A Study of the Tablets from Tel Arad Raised Doubts concerning the Age of the Bible
A group of scientists from Tel-AvivUniversity, after studying the business correspondence of the garrison in Tel-Arad around 600 B.C., came to the conclusion that the Old Testament could have been written down a few centuries earlier than has been previously thought.
The specialists checked about a hundred letters written in ink on pieces of pottery (ostracons). The documents, discovered during the excavations at Tel-Arad, are related to the daily life of the fort, which was located on the border of the desert. Their main subject was the grain, wine, and olive oil supplies for the troops.
When they focused on sixteen letters and conducted an electronic study of the handwriting, they established that they were written by six different people. The fact that in such a distant garrison so many literate soldiers served, ranking from the commander to the quartermaster, according to the researchers, is a sign of a widespread literacy among the Jews , who lived in Eretz-Israel at the end of the period of the FirstTemple.
Photographed by M. Kordonsky
“There is something psychological beyond the statistics,” said Prof. Israel Finkelstein of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at TelAvivUniversity, one of the leaders of the project. “There is an understanding of the power of literacy. And they wrote well, with hardly any mistakes.”
Soon after these texts were written, in 586 B. C., King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the FirstTemple, and drove Jews into Babylonian captivity. Judea reached a similar level of literacy in the Hellenistic period, at the end of the third century Before Common Era.
The researchers suggest, that if in the distant fortress there were so many literate people, than across the kingdom of Judah, which had about 100,000 people, there would have been thousands of people, who could read and write. It was enough to create some of the books that have been included in the canon of the Old Testament.
The question, “When was the Bible written?” is one of the most controversial in the studies of the Scriptures. According to the common understanding, the Pentateuch was created after the return from the Babylonian captivity, because there had not been enough literate Jews for such a work before.
National Park Tel Arad
The critics of the research point out, that even if the scientists managed to prove that prior to the fall of Jerusalem many Jews could read and write, it is too early to make on this ground far reaching conclusions concerning the dating of the Bible.
They point out, that among the discovered ostracons there is not one that would contain a fragment from the Bible. The theory’s opponents are certain that the creation of the religious text requires a higher level of mastering the language than the one needed for making a shopping list for the military kitchen.
This is an article from the web-resource NEWSru.co.il posted on April 13, 2016.