AI and Modern Dating Techniques Reveal Dead Sea Scrolls May Be Older Than Previously Thought

Are Dead Sea Scrolls older than we thought?

Over the years, scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls have analyzed the ancient parchments with a variety of methods: for example, X-rays, multispectral imaging, "virtual unfolding," and paleography, i.e., studying elements in their writing styles. The scrolls are believed to date back to between the third century BCE and the first century CE, but those dates rely largely on paleography, since only a handful of the scrolls have calendar dates written on them. However, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and based on a given scholar's experience. A team of scientists has combined radiocarbon dating from 24 scroll samples and machine-learning-based handwriting analysis to create their own AI program -- dubbed Enoch. The objective was to achieve more accurate date estimates, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Among the findings: Many of the scrolls are older than previously thought. As reported earlier, these ancient Hebrew texts -- roughly 900 full and partial scrolls in all, stored in clay jars -- were first discovered scattered in various caves near what was once the settlement of Qumran, just north of the Dead Sea, by Bedouin shepherds in 1946-1947. (Apparently, a shepherd threw a rock while searching for a lost member of his flock and accidentally shattered one of the clay jars, leading to the discovery.) Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, circa 73 CE, and historians believe the scrolls were hidden in the caves by a sect called the Essenes to protect them from being destroyed. The natural limestone and conditions within the caves helped preserve the scrolls for millennia. This isn't the first time that AI tools have been applied to analyzing the handwriting on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Back in 2020, we reported on an AI-aided handwriting analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll. Most scholars believed that the Isaiah Scroll was copied by a single scribe because of the seemingly uniform handwriting style. But others have suggested that it may be the work of two scribes writing in a similar style, each copying one of the scroll's two distinct halves. The 2020 analysis revealed that the text was indeed likely written by two scribes. It also showed that the second scribe's handwriting was more variable than the first's, although the two styles were quite similar, indicating a possible common training. Enter Enoch The authors of this latest paper wanted to find a better means than paleography alone for determining the chronology of the scrolls, with an eye toward reconstructing the evolution of ideas. They thought that given the small data set in the case of the scrolls, it was wisest not to rely on a pre-trained model and instead "let the available data speak." By combining writing styles with carbon-14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the date-prediction model Enoch is able to produce an accurate date for the manuscript. University of Groningen/CC BY-SA By combining writing styles with carbon-14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the date-prediction model Enoch is able to produce an accurate date for the manuscript. University of Groningen/CC BY-SA Mladen Popovic and Maruf Dhali working with Enoch to date a manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls. University of Groningen/CC BY-SA Mladen Popovic and Maruf Dhali working with Enoch to date a manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls. University of Groningen/CC BY-SA By combining writing styles with carbon-14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the date-prediction model Enoch is able to produce an accurate date for the manuscript. University of Groningen/CC BY-SA Mladen Popovic and Maruf Dhali working with Enoch to date a manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls. University of Groningen/CC BY-SA The development of Enoch grew out of the team's earlier deep neural network for ferreting out handwritten ink-trace patterns in digitized manuscripts, involving micro-level geometric shape analysis. "Enoch emphasizes shared characteristics and similarity matching between trained and test manuscripts, where traditional paleography focuses on subtle differences that are assumed to be indicative for style development," the authors wrote. "Combining dissimilarity matching and adaptive reinforcement learning can uncover hidden patterns." They tested Enoch by having paleographic experts evaluate the AI program's age estimate for several scrolls. The results: about 79 percept of Enoch's estimates were deemed "realistic," while its age estimates for the remaining 21 percent were either too young, too old, or just indecisive. This new model revealed that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previous estimates based solely on paleography. That should be relevant for the question of when two ancient Jewish script styles -- "Hasmonean" and "Herodian" -- developed, for example. The former script was thought to have emerged between 150-50 BCE, but the authors believe Hasmonean could have emerged much earlier; ditto for the Herodian script. So both scripts may have co-existed since the late second century, challenging the prevailing view that they preexisted by the mid-first century BCE. Enoch may even be able to shed light on Biblical authorship. For instance, the authors concluded that two of the scrolls are the first known fragments of the Book of Daniel, believed to have been finished by an anonymous author around 160 BCE. And Ecclesiastes was likely completed by an anonymous author in the third century BCE, rather than by King Solomon in the 10th century BCE. "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, especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors," the authors wrote. "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." DOI: PLoS ONE, 2025. 10.1371/journal.pone.0323185 (About DOIs).

