Okay, the argument that the Jews couldn't have written the Old
Testament back in the Bronze Age because they couldn't read
or write has been proven wrong.
We don't need to "refute" but draw an intelligent assessment
that ALL THE CIVILIZATIONS in the Bronze Age could write.
And the Jews were at least as smart as anyone else. In King
David's day they had what is termed Paleo-Hebrew, and
before that they used a Canaanite form of Proto-Sinaitic.
It is not a matter of being literate or not, but the fact that there were no “written scriptures” in the Bronze Age, hence no evidences for the scriptures to exist in Bronze Age. There are no Bronze Age stone or clay tablets of Genesis, Exodus, psalms in the 2nd millennium BCE, in which Abraham to Saul and David supposedly had lived.
Inscriptions found in two early Iron Age stones, the Gezer Calendar and the Zayit Stone, both from the 10th century BCE, make no references to or quoted passages from any scripture.
Every evidences we do have, points to far from the mid-1st millennium BCE, meaning from the time of King Josiah to the after the 2nd temple was constructed.
There are no busy writing again, until the 3rd century BCE when translation began with the Septuagint and the first of scrolls from Qumran (ie the Dead Sea Scrolls). And from the 2nd century CE to 9th century CE, the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, we see rabbis attempt to record not only the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible, known as the Masoretic Text), but also all Oral Torah and other oral traditions, which are known collectively today as the Rabbinic Literature, such as the Talmud, Midrash, Aggadah, etc.
The thing is that no Bronze Age scriptures exist that pertained to the ancient Judaism. It doesn’tt exist in Bronze Age archive in Megiddo, and yet there are clay tablet fragments from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Why would we find a Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh, but no works from Moses or David in the Canaanite Megiddo?
If Joshua did take Megiddo after Moses’ death you should see the transitions from the Canaanite to Hebrew, but that’s not the case. The scant evidences (eg Gezer Calendar and Zayit Stone) that we do have of paleo-Hebrew alphabet, showed lack of Hebrew scriptural writings.
The 10th century BCE, was supposedly the Golden Age of kingdom of Israel, eg Solomon, the richest monarch and supposed builder of temple and palace in Jerusalem, you would have thought that people should be make abundant copies of works by Moses, David and Solomon, and yet all do have in the 10th century BCE are just bunch of inscriptions that had nothing to do with scriptures.
We only start to evidences trickling down, beginning with King Josiah, like possibly the Silver Scrolls, the earliest surviving texts (from the late 7th century BCE) that contained a small passage of Numbers 6, the Priestly Blessings. Much of the fragments of the Silver Scrolls remained unreadable. And we have found nothing older than this.
It not so much as being dumb but more to do with scriptures weren’t around before Josiah’s reign and his religious reform.
