{"id":276630,"date":"2025-06-06T07:02:26","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T07:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/the-dead-sea-scrolls-changed-our-understanding-of-the-bible-could-some-of-them-be-even-older-than-we-thought\/"},"modified":"2025-06-06T07:02:26","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T07:02:26","slug":"the-dead-sea-scrolls-changed-our-understanding-of-the-bible-could-some-of-them-be-even-older-than-we-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=276630","title":{"rendered":"The Dead Sea Scrolls Changed Our Understanding of the Bible. Could Some of Them Be Even Older Than We Thought?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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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<\/h2>\n
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Sonja Anderson<\/a><\/p>\n

– Daily Correspondent<\/span><\/p>\n

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Radiocarbon dating requires destroying small samples of the fragile scrolls.
\n Normand Blouin \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/span>
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In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd tossed a rock into a cave near the Dead Sea\u2014and 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<\/a>, and researchers would eventually find a collection of nearly 1,000<\/a> ancient scrolls in nearby caves.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0PLOS One<\/em><\/a>, some of the texts may be even older than previously thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe initial results that have been generated are nothing short of groundbreaking,\u201d Travis Williams<\/a>, a religious studies scholar at Tusculum University, tells New Scientist<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Christa Lest\u00e9-Lasserre.<\/p>\n

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A fragment of the Dead Sea Scroll known as 1Q28a<\/p>\n

Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scholars have long relied on radiocarbon dating and palaeography<\/a> (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 \u201cEnoch<\/a>,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Next, the researchers fed Enoch images from 135 Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts that hadn\u2019t been dated, and it produced estimated dates for them. According to a\u00a0statement<\/a> from the researchers, expert paleographers determined that approximately 79 percent of the A.I.\u2019s estimates were \u201crealistic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we have created is a very robust tool that is empirically based\u2014based on physics and on geometry,\u201d as lead author Mladen Popovi\u0107<\/a>, an archaeologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, tells the Guardian<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Nicola Davis.<\/p>\n

Working from Enoch\u2019s 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<\/a> to the lifetime of its \u201cpresumed author,\u201d per the Guardian<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Enoch\u2019s date estimation process for the Dead Sea Scroll known as 4Q319<\/p>\n

Popovi\u0107 et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Additionally, the program estimated that the Dead Sea Scroll known as\u00a04Q114<\/a>, which contains parts of the\u00a0Book of Daniel<\/a>, was older than previously thought. As\u00a0Science<\/em><\/a>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was previously dated to the late second century B.C.E., a generation after the author of the Book of Daniel,\u201d Popovi\u0107 tells the Guardian<\/em>. \u201cNow, with our study we move back in time contemporary to that author.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scrolls were found in the caves of\u00a0Qumr\u0101n<\/a>, and historians have long assumed that\u2019s where they were created. But the new estimated dates \u201cmean 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,\u201d Joan Taylor<\/a>, a religious studies scholar at King\u2019s College London, tells the Guardian<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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The Psalms scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls<\/p>\n

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are about 1,000 separate biblical scrolls. You can\u2019t carbon-date them all,\u201d Popovi\u0107 tells Haaretz<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Ariel David. \u201cAnd the beauty of this is you don\u2019t have to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some experts urged caution. Christopher Rollston<\/a>, a paleographer at George Washington University, tells Science <\/em>that new technologies like Enoch can be useful in studying manuscripts, but scholars should never rely on them to reach a conclusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter all, human handwriting\u2014and all of its variations and idiosyncratic features\u2014is a deeply human thing,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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