Some Dead Sea Scrolls are older than researchers thought, AI analysis suggests

But overall, machine learning approach closely matches what human scholars had long suspected about ancient documents Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls some 8 decades ago, researchers have relied on the vast trove of Hebrew and Aramaic writings to tease out how Jewish communities lived more than 2000 years ago. Combined, the thousands of scraps of parchment and animal skin contain everything from some of the oldest known books of the Hebrew Bible to laws that governed the communities during centuries of turmoil. But as informative as these fragments are -- some contain a few lines of text on a brittle scrap the size of a thumbnail, preserved and protected for millennia in the desert caves of what is now Palestine and Israel -- most of the scrolls lack something important: timestamps that securely confirm their age, such as mentions of a particular monarch's reign. So for decades, researchers have relied on handwriting style and radiocarbon dating. Now, scientists have harnessed artificial intelligence (AI) to create a new way to date the scrolls, revealing that some may be up to a century older than previously thought. The new technique, announced today in PLOS ONE, uses machine learning, an algorithmic approach that teaches computers to "read" the Dead Sea Scrolls, to cross-reference two kinds of data: carbon-14 dates from a selection of scrolls, as well as geometric data on the fragments' words and letterforms. About 80% of the time, the resulting AI model -- called Enoch, after the Hebrew prophet and early scientist -- came up with age estimates consistent with those of human paleographers, scholars who decipher and interpret the properties of ancient texts. But what about the other 20% of scrolls that Enoch gave earlier dates to? These discrepancies may make scholars re-evaluate how ideas and literacy spread across the ancient Near East. But Enoch won't put human paleographers out of business anytime soon, says the study's lead study author, Mladen Popović, head of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen. "AI needs human beings, especially in its development," he says. "It's a tool like the microscope is a tool for a biologist." By itself, the use of machine learning in analyzing ancient texts is nothing new. In 2021, Popović and his colleagues used machine learning to show the Great Isaiah Scroll -- among the largest and best preserved Dead Sea Scrolls -- was the product of two scribes working together, rather than a single scribe's handwriting. More recently, carbonized scrolls from the Roman town Herculaneum have been digitally "unwrapped" to reveal 2000-year-old Latin poems and philosophical treatises. Popović and his colleagues sought to extend these techniques to dating the Dead Sea Scrolls. They hoped the fragments' algorithmically tuned dates could shed further light on their creators, who lived in and around Jerusalem between the fourth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E. -- a place and time of enormous turmoil. In 332 B.C.E., Alexander the Great brought the area under pagan control. Less than 2 centuries later, in 160 B.C.E., the Greek state descended from Alexander's conquest faced a Jewish rebellion now known as the Maccabee uprising. In 70 C.E., another 2 centuries later, Roman forces laid siege to Jerusalem and destroyed the Jewish temple for a second time. "Because none of the scrolls really have dates, we're just kind of left to fill in the gaps," says Drew Longacre, a research associate at the Duke Divinity School who also wasn't associated with the study. "We kind of create this story, this picture -- this metanarrative -- about how the script works." According to previous paleographic analyses of the Dead Sea Scrolls, many of the fragments' particular script styles mapped to different periods within this fractious political history. The "Hasmonean" script used on some Aramaic fragments, named for the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty, was thought to span roughly 100 B.C.E. to the first century C.E. The later "Herodian" Hebrew script, by contrast, was standardized by the time of Herod, the notorious Roman ruler who reigned over Judea at the time of Jesus Christ's birth. The Enoch AI model sees things differently. The new study finds the transition between Hasmonean and Herodian script is a bit messier than previously thought, with "Herodian" scripts that predate the existence of King Herod by as much as 50 years. However, Enoch also delivers a vindication of old-school paleography, in the form of new dates for scroll 4Q114, which contains three chapters of the Book of Daniel. Paleographers had placed 4Q114's creation around 165 B.C.E. because the scroll describes events that place it around the Maccabee uprising, including the desecration of the temple in Jerusalem. Enoch predicts a range between 230-160 B.C.E., well within the paleographic estimates. For paleographer Christopher Rollston, a professor of Northwest Semitic languages and literatures at George Washington University, the results come as little surprise. "Initially, [the study] sort of seemed to criticize paleography as entirely subjective, you know?" he says. "Nonpaleographers will often do that ... and I'll sometimes remind them that what I do with scripts, they do with pots." Researchers not affiliated with the work say that whether the scroll analysis is done by humans or AI, handwriting alone can only date a document so precisely. Longacre, for one, says paleography isn't well-suited in general for high-precision dating, especially when there's not a lot of well-labeled data. And Rollston emphasizes that new AI techniques like Enoch can be useful tools -- but they should never be the only tools a scholar uses to understand the writing of a manuscript. "After all," he says, "human handwriting -- and all of its variations and idiosyncratic features -- is a deeply human thing."

