“And he [Gideon] captured a young man of Succoth and questioned him. And he wrote down for him the officials and elders of Succoth, seventy-seven men.” (Judges 8:14)
I’ve always been intrigued by this seemingly unimportant line in the book of Judges, because it indicates that a random young man who was captured in battle was able to write, and that Gideon was able to read.
There is some belief that only an elite class of people were literate during Jesus’ time. In his book Ancient Literacy, William Harris argues that social and technological conditions were such that mass literacy during the time of the Roman Empire was unthinkable, and literacy rates could not have exceeded 10-15%. This seems to be the general consensus. In this article I am going to argue that literacy in Israel during the Biblical time period was much higher than is generally believed.
Trying to make the case for any rate of ancient literacy is trickier than one might think. If any measurements of such a thing were taken, they are lost to us today. If you use texts of ancient historians like Josephus, you may notice accounts of people reading and writing, but the problem is that Josephus and most other ancient historians wrote about the elites: kings, priests, etc. Everybody agrees that those elite classes could read and write, so these kind of records don’t prove anything either way. A much better source to use to argue for literacy is the Bible itself, because the Bible talks about all kinds of ordinary people and not just the elite classes.
Now when we use the Bible to make a case for a high degree of literacy during Biblical times, it’s not the same as using the Bible to make, say, a case for Christianity. The New Testament authors of course were trying to make a case for Christianity. But they were not trying to manipulate literacy percentages - they were not trying to fool 21st century readers into thinking more of them could read and write than really could. Therefore, the Bible ought to be considered a reliable source for this area of study even by those who are not believers.
Let’s consider some of the things the Bible says about literacy. Pontius Pilate wrote an inscription for a sign placed above Jesus’ head on the cross (Matthew 27:37). Why would someone write words on a sign? Probably because he figured that people would read it! We know the priests did, because they complained about what the sign said. John says many of the Jews read this inscription (John 19:20).
What about Jesus and his disciples? Jesus the carpenter could read (Luke 4:16). Among his disciples, Matthew could read and write, which would not be surprising for a tax collector. Matthew wrote the first gospel. The fishermen, Peter and John, also wrote New Testament books. Peter and John both had brothers, Andrew and James, and one figures that if one brother could read probably both learned to read. So that makes Jesus and five of the twelve disciples, giving us six out of thirteen readers in a group not taken from the upper echelons of society. This is not to say that the other seven disciples couldn’t read too; we just don’t have any information on them one way or the other.
Luke begins his gospel by saying that many before him had written down accounts of what Jesus did (Luke 1:1).
Jesus repeatedly asked the Pharisees, “Have you not read…” (Matthew 12:3, 12:5, 19:4, 21:16, 21:42). The implication was that of course the Pharisees had read these things. He also asked this of the Sadducees (Matthew 22:31). In Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14, the gospels contain the parenthetical statement “let the reader understand.”
So it sure sounds like we have a lot of literate people: Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, governors, tax collectors, doctors, fishermen and carpenters, plus a random captive, a bunch of folks who happened to walk past the cross, and whoever happens to read the gospels. We could add Paul, who wrote letters to Timothy and Titus, who could read, and the other New Testament authors James, Jude and the anonymous author of Hebrews.
Perhaps we should look at some evidence from outside the Bible too.
Inscriptions from a fort in Arad, Israel around 600 B.C. show writing by at least six different individuals in the army there, from the commander down to the deputy quartermaster (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/210694). This is long before the New Testament period, but it should be assumed that Jewish literacy increased over time, as Judaism came to depend less on the Davidic monarchy and national state and more on the Law and the Prophets being read in synagogues. The teaching of reading in the synagogues eventually became codified in Judaism through the tradition of the Barmitzvah, in which, among other things, a 13 year old boy would read the Torah.
I suspect that the belief in a low level of literacy for New Testament Jews may be based on an analogy to agrarian people in third world countries in more recent times. There the literacy rates were low indeed. But the analogy is arbitrary. Written texts were important to the Jewish people, and the Greco-Roman period overall had a fairly rich development of intellectual life – things not true in most more recent third world agrarian societies. Also, I suspect there is a little of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” which is the wrong-headed idea that we modern people are intelligent while those who lived before us were dumb.
By coincidence, at the time of this writing I am attempting to learn a new foreign language (to be named later) in which the alphabet consists of 33 symbols that are completely foreign to me. I started trying to learn the alphabet in earnest today. This will take me some number of hours, but less than ten, I think. After I learn the alphabet, I will still be no good in this foreign language because I’ve never spoken it and I don’t know any of the words or grammar. However, in Jesus time, to read Hebrew, the Jews needed to learn an alphabet with 22 symbols. After that, the Hebrew language was phonetic and unlike me with my new foreign language, they already spoke it. So that’s all it would take to be literate – several hours of concentrated study. It wouldn’t be that hard. I suspect most of them could read.
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