AI shedding new light on ancient texts

From 1947, the recovery of fragments of Biblical texts in the region of the Dead Sea became one of the most celebrated archaeological discoveries of modern times.

Accidentally found by Arab shepherd boys, the first scraps proved to be part of a trove of over 1,000 manuscripts hidden by Jews from the Romans during the first century. A recent paper has announced new light being revealed from these ancient texts.

Perfect preservatives

It is hard to overemphasise how significant the Dead Sea Scrolls would become for Biblical studies. Prior to their emergence, the earliest complete Hebrew manuscript was what we call the Masoretic Text dating to around the tenth century.

The Dead Sea Scrolls had been hidden in wilderness caves during the Roman suppression of the Jewish people. While the temple was destroyed, Jews expelled and temple treasures transferred to Rome, books of the Bible were hidden away in the desert. The dry, salty atmosphere was perfect for their preservation. Almost overnight, scholars had access to nearly every book of the Old Testament in Hebrew predating the Masoretic Text by a thousand years.

The Dead Sea Scrolls really are the gift that keeps on giving. Thirteen different caves were found to have manuscripts and it would be decades before all their contents had been scrutinised and published. The headline story for us is that the scrolls demonstrate the reliability of the copying tradition of the Hebrew scribes. Variations are minor and most modern translations (such as the NIV and ESV) will provide footnotes that reference any difference of note among the Dead Sea Scrolls. These manuscripts have also shed light on the traditions of the Jewish sect of the Essenes and first-century background to the time of Jesus.

Archaeological work at the site of the scrolls has continued over the decades. Further caves have been found, including evidence of looting that indicates many more scrolls have been found and sold into private collections. The extensive remains of a Jewish settlement at nearby Qumran are generally identified as the homes of those who copied the scrolls, though this is still debated.

But new technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence, has begun a re-evaluation of what had been assumed about the texts – and it gets better! The dating of the manuscripts has been relatively straightforward. First, many were found where they had been hidden rather than emerging on the black market. That helps because we know that the scrolls were sealed away at the end of the Jewish revolt of the first century giving a latest possible date of AD 70.

Carbon dating had been carried out on a handful of scrolls but this is destructive (requiring a fragment to be destroyed in order to measure the carbon content). The most important way the scrolls were dated was through palaeography – the analysis of handwriting. Putting together these techniques, the Dead Sea Scrolls were dated to between 200 BC and AD 66.

New insights into old texts

In June 2025 a new study was published that made use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and put together all the evidence from previous studies. AI was able to analyse handwriting in much more detail across many more examples than had ever been possible. What would take people years of study, AI could do in hours.

The results of the new studies indicate that many scrolls were completed much earlier than had been previously thought. Copies of Daniel and Ecclesiastes have been put back by over a century. These dates further confirm the reliability of the copying tradition and narrow the gap between these physical documents and the original writings from which they were copied. Given that at the time of burial some of the manuscripts were already over 300 years old, it demonstrates just how important they must have been.

A further implication of these new insights is that it suggests the manuscripts did not originate at Qumran. The evidence points to many of them already being venerable Old Testament scrolls that had been moved from somewhere else (Jerusalem?) and hidden from the Romans in the wilderness. The Dead Sea Scrolls may even include texts that belong to the period of the Old Testament itself. How close can we get to the time of their original writing? For all the anxieties over Artificial Intelligence, it does seem that AI will accelerate our answers to these questions!