The Dead Sea Scrolls Changed Our Understanding of the Bible. Could Some of Them Be Even Older Than We Thought?
A new study combines A.I., radiocarbon dating and handwriting analysis to estimate new dates for some of the ancient scrolls, thought to be some of the earliest surviving fragments of the Old Testament
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In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd tossed a rock into a cave near the Dead Sea—and he heard it strike pottery. Upon entering the cave, he found a jar filled with three well-preserved rolls of marked parchment. These were the Dead Sea Scrolls, and researchers would eventually find a collection of nearly 1,000 ancient scrolls in nearby caves.
At roughly 2,000 years old, the Dead Sea Scrolls are thought to be some of the earliest surviving fragments of the Old Testament. But according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One, some of the texts may be even older than previously thought.
“The initial results that have been generated are nothing short of groundbreaking,” Travis Williams, a religious studies scholar at Tusculum University, tells New Scientist’s Christa Lesté-Lasserre.
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Scholars have long relied on radiocarbon dating and palaeography (the study of ancient handwriting) to date the Dead Sea Scrolls. For the new study, researchers took a mixed approach: They used an artificial intelligence model called “Enoch,” after the Hebrew prophet. The team trained the model by showing it scans of ancient manuscripts alongside the carbon-14 dates. It then learned to predict dates based on handwriting style.
Next, the researchers fed Enoch images from 135 Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts that hadn’t been dated, and it produced estimated dates for them. According to a statement from the researchers, expert paleographers determined that approximately 79 percent of the A.I.’s estimates were “realistic.”
“What we have created is a very robust tool that is empirically based—based on physics and on geometry,” as lead author Mladen Popović, an archaeologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, tells the Guardian’s Nicola Davis.
Working from Enoch’s predictions, the researchers found that two writing styles in the Dead Sea Scrolls, known as Hasmonean and Herodian, actually coexisted for much longer than historians thought. Enoch also dated a copy of Ecclesiastes to the lifetime of its “presumed author,” per the Guardian.
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Additionally, the program estimated that the Dead Sea Scroll known as 4Q114, which contains parts of the Book of Daniel, was older than previously thought. As Science’s Kristin Romey reports, paleographers had dated the scroll to about 165 B.C.E., while Enoch dated it to between 230 and 160 B.C.E.
“It was previously dated to the late second century B.C.E., a generation after the author of the Book of Daniel,” Popović tells the Guardian. “Now, with our study we move back in time contemporary to that author.”
The scrolls were found in the caves of Qumrān, and historians have long assumed that’s where they were created. But the new estimated dates “mean that most of the manuscripts found in the caves near Qumran would not have been written at the site of Qumran, which was not occupied until later,” Joan Taylor, a religious studies scholar at King’s College London, tells the Guardian.
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The researchers hope that technologies like Enoch will help determine the age of other undated scrolls without radiocarbon testing, which requires destroying small samples of a text.
“There are about 1,000 separate biblical scrolls. You can’t carbon-date them all,” Popović tells Haaretz’s Ariel David. “And the beauty of this is you don’t have to.”
Some experts urged caution. Christopher Rollston, a paleographer at George Washington University, tells Science that new technologies like Enoch can be useful in studying manuscripts, but scholars should never rely on them to reach a conclusion.
“After all, human handwriting—and all of its variations and idiosyncratic features—is a deeply human thing,” he says.
