Were there domesticated camels in Abraham's day? Genesis 12 and 24

The passages

And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels.

Genesis 12:16

And the servant took ten camels of the camels of his master, and departed.

Genesis 24:10

The problem

Abraham's lifetime is traditionally placed around 2000–1800 BC. Bones of domesticated camels in the southern Levant appear in large numbers only from the late tenth century BC, and they are rare before that. A study of copper-mining sites in the Aravah Valley placed the introduction of domestic camels there in the late tenth century BC, about the time of the biblical Solomon. If so, camels in the patriarchal stories are an anachronism, written in by authors who knew camels as normal pack animals.

What believers and scholars say

Early use, rare evidence. Kitchen and others point to scattered earlier finds of camel bones, camel figurines and one or two inscriptions, and argue that camels were known in small numbers well before they were common. A wealthy man might own a few.

Later editors updated the details. If the text was composed or edited in the first millennium BC, the camels may reflect the world of the writers. This is a standard explanation among critical scholars, and some conservative scholars accept that editors updated incidental details.

Domestication is a matter of definition. Heide argues the question depends on what counts as domestication. A tamed camel kept for milk or occasional transport leaves little archaeological mark, and the evidence for wide commercial use is a different matter.

Where this leaves it

The disputed word here is "domesticated". On the evidence available, camels were very rare in the early period, and a caravan of ten is hard to place. This is a small anachronism, but it appears in a book that claims to describe the second millennium, so it carries weight for the question of when Genesis took its present form.