Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than we thought, AI-based study says

The Dead Sea Scrolls, already considered the oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, may have been written earlier than previously thought, according to new research that used an artificial intelligence to study the ancient texts.

Thus spake "Enoch" – an AI program with an appropriately biblical name, which was trained by an international team of researchers to date the scrolls by combining information from radiocarbon dating and paleography, the study of ancient handwriting.

It is on the basis of Enoch's analysis that the researchers now think some of the scrolls may have been written as early as the 4th or 3rd centuries B.C.E. This would shift the oldest manuscripts' production by decades or even a century.

The AI program offers scholars a new tool for the study of undated ancient manuscripts, says the Netherlands-based team led by Mladen Popovic, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism, and AI expert Dr. Maruf A. Dhali, both from Groningen University. Enoch's conclusions that some of the scrolls may be older also provides new insight into the production and spread of biblical manuscripts in a period from which few Hebrew texts have survived, the researchers reported Wednesday in PLOS One.

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An AI fed on radiocarbon

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1947 in caves surrounding Qumran, a settlement on the shores of the Dead Sea believed to have hosted the mystic Jewish sect known as the Essenes. Since then, thousands more fragments have emerged around Qumran and at other sites in the Judean Desert.

The scrolls, which comprise religious manuscripts and secular documents, were likely squirreled away in caves for protection during the first and second Jewish revolts against the Romans (66-70 C.E. and 132-136 C.E.), and were preserved for posterity by the dry desert climate. They have provided scholars with unprecedented information on ancient Judaism and early Christianity. But there is still much debate on who wrote them and when.

Most scrolls are traditionally dated to between the 2nd century C.E. and the 2nd century B.C.E., with a few earlier outliers. Because most of the scrolls are not signed or dated, scholars can estimate when they were written only by comparing the handwriting style to that of texts that are more securely dated.

But the problem is that, especially for the older scrolls, we don't have that many surviving texts from the Levant with which to do this comparative work. There are two large collections of Aramaic letters from the Egyptian island of Elephantine in the 5th-4th centuries B.C.E. and from Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan) in the 4th century B.C.E. After that, there are precious few texts until we get to Hasmonean times, in the second half of the 2nd century B.C.E.

Radiocarbon is of course an excellent tool for dating ancient organic materials, including the papyri and parchments on which the Dead Sea Scrolls were written. But, even though it requires very small amounts of material, it is still a destructive method, and conservators are loathe to sacrifice even a confetti-sized piece of the precious scrolls.

Hence the need to provide a new dating method by spawning Enoch, named after the biblical character of the (non-canonical) Book of Enoch, Popovic tells Haaretz in a phone interview.

"There are about one thousand separate biblical scrolls. You can't carbon-date them all and the beauty of this is you don't have to," Popovic says. "The AI combines the physical evidence of radiocarbon with the analysis of the shape of the letters, which is also empirical evidence."

Enoch was trained using around 30 carbon-dated scrolls and their corresponding high-resolution images. Part of these securely dated scrolls were used to teach the program how writing styles looked in different periods. Another set was used to test the AI, which successfully returned date estimates with an 85 percent overlap with the original radiocarbon ranges.

A first edition Ecclesiastes?

Enoch was then shown the scans of 135 scrolls that were not radiocarbon dated. The date ranges the AI provided for some of these were considerably older than those previously given by experts, Popovic and colleagues report.

For example, the oldest scrolls, fragments of the books of Jeremiah and Samuel, which were thought to date back to the 3rd century B.C.E. may have already been written in the late 4th century B.C.E. Similarly, fragments of the Book of Daniel and Ecclesiastes, thought to have been penned in the middle of the 2nd century B.C.E. were instead written up to a century earlier.

These last two are particularly exciting, Popovic notes, because many scholars believe that Daniel and Ecclesiastes were originally composed in the Hellenistic period, that is, in the late 4th or 3rd centuries B.C.E. Enoch's analysis would thus place the fragments of these books found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the very same time when the texts were first written, Popovic says.

