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Camel, Camel's Hair

Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament

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CAMEL, CAMEL’S HAIR.—The camel is by far the most useful of all animals in the East. There are two kinds of camels—the Turkish or Bactrian camel and the dromedary. The first is larger, has a double hump, and is capable of sustaining greater burdens; the latter is swifter, has a single hump, and is far less affected by extreme heat. The camel has been domesticated from time immemorial; it is now at least nowhere found in its aboriginal wild state, and nature has adapted it to its specific environment. Its nostrils are close and flat, to exclude the dust of the desert; its feet are heavily padded, and its anatomy shows provision for the enduring of great privation. It mocks hunger and thirst alike; it can go without water from sixteen to forty days.

The camel forms the staple wealth of the Arab of the desert, who utilizes every part of the animal, even to the dung, which is used as fuel. Its flesh was forbidden to the Jew (Leviticus 11:4, Deuteronomy 14:7). Its milk is extremely nutritious, and on fermentation becomes an intoxicant. A thick mat of fine hair protects the animal against the extremes alike of heat and cold.

The camel is mentioned three times in the Gospels, on two occasions as a synonym for size or bulkiness; Matthew 19:24 (= Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25), ‘It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’; and Matthew 23:24 ‘Ye blind guides, which strain out the gnat, and swallow the camel.’ In the former of these passages two attempts have been made to evade the Oriental hyperbole, firstly, by reading κάμιλος, ‘a rope,’ for κάμηλος; and, again, by explaining the ‘eye of the needle’ as the small door for foot-passengers which is generally made in the frame of the large entrance-door of an Eastern house. The expression ‘eye of the needle,’ however, is only the English equivalent of the Greek words denoting a ‘hole.’ The eye of a needle stands for something narrow and hard to pass, as in the Egyptian proverb, ‘Straiter than the eye of a needle’ (Burckhardt, 396). A similar proverb is given by Freytag (ii. p. 19), ‘Narrower than the shadow of a lance and than the hole of a needle.’ And in the Koran we have (vii. 38), ‘As for those who declare our signs to be lies, and who scorn them, the doors of heaven will not be open to them, nor will they enter Paradise, until a camel shall penetrate into the eye of a needle’—that is, never.

In the second of the two passages above, the camel is contrasted with the gnat, ‘Ye blind guides, which strain out a gnat, and drink down a camel.’ The gnat stands for an emblem of smallness in the Koran (ii. 24, ‘God is not ashamed to strike a proverb out of a gnat’). In Arabic the elephant rather than the camel is chosen to designate hugeness, as in the song of Kaab ibn Zuheir—

‘If there stood in the place which I stand in an elephant,

Hearing and seeing what I see and hear.

His shoulder muscles with dread would be twitching’;

and the camel is an emblem of patience and silent endurance, and goes by the name of ‘the father of Job.’ The elephant must have been a not unfamiliar object in Palestine in the first century, but would naturally be thought of in connexion with Hellenism and idolatry.

Camel’s hair or wool, as it is called, is woven by the Arabs into tent-covers, and also into rough outer garments for the peasantry. In Israel this coarse mantle was the badge of the prophet (Zechariah 13:4 ‘The prophets shall be ashamed each one of his vision, when he prophesieth; and they will no more wear a hairy garment in order to deceive’); and in 2 Kings 1:8 Elijah is described as being an ‘owner of hair’ בַּעַל שִעָר, that is, wearing this garment of the prophets; Authorized Version, ‘an hairy man’), and girt with leather. As the successor of Elijah and of the prophets, John the Baptist adopted the same dress (Matthew 3:4, Mark 1:6). It is generally supposed that the Oriental mystic or sufi is so named from his dress of wool (suf); cf. Revelation 11:3.

T. H. Weir and Henry E. Dosker.