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The Camel
Our Adaptation to Them
Stephen Broyles
Camel Carrying Wine Amphora.
Mosaic. Kissufim, Israel, sixth century.
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by courtesy of the Israel Antiquities
Authority.
For us in the West, the camel is the animal which more than any other
belongs to the Near East. Camels are well suited for life there. Desert
winds do not bother them because they have two rows of eyelashes and
slit-like nostrils that close to keep out dust and sand. They can walk
easily over sand, snow, and rock on their broad, padded feet. They are
able to go for days without eating because they store fat in their
humps. They are able to go for days without drinking, because their
bodies tolerate dehydration up to a fourth of their total weight, and
they replace the water quickly when they can drink again. Camels are so
well adapted to desert conditions that they do not survive well in any
other climate.
In fact, camels are so well adapted that when men wanted to make use
of them, they had to adapt themselves to the camel rather than the camel
to them. The principle economic value of the camel is its usefulness as
a pack animal in the desert. Therefore people had to let the camel go on
being a camel while they themselves conformed to its ways and to the
desert environment.
Although in Palestine the donkey was always the primary beast of
burden, the Bible does mention camel caravans and sometimes lists their
burdens. When the Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon she came with
camels bearing spices, gold, and precious stones (1 Kings 10:2; 2
Chronicles 9:1). When the prophet Elisha approached Damascus, Ben-Hadad,
the king of Syria, sent him forty camel loads of goods from the city (2
Kings 8:9).
Sometimes camels have been used militarily. In the time of the
Judges, some of Israel’s neighbors rode camels in raids against the
villages of Esdraelon. One of these early raids was mounted by “the
Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the East” (Judges 6:3).
The camels of these people were said to be “without number, as the sand
which is upon the seashore for multitude” (Judges 7:12). When the two
Midianite kings Zebah and Zalmunna were captured, it was found that
their camel mounts were decorated with jewelry, crescents, and chains
hung around their necks (Judges 8:21, 26).
By Roman times, the horse was the preeminent war animal. Nonetheless,
the Parthians, especially Surenas, skillfully developed the tactical
employment of camels in battle. The strength of Surenas’ army lay in his
10,000 horse-archers, who could shoot equally well riding away from you
as toward you, and whose arrows could pierce light armor. But the
archers were worth little without their arrows, so Surenas kept them
supplied with a huge reserve carried by 1,000 Arabian camels. The Roman
general Crassus felt the full weight of this combination. When he
attempted to subdue Mesopotamia by invading across the open land, the
Parthians destroyed his army at the battle of Carrhae (53 b.c.; Plutarch
Crassus 19ff.).
The rough clothing of John the Baptist was made of camel hair
(Matthew 3:4; Mark 1:6). John is the only biblical character said
explicitly to wear clothes of this material, although it is probable
that Elijah’s “garment of haircloth” was made of camel hair, too.
Two sayings of Jesus place the camel—a ridiculous animal anyway—in
ridiculous postures.
To illustrate his remark, “It will be hard for a rich man to enter
the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God” (Matthew 19:23-24; Mark 10:23-25; Luke 18:24-25). Imagine the
largest domestic animal of the East being threaded through the smallest
hole that ancient craftsmen could drill!
In another saying, Jesus illustrated the wisdom of putting first
things first. He found that some people were fastidious in minor
religious observances and tithed minute amounts of garden herbs, but
they were apparently oblivious of larger matters like justice, mercy,
and faith. He accused them of “straining out a gnat and swallowing a
camel” (Matthew 23:23-25). Here again the contrast is between the
largest and the smallest, for the camel and the gnat are the largest and
smallest of the unclean animals (Leviticus 11:4, 20, 41). The point is
that a man may well strain a drowned bug out of his drink and thereby
avoid swallowing food that is unclean. But he is no better off if he
should then obliviously gulp down a whole camel. The order should be
reversed: first remove the big things that contaminate your heart and
your life, and then see about the lesser things. Or to put it positively
rather than negatively, first fill your heart with justice, mercy, and
faith, and then the other obligations of the law will fall into place.
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