The Dead Sea Scrolls, once the sacred preserve of specialists armed with magnifying glasses and guesswork, have finally been subjected to machine learning.
In a new article in the journal PLOS One published Wednesday, researchers from the University of Groningen combined AI and carbon dating to find that many of the scrolls are older than scholars previously estimated. Some, it seems, could date to the time of the biblical authors themselves, not centuries after.
The conventional timelines, based largely on handwriting analysis and compromised carbon tests, now look suspiciously optimistic. Early dating efforts, we now learn, were skewed by the application of castor oil—a 1950s attempt to make the manuscripts readable that had the unintended effect of scrambling radiocarbon results.
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Mladen Popović, the lead researcher and a professor at Groningen, and his team cleaned the samples before dating them again. They then trained an AI model, playfully named Enoch after the biblical figure who reputedly walked with God and learned a few tricks along the way, to analyze ink patterns across the scrolls. When tested, Enoch produced dates that matched corrected carbon readings 85 percent of the time, often with greater precision.
The findings are not minor. A fragment from the Book of Daniel, long thought to be a later copy, now appears to be contemporary with the supposed author himself. Meanwhile, writing styles previously believed to belong to distinct eras—Hasmonean and Herodian scripts—were, it turns out, being used simultaneously for far longer than expected. History, as usual, refuses to be tidy.
Notably, the AI method does not require the destructive sampling that traditional radiocarbon dating demands, an advantage when dealing with the more than 1,000 undated scrolls that remain.
Still, some scholars have cautioned restraint. Radiocarbon, after all, dates parchment, not ink, and the AI model, like any machine, is limited by the quality of the data fed into it. But even cautious experts admit that the findings could force a reassessment of where and when these scrolls were produced. As Professor Joan Taylor of King’s College London pointed out to the Guardian, the data suggests many of the scrolls predate Qumran’s occupation—a polite way of saying they were unlikely to have been written there.
In short, the world’s oldest theological archive may finally be coming into focus—not through intuition, but through algorithms.