Deut 31:26 27 and bypasses the trend in similar societies for literature to be oral even among the literate.28 The most curious factor is the restriction of written texts to small, obscure sites: Izbet Sartah, Khirbet Tannin, and Manahat. Why no inscriptions from Shechem, Dothan, Shiloh, Tell el-Farah North, Ai, Bethel, Gibeon, Gibeah—if scribalism was, indeed, an indulgence of the elite? Since the discovery of the Tel Zayit Abecedary, there has been much discussion about literacy in the tenth and