New AI Technology Reveals Dead Sea Scrolls’ True Age
Researchers using artificial intelligence and new radiocarbon dating methods have found that the Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought.
“The implications are profound,” Maruf Dhali, assistant professor of AI at Groningen in the Netherlands and coauthor of the study, told “All Israel News.” “With empirical evidence now anchoring paleographic analysis, scholars can revisit longstanding questions about when particular biblical texts circulated and how these scripts relate to political and cultural shifts in ancient Judea.”
The study found that the fragment of the Book of Daniel 8-11, which was believed dated to the 160s BC, is likely as old as 230 BC, which overlaps with the period in which the biblical book was authored. That means it could have been written at the same time as the book itself.
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Experts previously based their estimates primarily on the changes observed in text as the Hebrew script evolved over time, together with some limited carbon dating, leading to a broad scholarly consensus.
“There simply were no securely dated Hebrew or Aramaic manuscripts from the late Hellenistic era against which to compare,” Professor Mladen Popović, director of the Qumran Institute at Groningen, told the “Jerusalem Post.” “Our approach bridges that gap by using 24 radiocarbon-anchored examples to give an objective timecode for handwriting styles.”
As part of the ongoing project, a deep-learning AI model nicknamed Enoch has been trained to recognize variations in ink trace patterns, shapes and styles, in combination with new radiocarbon results for a selection of manuscripts. Together with actual dates that were written as part of the text in some cases, Enoch has enabled more precise dating based on empirical data to within about 30 years. The results could now change the way scholars see history.
“This is very exciting, because it changes the way we have to think about the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls, the people who collected them, wrote them, read them,” Popović said. “It also changes how we think of the history of Judea.”
In looking at the two manuscripts of Daniel and Ecclesiastes, Joe Uziel, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority Dead Sea Scrolls unit, told “The Times of Israel” that “This means that these manuscripts are not just the earliest copy of these books that survived, but one of the earliest copies of these compositions ever written.”
–Dwight Widaman
