Was writing developed enough in early Israel to record the Old Testament?

Yes - writing was in ordinary, everyday use in Iron Age Israel, well before the sceptical objection allows. This is a bounded historical point rather than a sweeping one: it shows the tools existed, so a biblical book's early date cannot be dismissed on the ground that nobody could write yet.

The evidence is the ordinary kind, which is what makes it telling. The Samaria ostraca - around a hundred ink-on-pottery notes from the early eighth century BC - are administrative receipts, not monuments: the mark of writing woven into daily commerce. Dozens of clay bullae (seal impressions that once closed documents) survive with the imprint of papyrus fibres still on their backs - the fingerprints of scrolls that themselves rotted away in the damp soil of the Levant. The silver amulets from Ketef Hinnom, inscribed with the priestly blessing of Numbers 6, and the plastered Balaam text at Deir Alla, laid out in columns like a page, show writing used for religious and literary ends, not only for tallies.

Two cautions keep the point honest. First, none of this shows that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, or settles when any biblical book reached its final form - those are separate questions decided on other evidence. Second, it says nothing about how many Israelites could read; literacy in the ancient world was limited everywhere. What it shows is narrower and enough: a scribal culture able to compose and preserve texts existed in Israel far earlier than the 'too late to be real' objection assumes. And the absence of grand inscriptions proves little on its own - barely a monumental inscription of Herod the Great, the region's most prolific builder, survives in his own kingdom. For the wider archaeological picture, see our deep dive on archaeology and the Bible.