In Their Own Words

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How widespread was literacy in the Land of Israel during the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E.—the days of David and Solomon? Shmuel Ahituv and Amihai Mazar examine inscriptions from this time period and contend that literacy was not limited to society’s elite.¹

Writing in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E. [early First Temple period] was much more common than it initially appeared. As more excavations of sites dating to this period take place, the quantity of inscriptions increases. More and more inscriptions are found in secure archaeological contexts that have good radiometric dates, allowing us to build a dependable sequence of the development of writing during this period. The data show that there was a great degree of inconsistency in writing because it had not yet fully evolved at that time, as evidenced by unidentifiable signs and by the variability in the writing of letters and in the direction of writing [from left-to-right or right-to-left], particularly in the tenth century B.C.E.

Most of the inscriptions of this period are incised on pottery or stone vessels. Writing in ink was limited to only a small number of very fragmentary inscriptions … [like those] from Tel Rehov. The use of red or red-brown ink is prominent. …

The fragmentary short inscriptions [from the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E.] are usually insufficient to confirm whether the language is Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic or some other dialect. …

The Gezer Calendar is usually categorized as Hebrew, although this determination has recently been challenged. [André] Lemaire² interprets it as a Philistine inscription, and [Dennis] Pardee suggested that it was written in “Canaanite.”³ Contrary to these interpretations, we argue that there is no element in the Gezer Calendar that cannot be considered Hebrew. Moreover, the traces of the name written on the margins of the calendar, ]אבי, which should be completed as [ו]אבי, is a quintessential Israelite name.⁴ …

[Nadav] Na’aman suggested that during the reign of David and Solomon, literacy was limited to the palace and royal administration. This concentration of skills changed only in the eighth century B.C.E., when literacy expanded throughout the country.⁵ The inscriptions on the storage jars at Tel Rehov were found in different excavation areas [in different strata from different times] and in various types of contexts and buildings: a cultic area, a dwelling that might have been a patrician house, an average house, a building with a unique plan and in the apiary. The rest of the inscriptions were found in various everyday settings. The same can be said about the Gezer Calendar (which many scholars have understood as a writing exercise), as well as most of the other inscriptions of this period, many of which are inscribed on storage jars to designate merchandise, ownership and other routine functions. The corpus presented above, as small as it may be, indicates that most writing tasks were completed for routine purposes on imperishable materials in order to mark goods. It can be surmised that there was a larger body of writing on perishable materials such as papyri that have not been preserved. It is thus untenable to claim that writing was limited only to the state’s elite, although we cannot claim that literacy was widespread.

How widespread was literacy in the Land of Israel during the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E.—the days of David and Solomon? Shmuel Ahituv and Amihai Mazar examine inscriptions from this time period and contend that literacy was not limited to society’s elite.1 Writing in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E. [early First Temple period] was much more common than it initially appeared. As more excavations of sites dating to this period take place, the quantity of inscriptions increases. More and more inscriptions are found in secure archaeological contexts that have good radiometric dates, allowing us to build a dependable […]