A. R. Millard
[A. R. Millard, M.A., M. Phil., is Rankin Lecturer in Hebrew and Ancient Semetic Languages at the School of Archaeology and Oriental Studies, Liverpool, England.]
The following article first appeared in The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, December 1972 and is reprinted here, slightly abridged, with permission. — Ed.
Archaeological discoveries of recent decades have shown beyond any doubt that writing was well-known in Palestine during the period of Israelite rule. The intention of this article is to examine the use made of writing there at that time and the extent of its practice. Two sources are available on which any conclusions will rest: on the one hand, references in the surviving literature, mainly the Old Testament; on the other hand, existing specimens of writing or evidence for the former existence of documents now perished. We shall concentrate upon the latter — the ancient material recovered from Palestine and the neighboring lands.
The total number of written documents surviving from antiquity in this area is very large, ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the scribbles of Nabatean travelers. While we can find occasional examples of the hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts within the borders of ancient Israel and the time-span of the Monarchy, our interest is limited to writings in the alphabetic script inherited by the Israelites from the previous inhabitants of the land. Accidents of preservation and discovery have provided far more material from ancient Israel than from her neighbors; the greater intensity of exploration and settlement in Palestine is a contributory factor, too. However, enough is known of writing in Phoenicia, Aram, Ammon, Moab, and Edom to imply that a picture could be painted for each of these states similar in many respects to the one we shall compose for Israel.
The Documents
For the present purpose the known texts may be placed in three categories according to their content and destiny: monumental,
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professional, and occasional. While the form of script is involved to some degree in this study, it is not the basis of the division, although Old Hebrew or Phoenician does exhibit slightly divergent tendencies — formal in the “monumental” texts, cursive in the other two groups.
The monumental inscriptions need only brief mention here. These are texts intended for public display as enduring records. As it happens, the Siloam Tunnel Inscription alone can be counted a worthy representative of its class in Hebrew. While admiring its elegant style, it should be remembered that the engraver had only the light of oil lamps or torches to illumine his work some 20 feet from the end of the tunnel. The meager remnant of a stele from Samaria and perhaps a dedicatory plaque of ivory carried off as booty to the Assyrian arsenal at Nimrud may be adjudged “official” and placed beside the Siloam text. With these three can be associated the epitaphs from tombs in the village of Silwan in that they were written, apparently, for the king’s officials.
The Siloam Inscription, accidently found in Hezekiah’s tunnel at Jerusalem by a student in 1880. It tells of the meeting of two parties digging the tunnel from opposite directions.
Most early Hebrew texts fall into the category of professional. Use of this term indicates at once that a trained class was responsible for their production. In part this remains an assumption, for no piece is signed, nor has any material, such as exercises, survived from a scribal
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school, unless the Gezer Calendar is one such product. At this juncture the literary sources help with their frequent use of the word sopher, “scribe,” basically one who wrote, whatever other functions he may have had. A single archive testifies to the activity of scribes in the palace — the Samaria ostraca [pieces of broken pottery with writing on them] from the reign, it seems, of Jeroboam II. They represent only the lowest grade of secretarial duty — the noting of goods received at the palace, in this case wine and oil from the countryside around. More exalted products of the Hebrew courts have vanished. Sad witnesses to their former presence in the excavated area of the Samaria palace are the fifty or so clay sealings bearing on the reverse the imprint of the fibers of papyrus sheets to which they were once attached, and which, we may surmise, were letters or legal deeds. Nine of the seals were impressed by a matrix showing a scarab-beetle design and may be the royal seal of Judah, for Y. Yadin has recognized the scarab-beetle as the royal emblem of the Southern Kingdom.
Sole survivor of the once numerous papyrus documents is the fragment from a cave in the Wadi Murabba’at. We may assume that papyrus was the preferred material for any texts of importance or length, although the re-use of the Murabba’at piece three times implies that it was not commonly available, at least not at the outposts of the Dead Sea shore.
