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Jews around the world today are known to be more educated – and even more likely to vote in elections – than their counterparts. But was this high level of literacy true thousands of years ago? Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU), together with a retired superintendent and senior handwriting examiner from the Israel Police Division of Identification and Forensic Science, have found that contrary to popular belief, many people in the ancient Kingdom of Judah could read and write.
The first-ever, special interdisciplinary study, just published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS One) was conducted by Dr. Arie Shaus, Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin and Dr. Barak Sober of TAU’s applied mathematics department; Prof. Eli Piasetzky of the Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy; and Prof. Israel Finkelstein of the department of archeology and ancient Near Eastern civilizations. The forensic handwriting specialist was Yana Gerber, a senior expert who served for 27 years in the Israel Police.
The researchers examined the writings found in Tel Arad – ostraca (fragments of pottery vessels containing ink inscriptions) that were discovered at the Tel Arad archaeological site in the 1960s. Tel Arad is one of Israel’s most important archaeological sites, where remains were found of a fortified Canaanite city and fortresses from the time of the kings of Judah, when it was a small military post on the southern border of the kingdom. Its built-up area covered about two dunams, and it housed between 20 and 30 soldiers. The fortresses include the remains of a unique Judean temple.
Literacy was not the exclusive domain of a handful of royal scribes, the team concluded after examining ink-inscribed pottery shards and identifying 12 different handwritings with varying degrees of certainty.
A high rate of literacy indicates the ability to compile biblical texts, such as the books from Joshua to Kings, before the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians.
Forensic handwriting examination of the Arad inscriptions had never before been conducted. In fact, to the best of the team’s knowledge, such an examination had never been performed on any ancient inscription for forensic chemical analysis in the context of historical texts. The researchers used state-of-the-art image processing and machine learning technologies to analyze 18 ancient texts from the Tel Arad military post dating back to around 600 BCE. They concluded that they were written by no fewer than 12 authors, a finding suggesting that many of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah during that period were able to read and write, and that literacy not reserved as an exclusive domain in the hands of a few royal scribes...
...According to the researchers, the findings shed new light on Judahite society on the eve of the destruction of the First Temple and on the setting of the compilation of biblical texts.
“It should be remembered that this was a small outpost, one of a series of outposts on the southern border of the kingdom of Judah,” said Sober. “Since we found at least 12 different authors out of 18 texts in total, we can conclude that there was a high level of literacy throughout the entire kingdom. The commanding ranks and liaison officers at the outpost, and even the quartermaster Eliashib and his deputy, Nahum, were literate.” Someone had to teach them how to read and write, said Sober, “so we must assume the existence of an appropriate educational system in Judah at the end of the First Temple period. This, of course, does not mean that there was almost universal literacy as there is today, but it seems that significant portions of the residents of the Kingdom of Judah were literate. This is important to the discussion on the composition of biblical texts. If there were only two or three people in the whole kingdom who could read and write, then it is unlikely that complex texts would have been composed.”
“Whoever wrote the biblical works did not do so for us, so that we could read them after 2,600 years, they did so in order to promote the ideological messages of the time,” concluded Finkelstein. “There are different opinions regarding the date of the composition of biblical texts. Some scholars suggest that many of the historical texts in the Bible – from Joshua to II Kings – were written at the end of the 7th century BCE, that is, very close to the period of the Arad ostraca. It is important to ask for whom these texts were written. According to one view, there were events in which the few people who could read and write stood before the illiterate public and read texts out to them. A high literacy rate in Judah puts things into a different light.”
“Until now, the discussion of literacy in the Kingdom of Judah has been based on circular arguments, that is, on what is written within the Bible itself, for example on scribes in the kingdom,” he said. “We have shifted the discussion to an empirical perspective. If in a remote place like Tel Arad there was, over a short period of time, a minimum of 12 authors of 18 inscriptions, out of the population of Judah – estimated to have been no more than 120,000 people – it means that literacy was not the exclusive domain of a handful of royal scribes in Jerusalem. The quartermaster from the Tel Arad outpost also had the ability to read and appreciate them.”
Click on the link to see the original article Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level by Arie Shaus, Yana Gerber, Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., PLoS One, September 9, 2020.
Thanks for posting this.
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