Demsky, Aaron, Literacy in Ancient Israel [Hebrew]
The Biblical Encyclopaedia Library 28
Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012. Pp. 23 + 489 + xv.
This review was published 28 February 2013 in the Review of Biblical Literature (http://bookreviews.org/pdf/9052_9983.pdf). Copyright Society of Biblical Literature. Reproduced by
Permission.
David A. Glatt-Gilad, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheva, Israel
As the author notes in the preface, this book represents the culmination of over forty years of research into issues relating to writing and literacy in the biblical world. It thus offers the reader a comprehensive and systematic presentation of the direction set out in two of Demsky’s previously published introductory articles on the subject: one in a 1988 collection edited by M. J. Mulder, and the other in the 1997 Oxford Encyclopaedia of Archaeology in the Near East (for full bibliographic details, see p. 405 of the present work). Demsky aims to substantiate two basic claims: (1) the necessary conditions for the emergence of a literate society were present in ancient Israel from its inception, that is, in the period between the thirteenth and eleventh centuries B.C.E.; (2) the increase in writing that is empirically attested to in ancient Israel between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C.E. penetrated all levels of society, not merely the elites; thus Israel of this period can and should be designated as a fully literate society.
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