Feral dogs have always been seen as bad. They were dirty pests that loitered around eating our refuse and were essentially viewed as we view rats today. This actually says a lot about the history of our relationship with dogs. It didn't begin with us taking wolf pups and training them (as the popular myth was always told), it began with dogs living as scavenging pariah pests around our hunter-gatherer encampments. Dogs evolved without our help to fill this niche, much to our chagrin. We were annoyed by their presence for first few thousands of years. Clues to this fact can be found in Australian aboriginal culture, where still today "dog" is an insult, the main insult (since adopted by all Australians). Meanwhile one can view the relationship between Papua new guinea highlanders and dogs. Again they are mostly an annoyance. Tolerated begrudgingly if at all (often not, sometimes eaten). I mention these two cultures as examples of extremely old cultures that serve as a window into the past illuminating the earliest days of dog domestication. Dogs weren't domesticated by humans, they persistently forced themselves on unwilling humans.

The Middle East represents a window into a more recent past. It was a transitional period where some dogs were starting to prove their worth. They still had nuisance pariah dogs lingering around annoying them, but some lineages of dog were starting to separate themselves from the pack by evolving to be great hunting companions, others were instrumental in the domestication of other animals, the taming of goats, sheep and cattle. So Middle Eastern culture was like "look as we all know and have always known dogs are trash, don't want to rock the boat and suggest otherwise, however ... some of these dogs... I gotta say, are pretty damn handy". And indeed they were. Dogs are the reason civilisation happened, and this process happened in the middle east. They weren't unique for disliking dogs, they at the time were unique for starting to like some dogs. Latter people's would emerge who valued dogs very much, and dogs would diversify and continue to improve in how beneficial they were for a wider and wider array of roles. The Middle East is an important transitional phase in dog history, where dogs were transitioning from pest to ally and essentially building civilisation and "making man". But yes old attitudes about "dirty stinking dogs" were hard to kick.