Dead Sea Scrolls a century older than previously thought

The National

04-06-2025

Fragments from a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts found on the northern shores of the Dead Sea are 100 years older than previously thought, a study found.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, as they are best known, were discovered in the mid 20th century at the Qumran caves in the occupied West Bank.
They include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books from the Bible, and for decades were generally dated from the 3rd to 2nd century BCE.
But new AI technologies have allowed researchers to date some of the scrolls back to the 4th century BCE.
Two of the biblical scrolls – the Book of Daniel and Ecclesiasts - are now believed to have come from the time of their presumed authors.
The Book of Daniel is long believed to have been completed in the 160s BCE and Enoch's findings placed the scroll back in the same time period.
The same was true for a scroll fragment of the Ecclesiastes, which is commonly assumed to have been written by an anonymous author in the 3rd century BCE.
Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands developed a date-prediction programme called Enoch, which they say provides more accurate date estimates for individual manuscripts.
Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS on Wednesday.
Enoch uses AI to combine the traditional study of old handwriting with radiocarbon dating, which calculates the age of a material by measuring the amount of a specific carbon molecule in the sample.
Traditionally, researchers studying ancient handwriting have been unable to more accurately date texts between 4th and 2nd century BCE, but researchers say this 'gap' has now been closed through Enoch's additional use of carbon dating.
They say that the programme can predict radio carbon-based dates and handwriting style with an uncertainty of about 30 years.
The work was a collaboration between historians of the ancient world and computer scientists, led by Mladen Popovic, professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism and director of the Qumran Institute and Dr Maruf Dhali, assistant professor in Artificial Intelligence.
The first results showed that many of the texts were much older than previously thought.
'This also changes how researchers should interpret the development of two ancient Jewish script styles which are called 'Hasmonaean' and 'Herodian',' the researchers said.
The two scripts are now believed to have existed at the same time since the second century BCE, and manuscripts in the Hasmonian script could be older than their current estimate of 150-50 BCE.
'This new chronology of the scrolls significantly impacts our understanding of political and intellectual developments in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods -late fourth century BCE until second century CE,' the authors said.
'It allows for new insights to be developed about literacy in ancient Judaea in relation to historical, political, and cultural developments such as urbanization, the rise of the Hasmonaean dynasty, and the rise and development of religious groups such as those behind the Dead Sea Scrolls and the early Christians,' they said.