ABSTRACT
The biblical portrait of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments inscribed on two stone tablets to find the Israelites worshipping the golden calf is a striking representation of the hard and long war between education and idolatry. Jewish education, though limited in an impoverished peasant economy and by the effects of the Roman–Jewish wars, was made available to large numbers who had learned to value and profit from it. Prior to the time of Ezra, there seems to have been little formal schooling for Jewish children, though there were schools for the training of priests and sofrim. The sofrim institutionalized Jewish education and, by the time of Ben Sirah, set up at least one Wisdom school in Israel. Education generally has a political undercurrent, but Jewish education in the ancient land of Israel was unusual in being occasionally suppressed – notably in the Hasmonean era, under Herod, and during the Hadrianic persecution.