Dead Sea Scrolls analysis may force rethink of ancient Jewish history

Thanks to AI and modern carbon dating techniques, we have a new understanding of when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written - which could revise the story of Judaea Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be up to a century older than previously thought, potentially revising our understanding of how these ancient texts were produced. This new assessment, based on AI analysis of handwriting and modern radiocarbon dating techniques, even suggests that a few scrolls - like those containing the biblical books Daniel and Ecclesiastes - may be copies made during the lifetimes of the books' original authors, says Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

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."

Unlocking the timecode of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Since their discovery, the historically and biblically hugely important Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of Jewish and Christian origins. However, while the general date of the scrolls is from the third century BCE until the second century CE, individual manuscripts thus far could not be securely dated. Now, by combining radiocarbon dating, paleography, and artificial intelligence, an international team of researchers led by the University of Groningen has developed a date-prediction model, called Enoch, that provides much more accurate date estimates for individual manuscripts on empirical grounds. Using this model, the researchers demonstrate that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought. And for the first time, they establish that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed biblical authors. They present their results in the journal PLOS One. Until now, the dating of individual manuscripts was mostly based on paleography-the study of ancient handwriting-alone. However, the traditional paleographic model has no solid empirical foundation. For most Dead Sea Scrolls, a calendar date is not known, and there are no other date-bearing manuscripts from the time period available for paleographic comparison. Between the few date-bearing manuscripts in Aramaic/Hebrew from the fifth-fourth centuries BCE and the late first and early second century CE, a gap is present that prevents accurate dating of the more than one thousand scrolls and fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls collection. Digitized manuscripts This gap is now closed by researchers in the ERC project "The Hands That Wrote the Bible" by combining radiocarbon dates from 24 scroll samples, in combination with paleographic analysis using a machine-learning-based model applying a Bayesian ridge regression method. The new radiocarbon dates are reliable, empirical time markers that bridge the paleographic gap between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE. They provide an objective date for the writing styles in the tested manuscripts. Based on this information, the researchers trained the date-prediction model named Enoch. They used a previously in-house developed deep neural network for the detection of handwritten ink-trace patterns, BiNet, in digitized manuscripts. This allows for a subsequent geometric shape analysis at the microlevel of the ink trace, such as curvature (called textural), as well as at the level of character shapes (called allographic). It provides a quantitative and empirical basis for the style analysis of handwriting which traditional paleography cannot deliver. Cross-validation then showed that Enoch can predict radiocarbon-based dates from style with an uncertainty of some 30 years (plus and minus). This is even more precise than direct radiocarbon dating results in the period range of 300-50 BCE. The first machine-learning-based model Now that Enoch is ready for use, it becomes possible to date the roughly one thousand Dead Sea manuscripts from this time period. The researchers took a first step in this by feeding Enoch the binarized images of 135 scrolls and having the date predictions evaluated by paleographers. With Enoch, researchers have a powerful new tool that they can use to support, refine, or modify their own subjective estimates for specific manuscripts, often to an accuracy of only 50 years for manuscripts over 2,000 years old. Enoch is the first complete machine-learning-based model that employs raw image inputs to deliver probabilistic date predictions for handwritten manuscripts, while ensuring transparency and interpretability through its explainable design. The combination of empirical evidence (radiocarbon from physics and character-shape-based analyses from geometry) brings a degree of quantified objectivity to paleography never before achieved in the field. And the methods underpinning Enoch can be used for date prediction in other partially-dated manuscript collections. New chronology First results from Enoch's date predictions, presented in the PLOS One paper, demonstrate that many Dead Sea Scrolls are 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." Specifically, manuscripts in Hasmonaean-type script can be older than the current estimate of ca. 150-50 BCE. And the Herodian-type script emerged earlier than previously thought, suggesting that these scripts existed next to each other since the late second century BCE instead of the mid-first century BCE, which is the prevailing view. 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). 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. Anonymous authors Furthermore, this study establishes 4QDaniel (4Q114) and 4QQohelet (4Q109) to be the first known fragments of a biblical book from the time of their presumed authors. It is not known who exactly finished the Book of Daniel, but the common assumption is that this author did that during the early 160s BCE. Likewise, for Ecclesiastes (Qohelet), scholars assume that an anonymous author from the Hellenistic period (third century BCE) was behind this biblical book, instead of the view of tradition that it was King Solomon from the tenth century BCE. The novel radiocarbon dating for 4Q114 and the Enoch date prediction for 4Q109 place these manuscripts at the same time as these anonymous authors from the second and third centuries BCE. Thus, these results have now created the opportunity to study tangible evidence of hands that wrote the Bible.

