Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Digital handwriting analysis and artificial intelligence offer new clues
One day during the second century BC, a scribe dipped a pen in ink and started writing pages and pages of Hebrew on leather parchment.
The manuscript was to become one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.
But about halfway through their job, the scribe stopped writing, and the rest of the 7-metre-long manuscript was written by someone else.
Centuries later in 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd stumbled upon the scroll, which had been wrapped in linen and hidden in a jar, as part of a legendary find in the Qumran Caves west of Jerusalem.
As experts examined what became known as the Great Scroll of Isaiah, they noted the handwriting appeared to be uniform throughout, and most assumed it had been scribed by one person.
But the latest analysis using computers and artificial intelligence, published today in PLOS ONE, has revealed two scribes were involved — and promises a new era in understanding the hands that penned the Bible.
These Dead Sea Scrolls are so exciting because they're like a time machine," said Mladen Popovic, co-author of the study and a historian of ancient Jewish religion and culture at the University of Groninger in the Netherlands.
"They allow us to study a moment in the evolution of what became the Bible before it was the Bible."
Scrolls and scribes
In ancient times, holy texts were transmitted over the centuries by scribes.
The Great Scroll of Isaiah, for example, is the earliest version of the text that appears in the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. But we know little about who wrote such scrolls.
"The authors are anonymous," Professor Popovic said.
"They didn't sign it with their name, nor did they put a date on it. So we don't really have a clue who they are."
While there have been some hotly debated theories about who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, none are based on hard evidence, he added.
"We wanted to get down to the real people behind the scrolls."
To that end, he teamed up with colleagues Lambert Schomaker and Maruf A. Dhali from the university's department of artificial intelligence
The idea was to use computers to analyse digital images of the scroll text and identify tiny differences in handwriting that are unique to individuals – a method known as digital palaeography.
Some people suggested that certain aspects of the scroll, including a gap in text near middle, meant it had been worked on by two different scribes, but this was not generally accepted, Dr Popovic said.
But the new approach put that idea to a more robust test and indeed showed the first half of the manuscript was written by a different person to the second half.
"We were quite surprised to see such clear evidence for separation between the two halves," Dr Popovic said, adding that this kind of finding could help shed light on the "scribal culture" responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls.
For example, the fact the two scribes mirrored each other's handwriting could suggest they were trained together, or perhaps a parent trained a child, he said.