I would like to suggest an epigraphic evidence which supports the assumption that scribal activity took place in Jerusalem already in the tenth century BCE. A widespread use of hieratic numerals and signs appears in Israelite and Judean ostraca and weights of the eighth-seventh centuries BCE. They do not appear in documents of Israel’s neighbours, only in texts written in Hebrew script. Egyptian relations with the Philistine and Phoenician kingdoms were much closer in the ninth-early eighth centuries than with Israel and Judah, and it is hardly conceivable that hieratic signs would then have entered only the Hebrew script. Moreover, no definite eight-seventh century paleographical parallels have been found in Egypt for many hieratic signs (Lemaire and Vernus 1983), and use of the so-called ‘abnormal hieratic’ was waning in Egypt at the time (Goldwasser 1991: 251 n. 2). It is clear that the hieratic signs entered the Hebrew script before the ninth century BCE.

Writing in hieratic is known from southern Canaan in the late thirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE. Goldwasser (1991: 252-52) has therefore suggested that Egyptian, or Egyptian-trained scribes, cut off from their homeland in the late twelfth century, educated local Canaanite scribes, who in their turn passed on their knowledge to the new court of Israel, probably in the age of the United Monarchy.

The long gap in the use of hieratic between the twelfth and early eighth centuries is greatly narrowed by the assumption that scribes entered the Hebrew script and spread their knowledge to north Israelite centres. Canaanite centres like Gaza, Ashkelon or Gezer could have been the transmitters of the proto-Canaanite scribal tradition in the early Iron Age.

We may conclude that the appearance of hieratic numerals and signs in the Hebrew script of Israel and Judah strongly supports the assumption that scribal activity was introduced in the court of Jerusalem no later than the time of Solomon, and possibly already in David’s time.

It is commonly accepted today that historiography developed in Judah no earlier than the eighth century BCE and that the Deuteronomistic history was composed either in the late seventh or early sixth century BCE. The earliest Judean inscriptions are dated to the second half of the eighth century and the spread of alphabetic writing in the kingdom took place only in the seventh century. Writing in the tenth-ninth centuries BCE must have been confined to a small group of scribes in the court of Jerusalem and was mainly used for administration and for diplomatic exchange.