Ostraca are our best evidence of the scribe’s work, simply by reason of their greater durability. Our division of Hebrew inscriptions into three categories leads us to narrow the use of “ostracon” to potsherds [pieces of pottery] inscribed with continuous text, thus excluding those bearing a simple statement of ownership. Letters and accounts make up the content of the hundred or so known and published ostraca. The absence of legal deeds results from the use of papyrus for these more important texts as shown by the situation at Elephantine where both papyri and ostraca survive; and the ostraca are used only for day-to-day records.
Other objects falling into this class of “professional” products are the inscribed weights and the numerous seals. In each case the letters were engraved on the stone, sometimes a very hard stone, usually with considerable skill. Whether the engravers were scribes or literate lapidaries cannot be said, although the fluency of the script makes it likely that the engravers knew their letters. We shall return to this question.
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Occasional denotes a class of writings frequently disregarded in surveying Hebrew inscriptions. These are the pottery vessels and other objects on which the names of their owners or a note of content have been written, and a miscellany of scribblings on ail sorts of stone surfaces.
Two ostraca from Samaria. On the left is a list of amounts delivered to Gaddiyaw from Azzah and credited or debited to four men. The one on the right states “vineyard of Hatel in year 15.”
The Writers and the Readers
Clearly, professional scribes were responsible for the bulk of Hebrew written documents. Some traces of their activity in Samaria have been mentioned. Had the Hebrew monarchs not employed scribes at their courts in daily tasks and in making records for the eyes of their subjects and for posterity, they would have been unique among their contemporaries. When a king is said to have written a letter, it is to be understood that a secretary performed the physical task. Certainly this was the case in Babylonia, Assyria, and in Egypt.
Israel shared so many material and cultural aspects of her life with these nations that we should give a little attention to them. Various literary texts laud the scribal art in both regions. Egypt seemingly had an even higher regard for the scribe than Babylonia, but we can rely only on the opinions of the scribes themselves for that! Schooling at all grades and the various specialties are frequently described. Afterwards many avenues were open to qualified scribes, for they were indispensable as masters of the complicated writing systems of Egypt and Babylon. The most accomplished served in the imperial governments; in Egypt the most modest might accompany the gangs of laborers hewing royal sepulchres. Numerous as they may have been in the civilized centers, scribes were less common in the
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provinces and border lands. So in the Amarna era when Palestine lay firmly within the sphere of cuneiform writing, petty rulers there might share the services of the same scribe. Given the dominance of the complicated systems of hieroglyphic and cuneiform, the following words can be applied to the situation: “While the art of writing was well known … it was by no means universal, and was largely confined … to a professional class.” (T. H. Robinson, A History of Israel (1932), p. 231.)
The question is, was writing in Israel confined only to a professional class? An affirmative answer would be given by many scholars. One has stated lately, “Indeed in ancient Israel it was probable that the ability to read and write did not extend outside the professional scribes and ruling class.” (A. J. Phillips in P. R. Ackroyd, B. Lindars, Words and Meanings (1968), p. 194.) Others dissent. Forty years ago, E. Dhorme observed that writing was not confined to the upper classes of Israel. The primary reason for such an opinion has been well expressed by W. F. Albright: “The 22 letter alphabet could be learned in a day or two by a bright student and in a week or two by the dullest; hence it could spread with great rapidity. I do not doubt for a moment that there were many urchins … who could read and write as early as the time of the Judges, although I do not believe that the script was used for formal literature until later.” (In C. H. Kraeling, R. F. Adams, City Invincible (1960), p. 122-3.)
Incomplete and unrepresentative as the evidence already summarized may be reckoned, we will argue that it is adequate to support Albright’s claim and dispose of the view maintaining a very limited use of writing in ancient Israel.
The question of the extent of literacy looms larger in the light of the numerous Hebrew seals recovered. No comprehensive survey of seals from Iron Age Palestine is available for estimating a ratio of inscribed to uninscribed, but a glance through various excavation reports leaves the impression that it is higher than in Syria or in Mesopotamia. A recent catalogue, compiled by F. Vattioni, reaches a total of 252 Hebrew seals and impressions. (His list of Aramaic seals reaches a total of 178, of which only a few bear no design or picture beside the writing.) Some of these are not strictly Hebrew insofar as the personal names are compounded with alien religious elements, or are known to be foreign, or the seals were found in a context implying a non-Hebrew source, and so should be removed from the list. Some may date from after the end of the Monarchy; but there are others which should be added. Of course, some seals can never be
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satisfactorily assigned, the divine names ‘El and Ba’al being common to Phoenician and Hebrew. However, a round figure of 250 for the known number of Hebrew seals or their impressions cannot be far wrong. Noteworthy is the occurrence of the Divine Tetragrammaton YHWH [Yahweh, translated as Jehovah in the Old Testament] as an element in personal names some 134 times.
