were different. (Even in the Medieval era, it was considered unremarkable to portray the Roman soldiers at the Crucifixion as wearing the armor of a knight of the artist's era, because that was what the intended audience was familiar with).
This would suggest that, when we read sacred literature, it's more important to focus on the deeper spiritual meaning rather than becoming hung up on details like the premature presence of camels in the stories of the Patriarchs, because we're committing the opposite error, of imposing our mindset and expectations on authors centuries before us, instead of seeking to get inside their mindset and understanding the expectations of the audience for whom they were writing.
This is a serious problem for faith communities that place a significant weight on the concept of Biblical inerrancy -- that every word of Holy Scripture is literally true. If Abraham is portrayed as owning camels, suggesting that he couldn't have is tantamount to blasphemy, or at least to dismissing the sacred books as a collection of myths and fables.
However, the people of the times in which those texts were written did not think of history and historiography in the way we moderns do. Our views are heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and place a strong emphasis on factual accuracy of the descriptions of the past, and particularly a faithful representation of the world and events as the participants would've perceived them.
By contrast, to many of the ancient writers, it was perfectly natural to write of figures centuries in the past in terms of the writer's present. If the camel was a symbol of wealth in the writer's time, then camels would be included in the possession of someone being portrayed as a man of great wealth, even if that person lived centuries earlier, when things were different. (Even in the Medieval era, it was considered unremarkable to portray the Roman soldiers at the Crucifixion as wearing the armor of a knight of the artist's era, because that was what the intended audience was familiar with).
This would suggest that, when we read sacred literature, it's more important to focus on the deeper spiritual meaning rather than becoming hung up on details like the premature presence of camels in the stories of the Patriarchs, because we're committing the opposite error, of imposing our mindset and expectations on authors centuries before us, instead of seeking to get inside their mindset and understanding the expectations of the audience for whom they were writing.