Literacy Rate Ancient Israel

Literacy Rate Ancient Israel

I’m currently reading: “Did God Have a Wife?” by William Dever. In it he mentions the literacy rate of the ancient Israelites.
From page 28:
“… Writing does not become widespread before the 8th century B.C., and then the coprus indicates only what I would call “functional literacy.” That is, a number of people could write their names, numbers and the names of a few commodities. But that is a far cry from being truly literate, able to read literary material such as we have in the books of the Hebrew Bible. It has been estimated that even in the Roman period, no more than 5 percent of the population was literate by the above definition. In ancient Israel the figure was certainly lower. That has important implications for the question I have raised here concerning how early the Hebrew Bible could in fact have been written, and whether ordinary people could have read it if they had had it.”

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