The finding would make them the first biblical manuscripts dated to the presumed time of their authors. This does not mean that the fragments belong to "first editions" or even – we should only be so lucky – to the original manuscripts of Ecclesiastes and Daniel, the researchers qualify. On the contrary: mistakes and differences with the standard Hebrew and Greek versions of these texts suggest that the Dead Sea Scrolls versions were copies – and not particularly faithful ones.

"This gives us the opportunity to think anew about the production and spread of biblical texts," Popovic says. "Instead of seeing changes to biblical texts as something that happened in a later stage, this shows that the changes in texts happened very quickly, in the same time of the authors."

More broadly, the scrolls and the literary activity they attest to have often been linked to the Hasmonean dynasty, which successfully rebelled against the Hellenistic overlords of Judea in the 2nd century B.C.E. and then proceeded to greatly expand its territory by the end of that century.

"One way of thinking about the scrolls is that following the Hasmonean revolt and their expansion you have a growing apparatus of civil servants, which increases the spread of literacy and the composition of books," Popovic says. "But if we date this literary activity to earlier, that changes things around."

Enoch's analysis also suggests we should backdate the two main writing styles used in the Dead Sea Scrolls: the "Hasmonean" and the "Herodian" script, named after the Herodian dynasty of Herod the Great, which replaced the Hasmoneans in the second half of the 1st century B.C.E. The Herodian script had greater variations in letter size, while the Herodian letters are more square and aligned, similar to the Hebrew used later in the Middle Ages and up to the modern era, Popovic says.

Scholars named the scripts thusly because they thought they aligned nicely with the political dominance of the two dynasties. Not so suggests Enoch, which has dated some scrolls written in the Herodian style to the late second century B.C.E. This suggests the Herodian script overlapped for much longer with the Hasmonean style and was around well before the time of Herod, Popovic concludes.

"I believe the results of this study, combining the radiocarbon dating of a group of manuscripts from the Judean Desert in the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify the scribes behind the texts," commented Joe Uziel, head of the IAA Scrolls Unit. The work helps decipher clues in the Dead Sea Scrolls to past society - "particularly in the days of the Second Temple Period, when Jewish culture was thriving and early Christianity was budding," he adds.

From Ithaca to Judea

Enoch is not the first artificial intelligence used to study ancient texts in general or the Dead Sea Scrolls specifically. In 2022, a different team of scientists launched Ithaca, a deep neural network used to restore, date and geographically locate ancient Greek inscriptions. The Dutch researchers behind Enoch have themselves developed a previous AI tool to compare the handwriting of the Dead Sea Scrolls scribes and discover how many different hands penned the manuscripts.

More research is needed to understand how Enoch's work will affect our understanding of the chronology of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Popovic cautions. In any case, to evaluate the AI's work, the researchers asked a team of handwriting experts to judge its age estimates for the 135 scrolls it analyzed. The experts determined that around 79 percent of Enoch's estimates were "realistic," with the remaining 21 percent judged to be too old, too young, or indecisive.

Given that Enoch produces a range of likely dates for an artifact rather than a specific date, it's hard to specifically say how many scrolls should be backdated, as parts of those ranges often overlap with those provided by radiocarbon or traditional paleographic analysis, Popovic says.

But, broadly speaking, it now seems that the oldest scrolls date to the 4th century B.C.E. and there is a larger amount than we thought from the 3rd century B.C.E., in the Hellenistic period. This is important because this time is considered a bit of a "dark period" in Jewish studies, Popovic concludes.

Precious few manuscripts have survived from then, even though, as mentioned, large parts of the Hebrew Bible are believed to have been composed or edited in this period. Knowing that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are as old as parts of the Old Testament itself means we can "almost touch the hands that wrote the Bible," Popovic says, and understand better the processes behind the composition of the text that is holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims.