148 NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY 84.2 (2021) A highly discussed issue in the fields of Hebrew epigraphy and biblical research is the level of literacy in the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah (Rollston 2010; Davies and Römer 2013; Schmidt 2015). Treating this topic using bibli- cal texts, for example, the references to scribes at the time of a given monarch, may lead to circular argumentation: The real- ity behind a given account may reflect the time of the authors, who could have lived centuries later and retrojected their own situation back onto earlier history. A preferable methodology is to consider the material evidence—the corpora of Iron Age Hebrew ostraca from archaeological excavations. The idea is to use algorithmic and forensic methods to distinguish between handwritings and thus the number of authors in a given corpus. Tis study consists of two corpora representing diferent chronological and geographical settings: • Te ostraca from Arad (Aharoni 1981), dating to about 600 BCE and representing the military system of late-mo- narchic Judah. Here we worked in two tracks: algorithmic (Faigenbaum-Golovin et al. 2016) and forensic (Shaus et al. 2020). • Te Samaria ostraca, dated to the frst half of the eighth century BCE (e.g., Rainey 1988). Here we worked only in an algorithmic track, enhancing the framework used for the study on Arad (Faigenbaum-Golovin et al. 2020). Tis article introduces these methods and deals with the cul- tural-historical aspects of our results. For details regarding the mathematics the reader should refer to the references given above. The Corpora Arad Arad in the eastern Beersheba Valley produced around 90 Hebrew ostraca (fg. 1; Aharoni 1981). Tey contain military commands regarding movement of troops and provisions (wine, oil, and four) set against the background of the stormy events on the southern border of Judah before the fall of the kingdom in 586 BCE. Te inscriptions include orders that came to the fortress of Arad from higher echelons in the Judahite military system, as well as correspondence with neighboring forts. Sev- eral inscriptions that mention the Kittiyim, apparently a Greek mercenary unit (e.g., Na’aman 2011), were addressed to a person named Eliashib—the fortress quartermaster. Of the several corpora of Hebrew inscriptions (Ahituv 2008), Arad provides the best dataset for exploring the question of lit- eracy in Judah in late-monarchic times. Most of the corpus rep- resents a time span of the few years around 600 BCE; it has even Literacy in Judah and Israel Algorithmic and Forensic Examination of the Arad and Samaria Ostraca Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, Arie Shaus, Barak Sober, Yana Gerber, Eli Turkel, Eli Piasetzky, and Israel Finkelstein 1 Hebrew ostraca from Arad in the Beer Sheba Valley, ca. 600 BCE. Photograph by Michael Cordonsky; courtesy of the Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority.