In your discussion regarding modern scholars’ interpretation of the story of Abraham and his exodus from Ur you quote one of Albright’s students as saying that although we can never know whether the man Abraham ever really existed, through archeological discoveries made in the last century, “we can prove that his life and his times as reflected in the stories about him….fit imperfectly with a later period..” I am taking this to mean that whoever wrote the story of Abraham wrote either within Abraham’s own lifetime or not to long after it. (pg.101)
However, in Genesis 10:16 it states that when Sarai was taken into Pharaoh’s house “he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep oxen,…donkeys, and camels.” I believe that camels were not yet domesticated at the time that Abraham would have lived. Doesn’t this show that perhaps the story may have been put into writing much later, thus reflecting the time in which the writer lived and not Abraham?
Scholarship has really gone back and forth on that question. Albright himself suggested that the camels were an anachronism; he said Abraham was really a “donkey caravaneer.” But I think now that most scholars nowadays believe the evidence is far less unambiguous than Albright thought — and frankly, it always seemed to me quite unreasonable to suppose that, thousands and thousands of years after the domestication of sheep and cattle, the camel somehow remained outside the barn!