Researchers are gleaning new insights into ancient biblical texts with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
The Dead Sea Scrolls contain some of the earliest known versions of texts from the Bible, including the books of Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah, Kings, and Deuteronomy. For decades, researchers relied on handwriting style and radiocarbon dating to determine that the manuscripts originated between the third century B.C. and the first century A.D.
However, AI is giving researchers more accurate insight into when the scrolls originated.
Findings published in the journal PLOS One contend that the biblical manuscripts date to about 2,300 years ago, which would be up to 150 years earlier than researchers originally thought.
In fact, the new dating discovery places Dead Sea Scrolls for the book of Daniel directly in the same time period as the life of its presumed author.
“The Dead Sea Scrolls were extremely important when they were discovered because they completely changed the way we think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity,” said Mladen Popović, who is also dean of the Faculty of Religion, Culture, and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
“Out of around 1,000 manuscripts, a bit more than 200 are what we call biblical Old Testament, and they are the oldest copies we have of the Hebrew Bible. They gave us a lot of information about what the text looked like back then,” he continued.
Popović and his team used an AI program called Enoch to analyze handwriting on 27 pieces of thumbnail size scraps of parchment through an algorithmic approach and then compared that with radiocarbon dating. They then compared the handwriting style of other manuscripts from the region to objectively determine an approximate age range.
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Popović says the scrolls, which include legal documents and laws that governed the communities during those centuries, are like a “time machine,” that gives insight as to how people were reading, writing, and learning.
“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,” said Popović in a statement.
“They are physical, tangible evidence of a period of history that is crucial — whether you’re Christian, Jewish, or don’t believe at all, because the Bible is one of the most influential books in the history of the world, so the scrolls allow us to study it as a form of cultural evolution,” he added.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by Bedouin shepherds inside the Qumran caves located in the Judaean Desert from 1946 to 1947.
Previously, researchers have relied heavily on paleography, the study and deciphering of ancient writing and manuscripts, to determine the manuscript’s range.
Popović contends AI’s ability to analyze the Dead Sea Scrolls will transform how researchers study artifacts.
Christopher Rollston, a professor and chair of biblical and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at George Washington University argues the results of AI’s analysis are not very surprising.
“The results of this study are very interesting and presumably important, but not Earth-shattering,” he told Live Science. “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 noted that while AI could be helpful in research, it should not be the “only tool in the toolbox.”
“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.”
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