An even more serious undermining of the Bible’s authority has come, however, from the general realisation, as archaeology has developed, that a world that is supposed to be set in the Bronze Age–say, c. 1800 BC–is in fact set in the Iron Age, i.e., after 1200 BC. Place names in the Bible are Iron Age names, the Philistines (Palestinians) are not mentioned in other, extra-biblical texts, until around 1200 BC, and domesticated camels, though mentioned in the Bible as early as chapter 24 of Genesis, were not brought under human control until the end of the second millennium BC.21
