You probably can’t look very far through the stack of Christmas cards you received in the past weeks without finding some pictures of camels. They’re always there, either with the Magi seated on them looking toward the star or posed beside the stable as the gifts are presented to the one born King of the Jews. But where are the camels in the biblical story? There’s no mention of them in the Epiphany gospel reading from Matthew. It’s only in the Old Testament reading for the festival that they show up — “the young camels of Midian and Ephah” who will bring the wealth of the nations to Zion.
Few of us see camels very often, so they help to give an exotic “Bible times” air to the Epiphany story. We can imagine the adventure of the “three kings” crossing “field and fountain, moor and mountain” as they follow the star, and it sounds kind of fun and exciting.
But those camels — what would they have been like on the journey? Valuable as these animals were in the ancient Near East and still are today, they aren’t the easiest to get along with. One older encyclopedia begins its article on them by saying that the camel “is one of the ugliest, meanest, and most useful of all animals” and says that it “will bite and kick ferociously, with or without cause” and “often whines and protests while being loaded.”1
The Magi
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