Using advanced image-processing technology as well as more traditional methods, a group of scholars and scientists have carefully examined eighteen potsherds bearing Hebrew inscriptions from around 600 BCE—a few decades before the destruction of the First Temple. The scholars concluded that the fragments, found at a Judean military post during the 1960s, contain the handwriting of twelve different individuals, from which they have concluded that a significant portion of Judean males were literate. Barak Sober, a mathematician involved in the research, explains:
It should be remembered that this was a small outpost, one of a series of outposts on the southern border of the kingdom of Judah. Since we found at least twelve different authors out of eighteen texts in total, we can conclude that there was a high level of literacy throughout the entire kingdom. The commanding ranks and liaison officers at the outpost, and even the quartermaster Eliashiv and his deputy, Naḥum, were literate. Someone had to teach them how to read and write, so we must assume the existence of an appropriate educational system in Judah at the end of the First Temple period.
This, of course, does not mean that there was almost-universal literacy as there is today, but it seems that significant portions of the residents of the kingdom of Judah were literate. . . . If there were only two or three people in the whole kingdom who could read and write, then it is unlikely that complex texts would have been composed.
The archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, also involved in the research, adds:
Until now, the discussion of literacy in the kingdom of Judah has been based on circular arguments, on what is written within the Bible itself, for example about scribes in the kingdom. We have shifted the discussion to an empirical perspective. [Our discovery] means that literacy was not the exclusive domain of a handful of royal scribes in Jerusalem. The quartermaster from the Tel Arad outpost also had the ability to read [biblical texts] and to appreciate them.
Read more on Phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-widespread-literacy-biblical-period-kingdom-judah.html