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If you are reading this article, you are probably literate – you can read and write. And not just you; according to the data of the Central Bureau of Statistics, this is true for 95.5% of the citizens of the State of Israel. Was the literacy rate high among the Jews at the time of the First Temple as well? On the occasion of Book Week, we try to find out whether we deserved the title of being “with the book” even then.
At first glance, it seems that the answer is positive, because a number of inscriptions from this period have been discovered in the area of the City of David, the most famous of which is the Siloam Inscription left by King Hezekiah’s carvers, and in addition, on the mountain opposite, an inscription was discovered warning grave robbers that “There is no silver or gold here. Cursed is the person who opens this.”
That is, even miners and robbers could read and write. But, in truth, these inscriptions do not constitute evidence. For comparison, if we take Burkina Faso, which is one of the countries with the lowest literacy rate in the world, where only about 23% of the population can read and write, then the presence of street signs does not indicate the literacy level of the population. Here too, the inscriptions made by stone-cutting artists are not evidence that the people actually knew how to read them.
We will say this in advance: we will not be able to get a definitive answer to the question because there was no central bureau for statistics at the time, and the data we have are both partial and indirect. However, we can still get an idea from what may be elucidated from letters written by the common people for personal use. In this short review, we will provide examples from hundreds of testimonies from the time of the First Temple, in which words and letters were used in everyday life, rather than the symbols that were customary in the nations around us.