When was hebrew first written

When was the Hebrew Bible written? The researchers say they were able to identify at least six different handwriting styles on the inscriptions, which contained instructions for the movement of troops and lists of food expenses.

We assume that in a kingdom of some , people, at least several hundred were literate. So when was the Hebrew Bible written? What does literacy in the Iron Age have to do with it? Scholars have debated whether the texts of the Hebrew Bible were written before B. If literacy in Iron Age Judah was more widespread than previously thought, does this suggest that Hebrew Bible texts could have been written before the Babylonian conquest?

The Tel Aviv University researchers think so, based on their study of the ostraca from Arad. In a lengthy blog post analyzing the TAU study, Rollston contends that there is not enough information from these ostraca to make estimates about the literacy of Iron Age Judah.

Rollston points out that, according to a publication by Yohanan Aharoni, the original excavator at Arad, the 16 ostraca came from different strata dated across the seventh and early sixth centuries—and therefore do not all date to B. Moreover, we cannot tell how many of these inscriptions were written at the Arad fortress and how many came from elsewhere.

Ancient Military Correspondence: Send Wine. Three Takes on the Oldest Hebrew Inscription. Ancient Aramaic Business Records. Not all of ancient Israel was literate. The ancient text is written in ink on a trapezoid-shaped piece of pottery about 6 inches by 6. It appears to be a social statement about how people should treat slaves, widows and orphans. In English, it reads by numbered line :.

Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king. The content, which has some missing letters, is similar to some Biblical scriptures, such as Isaiah , Psalms , and Exodus , but does not appear to be copied from any Biblical text.

That doesn't actually matter when writing or reading, but it is nice to know. Lastly, there is a text universally accepted by Western and Eastern cultures.

It is the Old Testament. The five books of Moses describe, in Hebrew, the creation of the world by God and the early history of the nation that evolved from the Hebrews into the Israelites and the Jews. The last two millennia BCE were turbulent years for alphabets as the two existing systems of writing — hieroglyphs and cuneiform — evolved into a third, representative form.

Hieroglyphs and cuneiform used symbols pictographs or schematic drawings to depict words. That morphed into a phonetic system, where each sign represents a sound. Back then pictograms had no specific spatial orientation, nor did script have a definitive direction. But two main writing directions emerged towards the second half of the first millennium BCE. In one, possibly the earlier one, writing runs from right to left.

If we assume that a right-handed scribe made those inscriptions in stone, he would be holding the chisel in his left hand, hitting it with the hammer in his right hand. His script would, logically, go right to left. When etching with a stick on tablets of wet clay, going from right to left would make the right-handed scribe smudge the text he had just painstakingly inscribed. Logically then, a right-handed writer would change direction and the text would run from left to right.

All this is plausible, of course, unless the first scribe happened to be left-handed. One slight snag to that narrative: the various writing methods — chisel and hammer, stick on clay, stick dipped in ink on parchment - did not evolve linearly, neatly superseding one another, but were used simultaneously over eons. Ancient Greek script went right to left on one row, and then went left to right on the next - like an ox who leads a plow over a field.

Finally it settled on left to right only some time in the first millennium BCE. If indeed it was due to change in writing materials, with parchment becoming the norm, why didn't Hebrew script follow suit? Maybe it was because the Hebrew script was used to write down holy words, chisel on stone, right to left, and thosewere not to be meddled with, whereas the Greek wasn't considered sacred.