Loving, Passionate, Sexy Camels and other Beautiful Biblical Beasts in Isaiah and Jeremiah

 “A multitude of camels shall cover you. . . 

All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered

to you,

the rams of Nebaioth shall minister to you.”

(Isaiah 6:6-7)

I can’t stop thinking about Isaiah 60:6-7. I know it’s supposed to symbolize the nations paying tribute to Israel, metonymically and actually through animal offerings. But I’m enjoying imagining it detached from its cultural context. 

Are you ever caught with your bank account at its limit–an important bill just out of your financial reach? Maybe you’re stranded on the side of the road with a broke-down engine. Maybe your card was just declined with a week’s worth of groceries on the cashier’s belt. Here come the camels. They’ll cover you. 

You hear one braying from just out of sight. Then another comes around the corner. They and a third camel mosey purposefully to the checkout counter where you stand, declined card in hand, full of embarrassment. One of the camels spits on the grocer’s scale. You can smell him. His hot, heavy breathing humidifies the air. The camels smell like sweat and sand and the odor of labor that never really goes away, even after a million showers. 

A young camel pushes his way through the now uncountable multitude of others. He is a Midianite spectacle of hump and muscle. With his big lips, he carefully deposits gold coins on the counter, plenty, he’s sure, to bring you even with the store’s demands. A female camel, a broad, Ephesian, two-humped dromedary, drools out a long line of jammy spittle on the conveyor belt, it’s fragrance–frankincense she carried in her enormous cheek across an ]unforgiving desert–is intoxicating. 

All the camels praise the LORD. 

The musk of the camels still on your clothes, you walk home and open your door. No sooner do you enter, than the flocks of Kedar follow. They gather across every inch of your living room; the tufts of wool cushion your shins. You must be careful not to crush any cloven hoof. They bleat a tangled chorus of moral support, something you didn’t know you were desperate for. They baa in unison their approval of your life’s decisions. They bleat out in sheepy harmony the truth that you have never been alone. 

Gently, they guide you to a chair. They clear space. Out come three wise rams, their horns spiral crowns upon their heads. They grunt and bleat as if to say your name in full. In reverence, they say it again. They anoint you with fine oil. They lick your wounds. For the first time in a long long time you feel at peace in your mortal coil. You feel gripped in love. You feel free. 

When all is said and done, from where do the great herds come? These camels, these flocks of sheep and ram? What deed has made you deserving of their care? Each one lays itself so humbly upon an altar in sacrifice for you. They leave behind everything to come to you. They’d sooner drink the desert. But there’s something that draws them to you, that even you cannot really understand. 

They cover you. They gather. They minister gently to your body and your mind. They are coarseness and roughness, and stench, and tenderness. And they love you. They restore you. They call out for you across the wilderness. Even on the lonesome nights in lonesome years in lonesome decades, they dream of you. Even from their mute tongues they speak your name. They remember. 

In Jeremiah there’s a camel too. 

“A restive young camel interlacing her tracks,

a wild ass at home in the wilderness,

in her heat sniffing the wind!

Who can restrain her lust?

none who seek her need weary themselves;

in her month they will find her.”

(Jeremiah 2:23-24)

This one symbolizes Israel through the lens of King Josiah’s religious reforms. Jeremiah uses the imagery as a condemnation of pre-Josiah Israel. But I want us to honor that slutty camel. 

Who can restrain her lust? No one. Look at her sniff in the open desert air. Look at her eye on the prize. Look at her tracks, interwoven. The art she weaves behind in the sand, unknowingly. Look how easily she lies with the Canaanite camels, building bridges where none but her beauty ever existed. 

From a Tarot deck today, I drew the 6 of wands that depicted Lady Godiva on a royal steed (I promise this will connect, lol) The guidebook says she represents happiness and that confused me. To me, the Godiva story is about an oppressive government, a manipulative husband, sexual harassment, and yes, a woman who finds a way to leverage her power in spite of it. But I don’t see joy as a main theme. But then I realized how vulnerable true joy really is. To be happy and not hide it is so vulnerable, and the card drew out that reality. And that vulnerable joy is not just personally enriching. Joy is subversive. It is a high rebellion to glow with inextinguishable internal joy when all external factors impose nothing but guilt and shame and suffering on your beautiful hide. 

And that’s what I see in the camel whore of Jeremiah. I see a beast who has taken all of the pejoratives of the prophet and has subverted the text with her powerful lust. 

And you know what? I’m actually happy to put her back into her symbolic context in the book of Jeremiah. Israel is a lusty camel, and I’m glad she is. I’m glad she turned up the heat enough to, as is attested in scholarship, fuse together multiple Canaanite gods to define the LORD. I’m glad she stripped, unceremoniously, the religious and cultural texts of the region and made them her own in so many new and fascinating ways. We would not have a Bible as we know it today, if ancient Israel did not know its way around the Levant to put its growing canon together from so many beautifully conflicting parts and put it in conversation with the nations that are, as prophesied by Isaiah, still flowing unto it. And I think we need to follow the camel’s example. 

Isaiah teaches that the LORD will, “create new heavens and a new earth,” and I know “heavens” is just plural because that’s the way we talk about the skies and the heavens. But I’d like to think that god intends us to imagine new heavens. And we have to sniff them out with unrestrainable lust. And we who seek her need not weary ourselves. In her month we will find her.