Many Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than experts thought, AI analysis suggests

The scrolls were first discovered by a Bedouin shepherd inside the West Bank's caves of Qumran between 1946 and 1947. (Image credit: Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images) Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than experts thought, according to an artificial intelligence (AI) analysis. Consisting of about 1,000 ancient manuscripts etched onto animal skin, papyrus and copper, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain the earliest known versions of texts from the Hebrew Bible -- including copies of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Kings and Deuteronomy -- and date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. Now, scientists have used an AI program, dubbed Enoch, to analyze the handwriting patterns on the scrolls, revealing that they may be older than experts thought. The study authors say their findings, published June 4 in the journal PLOS One, are a significant step in dating some of the earliest versions of the Bible. However, not all experts are convinced. "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," lead study author Mladen Popović, director of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "Especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors." Discovered by Bedouin shepherds inside the West Bank's caves of Qumran from 1946 to 1947, the ancient manuscripts range from legal documents and calendars to sections of the Hebrew Bible and psalms, written mostly in Hebrew but also in Aramaic and Greek. Previous dating of the scrolls relied on paleography -- the study of ancient writing systems -- with some undergoing radiocarbon dating in the 1990s. However, castor oil had been applied to some of the manuscripts in modern times to improve their legibility. This oil is also a contaminant that can disrupt radiocarbon dating, so the results from these techniques remain a topic of debate. Related: Ancient 'curse tablet' may show earliest Hebrew name of God In an attempt to clear things up, the researchers first cleaned 30 samples from different manuscripts to remove the castor oil, before successfully radiocarbon-dating 27 of them. They found that two of these scroll fragments were younger than past analyses suggested but that other fragments were older. Then, the scientists set about creating their Enoch AI model. Enoch was trained on the handwriting of 24 of the newly dated manuscripts and their radiocarbon dates. After verifying the model with 13 further selected images from the same manuscripts, the researchers presented it with 135 undated manuscripts. They found that it agreed with the estimates made by scholars 79% of the time. Yet the results for the remaining 21% of the scrolls point to a mystery, with Enoch giving them a range of dates that could make them older, hard to determine, or even a century younger than initial estimates. They also suggest that two different writing styles, known as the Hasmonean and Herodian scripts (named after the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty and Herod, the Roman client king, respectively), could have overlapped for longer than previously thought. Nonetheless, Enoch also corroborates earlier paleography, notably for a scroll titled 4Q114, which contains three chapters from the Book of Daniel. Analysts initially estimated 4Q114's writing to have been inked during the height of the Maccabee uprising in 165 B.C. (a part of the Hanukkah story) due to its description of Antiochus IV's desecration of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The AI model's estimate also falls within this range, between 230 B.C. and 160 B.C. But for some paleographers, the results are hardly surprising. "The results of this study are very interesting, and presumably important, but not Earth-shattering," Christopher Rollston,a professor and chair of biblical and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at The George Washington University, told Live Science in an email. "Most of the conclusions of this article also dovetail with what the great palaeographers in the field, such as the late Frank Moore Cross, had already stated more than 60 years ago." Rollston also criticized the notion that the new tool could enable researchers to "study the hands that wrote the Bible" as "at the very least, gross hyperbole." No manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible date to the First Temple period (circa 1200 to 586 B.C.), when it was originally composed, or to the early parts of the Second Temple period (538 B.C. to A.D. 70), he said. He noted that AI can be useful, but it should only be one of many techniques used to study ancient texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Enoch could and should never be the only tool in the toolbox of someone wishing to determine the date for the writing of a manuscript. After all, human handwriting, and all of its variations and idiosyncratic features, is a deeply human thing," Rollston added. "Machines can be helpful in isolating features of a script, but the presence of a gifted palaeographer is at least as valuable as a machine-learning tool."

Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls might be even older than known, AI reveals

In a recent development, AI has been deployed to date the Dead Sea Scrolls with astounding accuracy, radically challenging misconceptions regarding their age and the historical timelines they fall under. The results show that several of the Scrolls might actually be much older than what is assumed, and in some cases, could be from the era of the biblical figures that supposedly wrote them. Pioneered by the University of Groningen, this multidisciplinary work merges radiocarbon dating, ancient handwriting analysis, and machine learning.

Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be older than thought, experts say

Researchers enlisted help of AI along with radiocarbon dating to produce new insights into ancient texts Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be older than previously thought, with some biblical texts dating from the time of their original authors, researchers say. The first of the ancient scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran in the Judean desert by Bedouin shepherds in the mid-20th century. The manuscripts range from legal documents to parts of the Hebrew Bible, and are thought to date from around the third century BCE to the second century CE. Now researchers have used artificial intelligence to glean fresh insights into the dates of individual scrolls - findings experts suggest could challenge ideas about when, where and by whom they were produced. "It's like a time machine. So we can shake hands with these people from 2,000 years ago, and we can put them in time much better now, said Prof Mladen Popović, first author of the research from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. While some scrolls were radiocarbon dated in the 1990s, Popović said scholars did not tackle the problem of castor oil contamination - a substance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the manuscripts, but which could skew results. In addition, many of the scrolls had only been dated by handwriting analysis. Writing in the journal Plos One, the team report how they attempted radiocarbon dating of 30 samples from different manuscripts found at four sites and thought to span five centuries. Crucially, the team first cleaned the samples to remove the castor oil contamination. The researchers successfully radiocarbon-dated 27 samples, finding that while two were younger than handwriting analysis had suggested, many were older. Among other findings, the researchers discovered two different writing styles, known as Hasmonean and Herodian scripts, coexisted for a much longer period than previously thought, while a sample from a manuscript called 4Q114 - which contains verses from the book of Daniel - was older than traditional palaeography had suggested. "It was previously dated to the late second century BCE, a generation after the author of the Book of Daniel. Now, with our study we move back in time contemporary to that author," said Popović. The team then used a type of AI known as machine learning to build a model they called Enoch - a nod to a biblical figure associated with scientific knowledge. The team trained Enoch by feeding it 62 digital images of ink traces from 24 of the radiocarbon dated manuscripts, together with the carbon-14 dates. They then verified the model by showing Enoch a further 13 images from the same manuscripts. In 85% of cases the model produced ages that tallied with the radiocarbon dates, and in many cases produced a smaller range of probable dates than obtained from radiocarbon dating alone. "What we have created is a very robust tool that is empirically based - based on physics and on geometry," said Popović. When Enoch was presented with images from 135 undated manuscripts it had not previously seen, it realistically dated 79% of them - as judged by expert palaeographers. Popović added those deemed unrealistic might have had problematic data, such as poor quality images. The system has already produced new insights including that a copy of the biblical book Ecclesiastes dates from the time of the book's presumed author. Popović said Enoch meant the age of further scrolls could now be uncovered without radiocarbon dating - a process that requires the destruction of small samples. "There are more than 1,000 Dead Sea scrolls manuscripts so our study is a first but significant step, opening a door unto history with new possibilities for research," he said. Prof emerita Joan Taylor of King's College London, said the results would have a major impact on Qumran studies. "These results mean 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," she said. However, Dr Matthew Collins of the University of Chester cautioned that radiocarbon dating only shed light on the age of the parchment, not when it was written on, while there were also questions about how stylistically representative the small number of training samples were for different periods in time. "Overall, this is an important and welcome study, and one which may provide us with a significant new tool in our armoury for dating these texts," he said. "Nevertheless, it's one that we should adopt with caution, and in careful conjunction with other evidence."

