Why Israeli Schools Stopped Teaching the Bible

For decades, the Bible was at the heart of Israeli education; not as a religious text but as a cultural and national foundation. It was central to the Zionist ethos, shaping generations of Israelis with a shared language, story, and set of values. Children in secular public schools once studied it four to five hours a week. Only math and English received more classroom time.

David Ben-Gurion revered the Bible. Yosef Haim Brenner, hardly a religious man, called it the soul of the Jewish people. The spirit of the Bible helped form the ethos of the Palmach, the labor movement, and the pioneering character of early Israeli society.

But at some point, that centrality faded.

From the 1980s and especially the 1990s onward, not only did critical and academic approaches begin to replace the national and traditional lens through which the Bible was once taught, but a deeper shift took root: many simply stopped seeing Bible study as essential at all.

Today, Israeli students study less than twenty percent of the Bible compared to what was taught in the 1960s. In elite secular schools - once proud standard-bearers of Zionist education - the subject has nearly vanished, some teachers involve in their teaching Christian works.

The suggestion in recent years to remove the Bible from the matriculation exams entirely marked a symbolic collapse.

Strikingly, the steepest decline happened not under left-wing governments, but under Likud-led ones that often presented themselves as nationalist and traditional. For all the rhetoric about Jewish identity, the actual policy led to continued erosion in the teaching of the text that once defined Jewish civilization. In practice, these governments presided over a growing detachment from the Bible in the very schools that once saw it as foundational.

Why did this happen?

Partly due to growing discomfort with perceived religious encroachment into the public sphere, particularly associated with the settler movement and its frequent invocation of biblical justification. But more deeply, the secular education system lost the ability to teach the Bible without a sense of spiritual or moral investment. Teachers and students alike no longer felt inwardly committed to the text which they do not see a life to be lived by (like the pioneers), and without that, the curriculum became hollow.

This is not just a loss of tradition. It is a failure of cultural continuity, a quiet betrayal of the intellectual inheritance that sustained Jewish identity for centuries.

And when it comes to classical Jewish texts beyond the Bible - such as the Oral Torah - the collapse is nearly total. Once studied even in secular schools, these texts have been all but erased from the national curriculum, now encountered only by a shrinking minority.

The story of the Bible in Israeli education is no longer one of reverence but of neglect. And that neglect reflects a broader crisis - of identity, memory, and meaning in today's Israel.