It is clear that the seals were applied to clay in sealing letters or legal deeds and also to large jars and other objects. In the first case they served as seals, authenticating and securing documents which would contain the names of the parties and the witnesses in the text proper (cf. Jeremiah 32). In the latter case, when applied to jars and the like, they seem to have acted as marks of ownership and identification. When the seal carried a pictorial design as well as the owner’s name, little difficulty would arise in recognition. However, as many as one third of the Hebrew seals are engraved solely with the owners’ names and family names, and any attempt to identify these seals obviously demanded reading ability. Moreover, many of them are very small, down to half an inch in length, not always easy for the modern Hebraist to read!
But was it necessary to read the impressions made by the seals at all? Seals were fastened to documents for security; the seals impressed on jars may have served only as guarantees of capacity. Their function is bound up with the still uncertain use of the “royal”
Judean jar handles stamped with officials’ seals. The central one bears a winged scarab-beetle and the words “of the king, Hebron.” The others bear a winged sun-disc and the words “of the king, Ziph” (left hand), and “of the king, Socoh” (right hand).
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stamps which have a pictorial symbol to facilitate recognition beside the relevant and often illegible inscription, “the king’s: Hebron/Ziph/Socoh.” If they were simply guarantees of a fixed capacity, they may be compared with the guarantee contained in the royal bust or device stamped on coins by the issuing authority; and the rare pre-exilic and more common post-exilic seal impressions combining official and private forms have a remote analogy in the early medieval English coins bearing the king’s name on one face and the name of the responsible mint-master on the other as a warranty of the coin’s integrity. If the seals impressed on jars were marks of identification which were required to be read, they have a parallel in the roughly scratched notes on jar handles from Gibeon which, there can be no doubt, were written to be read.
In surveying Hebrew inscriptions, uncertainty was expressed about the engraving of the stones — whether they were passed, cut and polished, by the lapidary to some scribe who incised the legend, or whether one man carried out the whole operation. The directions for making the priestly regalia in Exodus 28 imply that an engraver did all this work. Scrutiny of photographs reveals comparatively few seals with a design and a name where the name is obviously later, or made with different tools. Of course, an engraver may have copied the writing traced for him by a scribe; but the high quality of script evident in most of these tiny inscriptions and the rarity of error combine to suggest that many of the engravers were familiar with their letters. Thus a very specialized class of craftsmen, “seal-cutters or engravers,” can be counted among those who could read in Israel.
The Evidence of the “Occasional” Texts
Seals and weights are small, easily transported to an engraver’s bench. The objects in the third category of text are not of the same nature. Did Pekah write his name on the storage jar found at Hazor, or did he invite a scribe for the purpose? If the same question is asked of each potsherd or vessel bearing a name the answer may be “Yes, he called in a scribe” on a few occasions; but it is hard to accept for all of the three-score or so known today.
Apart from plausibility, comparison with Babylonia plays a part in reaching this conclusion. There the number of potsherds or ordinary objects inscribed in cuneiform with personal names — admittedly a more difficult process — is very small indeed; and there writing was widely known but its practice limited, as noted above, to the scribe
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and the academic. A name written on a vessel served to distinguish it from others: if only one were inscribed, it could be identified instantly; if several bearing their owners’ names were brought together, identification could be made only by someone who could read, or by each owner recognizing the form of his own name. Again, such graffiti as the partial alphabet on a palace step at Lachish, or the inscription on a tomb-wall nearby could be the work of scribes; equally they could be the idle scratchings of a waiting petitioner or mourner. The inscriptions in the tombs at Khirbet el-Kom, also near Lachish, are clearly not the work of the most expert hands either. However, the difficulties of a scribe accustomed to writing with pen and ink when faced with a stone surface need to be borne in mind.
