How Tech Unlocked Secrets of Ancient Biblical Scroll

Nearly half a century ago, archaeologists found a charred ancient scroll in the ark of a synagogue on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The lump of carbonized parchment could not be opened or read. Its curators did nothing but conserve it, hoping that new technology might one day emerge to make the scroll legible. Just such a technology has bow been perfected by computer scientists with biblical scholars in Jerusalem, they have used a computer to unfurl a digital image of the scroll. It turns out to hold a fragment identical to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible and at nearly 2,000 years old, is the earliest instance of the text.

The writing retrieved by the computer from the digital image of the unopened scroll is amazingly clear and legible, in contrast to the scroll’s blackened and beaten up exterior. The scroll’s content, the first two chapters of the Book of Leviticus, has consonants – early Hebrew texts didn’t specify vowels – that are identical to those of the Masoretic text, the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible and the one often used as the bases for translations of the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles. The Dead Sea scroll contain versions quite similar to the Masoretic text but with many small differences. The text in the scroll found that the En-Gedi excavation site in Israel decades ago has none. This is the earliest evidence of the exact form of the medieval text.