ARCHAEOLOGY: Judah was Literate

So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading. Nehemiah 8:8

"The Hebrew inscriptions from the Arad fort, located in the arid southern frontier of Biblical Judah, are one of a few text collections from the First Temple period.

Dated to 600 BC, more than 100 ostraca — texts written in ink on clay potsherds — provide a record of distribution of provisions to military units shortly before the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by the invading Babylonian army.

The texts include administrative records, such as lists of names, probably produced at the fort itself, as well as orders that were dispatched to Arad from higher echelons in the Judahite military system, as well as correspondence with neighboring forts.

One of the inscriptions mentions the ‘King of Judah’ and another the ‘House of YHWH,’ probably referring to the Temple in Jerusalem.

Some orders of provisions refer to the Kittiyim, seemingly a Greek mercenary unit/s, which assisted in protecting the Negev desert border from the neighboring Kingdom of Edom.

“But who wrote these documents? Was this a society with widespread literacy, or was there just a handful of literate people?”

---In the study, Dr. Shaus and colleagues conducted handwriting analysis of 18 inscriptions with the goal of determining the number of writers represented.

“We examined the question of literacy empirically, from different directions of image processing and machine learning,” said co-author Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin.

“These are ancient Hebrew inscriptions written in ink on shards of pottery, utilizing an alphabet that was previously unfamiliar to me.”

The examination revealed at least 12 distinct writers, at least 3 of whom were writing at Arad (which is estimated only to have accommodated 20-30 soldiers), and at least 4 of whom were commanders among the regional military.

---These results indicate a high literacy rate among the military for the time, notably higher than previous estimates for the Arad inscriptions.

Combined with evidence for high literacy in religious and civic contexts, this suggests the presence of an education system in Judah at the time." SciNews