Literacy in Bible Times Confirmed

Hand me a pottery shard, I have to leave a note for my wife...much obliged.

If someone gets a notion to slap leather with a Christian about evidence for the Bible, he'd better not be grabbing archaeology to use as his shootin' iron. Archaeology has been supportive of the Bible. (Why not? It's God's Word, after all.) Some tinhorns will use arguments from silence using archaeology (something mentioned 4,000 years ago hasn't been found, so the Bible is false), but that shows desperation as well as ignorance of logic.

Dead Sea image credit: Freeimages / phunphoto

It has been claimed that people in the Bible could not have written because they were not literate. How do they know that? They don't. It's an assumption based on presuppositions, and those ultimately come from evolutionary assumptions. That is, ancient humans were stupid and hadn't evolved enough yet, and we're the most intelekshul specimens of humanity, us today being them. Wrong.

Evidence has been mounting to refute their faulty assumptions, and there is some big news: pottery shards. Those things were examined, and they were used as written communication. Further, they show that people in the Old Testament times had widespread literacy, not just a few elite folks here and there.

Analysis of 16 texts written on pottery shards confirm that ordinary people were literate in Old Testament times.

The Bible is not often mentioned in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A paper by scholars including Israel Finkelstein (advocate of a late chronology) concludes that ordinary soldiers at a remote desert outpost called Arad were literate. By doing handwriting analysis of inscriptions on 16 pottery shards, they deduced that six different individuals, each of which knew how to write and spell correctly. Rachel Pells writes in The Independent:

To read what Rachel wrote, click on "Arad Texts Confirm Widespread Literacy in Judah". And, you may want to check out "Archaeologists buttress early dating of OT books".