There was public schooling for fatherless boys since the time of Ezra. A male child of 6 knew the alphabet and prayers, and his father would teach him the Torah from 7-14 (written, and which could be recited by memory) - There is no mention of the education of women, but if a woman could teach the alphabet and prayers to her sons, it goes without saying that she was literate too, thereby teaching her daughters as well, so that they could teach their sons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_ancient_Israel_and_Judah
There is Hebrew graffiti in lowly mine shafts and in the whorehouses of Pompeii, among many other places, so even the most menial and socially low-caste were literate. Israel was a hub of commerce, sitting on two major trade routes, and being a shipping hub between the eastern and the western seas. Workers, like today, had to be able to read invoices and shipping labels - some of which are extant (and are written in Hebrew, btw). Grave stones, pottery shards, jewelry...
That Israel was an illiterate backwater with a dead language serves nothing but antisemitism and the myths of the Roman church.
Here's a link to a keyword search to the word *write*.
http://www.biblegateway.com/keyword/?search=write&version=ESV&searchtype=all&bookset=1
It's an obvious ploy to bolster their claim that they needed to write things down themselves because nobody else was literate enough to do it but them, and therefore the whole world is obligated to the Roman church for having Scripture today, as if without them, Scripture wouldn't exist.
What a bunch of nonsense.
God proved Himself perfectly capable of preserving His word when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found
>> “speaking of stupidity....they didn’t have a pen, they didn’t know how to write, they didn’t know anyone who could read,.the VAST majority of people then were illiterate....in the high 90% catagory.” <<
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If this statement isn’t the very definition of stupidity, I can’t imagine what is!
Israel is and always has been the most literate nation on Earth, yet they all seem to want to declare them illiterate, so that the myth of a non-Hebrew origin of the writings of the “New Testament” can be more easily foisted upon the ignorant.
Every time one reads the words “being interpreted” in a NT scripture, one is reading irrefutable proof that the writer of those words is not the original author of that scripture.
Those words stand out in Matthew, Mark, John, and Acts, showing that the Greek manuscripts of each of them is a translation, not the original language.
This is what it is all about.