Dead Sea Scrolls aged decades older by AI-powered discovery

An international team led by the University of Groningen has combined radiocarbon dating, paleographic analysis, and artificial intelligence to assign more precise dates to individual Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, showing many are significantly older than previously believed. Using a deep learning model called Enoch, researchers input digitized images of 135 scroll fragments and trained the system to recognize microscopic ink trace patterns - such as curvature and character shape - alongside new radiocarbon results for 24 samples. By correlating these handwriting features with empirically established dates, the team narrowed dating uncertainty to roughly ±30 years, outperforming conventional radiocarbon ranges for the period of 300-50 BCE. Until now, most Dead Sea Scrolls had been broadly placed between the third century BCE and the second century CE based on paleography alone, a method that lacked solid empirical markers. "There simply were no securely dated Hebrew or Aramaic manuscripts from the late Hellenistic era against which to compare," explained Prof. Mladen Popović, director of the Qumran Institute at Groningen. "Our approach bridges that gap by using 24 radiocarbon-anchored examples to give an objective timecode for handwriting styles." BiNet, an earlier neural network that the Groningen group developed to detect handwritten ink traces, formed the foundation of Enoch's architecture. Once trained, Enoch produced date predictions that aligned remarkably closely with radiocarbon results - and, in some cases, suggested scrolls written in "Hasmonean type" script may date to decades earlier than the approximate 150-50 BCE range. Similarly, Herodian style fragments appear to have emerged in the late second century BCE rather than the mid-first century BCE, indicating concurrent script traditions rather than a simple evolutionary sequence. "The implications are profound," said Maruf Dhali, assistant professor of artificial intelligence at Groningen and co-author of the study published this week in PLOS One. "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."Biblical fragments dates to originate in the early 160s BCEIndeed, two biblical fragments - 4QDanielc (4Q114) and 4QQoheleta (4Q109) - were shown by Enoch and new radiocarbon dates to originate roughly in the early 160s BCE and third century BCE respectively, matching the eras their anonymous authors likely composed the books of Daniel and Ecclesiastes. "This is the first tangible proof that portions of Daniel and Kohelet were penned contemporaneously with their presumed scribes," noted Popović. "It opens a window into the production of biblical literature at its very source." Researchers stressed that Enoch does not replace human paleographers but augments their expertise with quantitative, explainable AI inferences. "Within a few decades, we could use this model to date more than a thousand additional scroll fragments," said Popović. "The resulting new chronology will reshape our understanding of literacy, script development, and textual transmission in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and early Roman eras." Buddy Christ, an associate curator at the Israel Antiquities Authority who was not involved in the study, praised the advance. "Marrying radiocarbon science with AI-driven handwriting analysis represents a major leap forward. We now have a roadmap for dating unlabeled manuscripts across the Judean Desert corpus - and beyond." The Enoch method could also be applied to other partially dated collections, such as Greek papyri or medieval European codices, providing a template for empirically grounded paleography. As the next step, Popović's team plans to make Enoch publicly accessible so that scholars worldwide can upload digitized manuscripts and receive probabilistic date estimates. For now, the Dead Sea Scrolls - drawing renewed attention thanks to this breakthrough - remain as historically vital as ever. With a precise "timecode" now embedded in their script, the scrolls promise fresh insights into the political upheavals, theological debates, and cultural transformations that shaped the Jewish and early Christian worlds.

