Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Raymond de Hoop <rdehoop AT keyaccess.nl>]

Shalom Liz,

> Freedman makes a case in his Who Wrote the Torah (a case
> adopted without attribution by Bloom) for the J writer to be female.
> My question is how literate were women? How likely is it for there
> to have been women writers? It seems very unlikely to me.

Well, it is in my view not impossible. But the data that are at hand just
suggest that the world of writers was a men's world. Especially in the
beginning [roughly dated 1100-900 BCE/BC/-, :-)   ) when the change came
from cuneiform writing to the alphabetic script in Canaan. Only the
alphabetic script created the opportunity that writing came in the realm of
all kind of people, including women.

Regards,

Raymond