Of much earlier date are the copper arrowheads found near Bethlehem, generally agreed to belong to the 12th century B.C. They bear the words “Arrow of ‘Abd-leba’at.” Whoever wrote on these objects was not a professional engraver; many of the letters were impressed with the sharpened end of an instrument like a narrow chisel, accounting partially for their eccentric shapes. Was it a scribe called in haste to write on an unusual substance who made these marks, or the owner who used the tool most ready to hand to write in the easiest way?
Three arrow or javelin heads found near Bethlehem. Made of copper, each is inscribed with the words “Arrow of ‘Abd-leba’at.” Probably of the 12th century B.C.
These are speculations, yet the motley remnants of early Hebrew writing warrant them. The tenor of the Old Testament books is to
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treat reading and writing ability as an ordinary accomplishment, and the surviving examples of “occasional” texts especially support that literary evidence.
The Antiquity of Writing in Ancient Israel
A glance through the texts cited will show a great majority dating from the late eighth to the sixth centuries B.C. So it is legitimate to ask whether it may be extended backwards into earlier times. Documents from before ca. 750 B.C. are limited to the Samaria ostraca, witnessing a very mundane use of writing, the record of names and deliveries; an odd seal placed in the ninth century B.C. on textual grounds; a few scattered ostraca and graffiti such as those from Hazor Stratum VIII; and the Gezer Calendar, a lonely monument from the Solomonic era.
Although merely isolated survivors, these pieces show at least some use of writing. Even if writing prior to 750 B.C. was used on the scale postulated for the subsequent period, there could be no assurance that many examples would be unearthed. The factor of preservation has to be taken into account, a factor very much responsible for the uneven representation of relics from ancient Palestine in modern museums. Generally, the spectacular finds are made in the ruins of cities abandoned in haste, whether the cause be a natural disaster or hostile action, or in the tombs of notable persons. Remains of earlier cities, inhabited then superseded in peace for reasons of obsolescence or fashion, yield comparatively little. This is a commonplace of archaeology, and it applies equally to the recovery of ancient written documents. With few exceptions, the archives of ancient western Asia known today belong to the closing decades of the lives of the buildings in which they were found, a matter which has only rarely received mention in considering the contents of such archives. It follows that, even if examples are few, the employment of writing on as wide a scale in the early period of the Monarchy as in the later cannot be ruled out — “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
The Purpose of Writing in Ancient Israel
Most of the specimens of Hebrew writing now available were made for mundane and routine purposes. The monumental texts and tomb inscriptions alone were intended to endure, and obviously the best professional scribes would be brought in to engrave the most
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important of these, or to trace the characters. Was the service of writing limited otherwise to matters of daily life — accounts, letters, and legal deeds — the work of scribes in busy centers? These were surely its most common end, and the documents which it was invented to record. Next to them may be placed the dedications and memorials required by ordinary folk from time to time, a class of text comprising almost the whole of our earliest group of alphabetic material, the Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions, and the recently found tomb notices of Khirbet el-Kom of the Judean monarchy, the work of craftsmen less skilled than those of Jerusalem. Yet Israel would be unique in the ancient world had nothing else been written down. By the same broad analogy Albright’s belief, noted earlier, that the script was not used for formal literature until after the time of the Judges may be disputed. The witness of lengthy literary texts from early in the history of other scripts (e.g. the Pyramid Texts of Egypt, the Abu Salabikh and Fara tablets from southern Babylonia) suggests that the alphabet, too, could have been put to the same use soon after its invention.
It is submitted, therefore, that the indications of ancient usage contradict any idea of writing not being used for “formal literature” at a date as early as the Judges in Israel and allow, rather, the conclusion that both Canaanites and Israelites had the means to record and read anything they wanted, from brief receipt to lengthy victory poem, from a private letter to a state treaty. Whether they actually did so is not within the power of the evidence cited to reveal, but it does allow the possibility.
Here we reach the limit of our study. The questions of literacy and its extent inevitably follow from thoughts on the use of writing, but we have been concerned to show simply that writing was theoretically within the competence of any ancient Israelite, not the prerogative of an elite professional class alone and to show that it was, in fact, quite widely practiced.
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