Int'l team uses artificial intelligence to date Dead Sea Scrolls

"The implications are profound," said Dr. Maruf Dhali, assistant professor of AI at Groningen and co‐author of the study. An international team led by the University of Groningen has combined radiocarbon dating, paleographic analysis and artificial intelligence to assign more precise dates to individual Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, showing many are significantly older than previously believed. Using a deep‐learning model called Enoch, researchers input digitized images of 135 scroll fragments and trained the system to recognize microscopic ink‐trace patterns, such as curvature and character shape, alongside new radiocarbon results for 24 samples. By correlating these handwriting features with empirically established dates, the team narrowed dating uncertainty to roughly ±30 years, outperforming conventional radiocarbon ranges for the period of 300-50 BCE. Until now, most Dead Sea Scrolls had been broadly placed between the third century BCE and the second century CE based on paleography alone, a method that lacked solid empirical markers. "There simply were no securely dated Hebrew or Aramaic manuscripts from the late Hellenistic era against which to compare," explained Professor Mladen Popović, director of the Qumran Institute at Groningen. "Our approach bridges that gap by using 24 radiocarbon‐anchored examples to give an objective timecode for handwriting styles." BiNet, an earlier neural network that the Groningen group developed to detect handwritten ink traces, formed the foundation of Enoch's architecture. Once trained, Enoch produced date predictions that aligned remarkably closely with radiocarbon results -- and, in some cases, suggested scrolls written in "Hasmonaean‐type" script may date to decades earlier than the approximate 150-50 BCE range. Similarly, Herodian‐style fragments appear to have emerged in the late second century BCE rather than the mid‐first century BCE, indicating concurrent script traditions rather than a simple evolutionary sequence. "The implications are profound," said Dr. Maruf Dhali, assistant professor of artificial intelligence at Groningen and co‐author of the study published this week in PLOS One. "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." Biblical fragments dates to originate in the early 160s BCE Indeed, two biblical fragments -- 4QDanielc (4Q114) and 4QQoheleta (4Q109) -- were shown by Enoch and new radiocarbon dates to originate roughly in the early 160s BCE and third century BCE respectively, matching the eras their anonymous authors likely composed the Books of Daniel and Ecclesiastes. "This is the first tangible proof that portions of Daniel and Qohelet were penned contemporaneously with their presumed scribes," noted Popović. "It opens a window into the production of biblical literature at its very source." Researchers stressed that Enoch does not replace human paleographers but augments their expertise with quantitative, explainable AI inferences. "Within a few decades, we could use this model to date more than a thousand additional scroll fragments," said Popović. "The resulting new chronology will reshape our understanding of literacy, script development, and textual transmission in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and early Roman eras." Buddy Christ, an associate curator at the Israel Antiquities Authority who was not involved in the study, praised the advance: "Marrying radiocarbon science with AI‐driven handwriting analysis represents a major leap forward. We now have a roadmap for dating unlabeled manuscripts across the Judean Desert corpus -- and beyond." The Enoch method could also be applied to other partially dated collections, such as Greek papyri or medieval European codices, providing a template for empirically grounded paleography. As the next step, Popović's team plans to make Enoch publicly accessible so that scholars worldwide can upload digitized manuscripts and receive probabilistic date estimates. For now, the Dead Sea Scrolls -- drawing renewed attention thanks to this breakthrough -- remain as historically vital as ever. With a precise "timecode" now embedded in their script, the scrolls promise fresh insights into the political upheavals, theological debates, and cultural transformations that shaped the Jewish and early Christian worlds.

