When Did Literacy Emerge in Judah?
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Footnotes
1. In my view, the authenticity of the recently published “Jerusalem papyrus” is doubtful. For more, see Christopher Rollston, “The King of Judah, Jars of Wine, and the City of Jerusalem,” Bible History Daily (blog), published October 25, 2017 (www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/jerusalem-papyrus/).
2. See, e.g., Hershel Shanks, “Ancient Jerusalem: The Village, the Town, the City,” BAR, May/June 2016; Jane M. Cahill, “Jerusalem in David and Solomon’s Time,” BAR, November/December 2004.
Endnotes
1.
Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), p. 156.
3.
To see this argument in more detail, please see Matthieu Richelle, “Elusive Scrolls: Could Any Hebrew Literature Have Been Written Prior to the Eighth Century BCE?” Vetus Testamentum 66 (2016), pp. 556–594.
4. Benjamin Sass and Israel Finkelstein, “The Swan-Song of Proto-Canaanite in the Ninth Century BCE in Light of an Alphabetic Inscription from Megiddo,” Semitica et Classica 9 (2016), pp. 19–42.
5.
Shmuel Aḥituv and Amihai Mazar, “The Inscriptions from Tel Reḥov and Their Contribution to the Study of Script and Writing During Iron Age IIA,” in Esther Eshel and Yigal Levin, eds., “See, I will bring a scroll recounting what befell me” (Ps 40.8) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck Ruprecht, 2014), p. 51. According to Mazar’s chronology, Rehov’s Stratum V is dated to the last decades of the tenth century B.C.E. or to the early ninth. Similarly, the Megiddo inscription belongs to the transition from Stratum VB to Stratum VA-IVB, or to Stratum VA-IVB, which stretches from the tenth to the ninth century.