A Rare First Temple-period Family Burial Opens the Door to Genetic Studies on the True Origin of the Ancient Israelites - and Their Links to Modern Jewish Populations
Military correspondence from the First Temple period discovered on reverse side of well-studied artifact at The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv University researchers say.
Reading, Writing, and Algorithms
Scholars have long
debated how widespread literacy was among the Israelites of the seventh century B.C., during the last decades before the ancient kingdom of Judah fell to the Babylonians and its people went into exile. If this were known, it could help determine whether certain books in the Hebrew Bible, such as Deuteronomy, Judges, and Kings, which narrate the kingdom’s rise, were composed and possibly read by the broader populace during this period. Now, a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University, including a mathematician and a police investigator, studying 2,700-year-old Hebrew inscriptions have found evidence of a surprisingly high rate of literacy at the time.