AI model 'Enoch' reveals Dead Sea Scrolls are older than believed

Researchers establish two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors. An artificial intelligence program named Enoch has advanced the dating of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls by 50 to 150 years earlier than previously believed, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One. Researchers from the University of Groningen developed Enoch to analyze the handwriting styles of ancient manuscripts, combining radiocarbon dating and paleography to provide more accurate date estimates for individual Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts. The AI model suggests that many of the scrolls date back to the early second century BCE, and sometimes slightly earlier. "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, especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors," the authors stated, according to Ars Technica. The most striking results from the study concern the ages of two fragments from the Book of Daniel and Ecclesiastes. The fragments, known as 4QDaniel and 4QQohelet, are the first known biblical manuscripts dated to the time of their presumed authors. "Radiocarbon dating is a destructive method," said Professor Mladen Popović, an archaeologist at the University of Groningen and study lead author. To overcome this hurdle, the researchers created Enoch, which combines radiocarbon dating and machine-learning-based handwriting analysis to achieve more accurate date estimates. Enoch was trained on two primary datasets: an index of radiocarbon-dated historic biblical texts and an analysis of each manuscript's handwriting, allowing it to objectively determine an approximate age range for the scrolls. The AI program analyzed the handwriting style of 135 scrolls with unknown dates spanning three centuries from around 200 BCE to 100 CE. "In some cases we see dates that are 50 years older or maybe even a century older than previously assumed," Popović adds. Written with the help of a news-analysis system. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the Qumran Caves in the West Bank between 1946 and 1956, are considered the oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, including some of the oldest complete biblically canonical books known to exist. Previously, the age of individual scrolls was mainly estimated using paleography, which analyzes letter forms and handwriting. This method lacked an empirical basis due to a chronological gap between dated manuscripts from the 5th-4th centuries BCE and the 1st-2nd centuries CE. By combining writing styles with carbon-14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the date-prediction model Enoch can produce accurate dates for the manuscripts. The AI model provides a quantitative and empirical basis for the style analysis of handwriting, which traditional paleography cannot deliver. "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. Popović plans to apply the Enoch model to more Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as other ancient Aramaic texts like the Elephantine Papyri. "The techniques and methods we developed are applicable to other handwritten collections of text," he said. Enoch's analysis suggests we should backdate the two main writing styles used in the Dead Sea Scrolls: the Hasmonean and the Herodian script, indicating that the Herodian-type script emerged earlier than previously thought. According to a press release published on EurekAlert, the researchers evaluated the age of historic manuscripts from sites in modern-day Israel and the West Bank. "Enoch allowed the researchers to determine the age of individual Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts, offering 'realistic' dating estimates for nearly 80 percent of the scrolls, which could help order the remaining hundreds of scrolls," reports Popular Science. "The advantage of the [AI] model is that it provides quantified objectivity to paleography, reducing the method's subjectivity," the authors write. The study suggests that scribes were copying multiple literary manuscripts before this period, which could have major implications for our historical narratives.

Dead Sea Scrolls much older than previously thought, AI-based study...

Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are much older than academics previously thought, with some dating back to the time of their ancient authorship, a new study claims. Scientists from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands utilized artificial intelligence to examine the handwriting of the ancient fragments and claim they derived more accurate dates for some writings, including the Book of Daniel, according to a paper published in Plos One. The aptly named AI program "Enoch" was fed a plethora of already dated ancient texts from modern-day Israel and the West Bank that also had radiocarbon dates -- then used machine learning to study the handwriting progressions of 135 Dead Sea Scroll fragments. The study claimed that the fragment of the Book of Daniel 8-11, which was thought to be dated to 160s BC, could be as old as 230 BC, which overlaps with the period in which the biblical book was authored. "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," the study's authors wrote in a statement, Eureka Alert reported. "Especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors," the statement continued. Researchers also claim that fragments written in Herodian Aramaic and Hasmonaean Hebrew -- considered to have emerged in the First and Second centuries BC -- are actually older than initially thought and provide a new lens for the presumed proliferation of writing during that era. These new dating claims result in "a new chronology of the scrolls and the re-dating of ancient Jewish key texts that contribute to current debates on Jewish and Christian origins," the study stated. The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1943 by two Bedouin shepherds who found them secreted in caves in the Qumran section of Israel near the Dead Sea and are the oldest known fragments of Jewish manuscripts written in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Aramaic dating back to the Third and Second century BC. Scholars attribute the trove of religious manuscripts to the Essens, who were Jewish sectarians at the turn of the first millennium.