Dead Sea Scrolls possibly even older than scholars thought

A specially designed artificial intelligence program named after a Judaic prophet suggests one of biblical archeology’s greatest finds require reexamination. According to an international team of researchers in consultation with “Enoch,” some of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be a bit older than we thought. Their evidence is laid out in a study published on June 4 in the journal PLOS One.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are among the most remarkable and revolutionary archeological discoveries ever made. Researchers uncovered the first documents within the West Bank’s Qumrum Caves in 1946, eventually amassing around 15,000 scrolls and parchment fragments over the next decade. Historians and religious studies experts have spent years examining the trove believed to date to the Second Temple era (516 BCE–70 CE), in the process learning invaluable details about ancient Jewish and early Christian life. The scrolls also include some of the oldest complete biblically canonical books known to exist, and helped confirm the era’s rabbinic culture to maintain remarkably standardized written texts over a roughly 1,000-year period.

Although ancient manuscripts occasionally feature written dates, many others are missing them. This often makes it difficult to easily pinpoint their provenance, but experts have ways to narrow down the possibilities. In addition to radiocarbon dating, scholars frequently study the evolution of ancient handwriting—a field of study known as paleography. Understanding these stylistic shifts can help indicate when authors penned certain documents, and thus fill in historical gaps.

However, there’s a catch to this approach. In order to get a sense of a written artifact’s age from its script, paleographers require enough accurately dated manuscripts to serve as a reference. Add in the many nuances to historical documentation, and it can get very tricky, very quickly.

Knowing this, a group of experts from universities across the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and Italy recently collaborated on a new machine learning program specifically designed to analyze and evaluate scanned images of biblical writings. Enoch, named after the Book of Genesis prophet who “did not experience death,” is built on two primary datasets—an index of radiocarbon dated historic biblical texts, and an analysis of each manuscript’s handwriting. By combining these two databases, Enoch could then analyze a sample text in order to more accurately date it.

Once Enoch was built, the team had it scan 135 non-dated Dead Sea Scrolls and offer an age estimate for each one. A group of paleography experts then compared those results to their own evaluations. They concluded Enoch offered “realistic” dating estimates for nearly 80 percent of the scrolls, while the remaining conclusions were either too young, too old, or indecisive.

Interestingly, researchers noted that some of Enoch’s “realistic” estimates meant that certain Dead Sea Scroll samples were actually older than scholars previously theorized. These revisions were further reinforced by additional radiocarbon testing. In one example, Enoch and scholars agreed a scroll fragment likely dated to the first half of the second century BCE—roughly 100 to 150 years older than existing estimates. What’s more, two scroll fragments were dated to the time of their assumed authors, implying they may be primary texts.

While more validation and testing is needed, the team believes Enoch may offer experts a new tool to help investigate, correlate, and date ancient texts.
“It is very exciting to set a significant step into solving the dating problem of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also creating a new tool that could be used to study other partially dated manuscript collections from history,” the study’s authors said in a statement. “With the Enoch tool we have opened a new door into the ancient world, like a time machine, that allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible.”

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