Groundbreaking research indicates that several Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously believed. the revised dating aligns some fragments with the periods in which they were originally written.

A team from the university of Groningen in the Netherlands utilized artificial intelligence too meticulously analyze the handwriting on these ancient documents. Their findings, published in the journal Plos One, suggest more accurate dates for several manuscripts, including sections of the Book of Daniel.

The AI program, named “Enoch,” was trained to assess a vast collection of pre-dated ancient manuscripts from Israel and the West Bank, which had also undergone radiocarbon dating. Through machine learning,it scrutinized the stylistic evolution present in the handwriting of 135 Dead sea Scroll fragments.

The study suggests that a fragment of the Book of Daniel 8-11,previously estimated to originate from the 160s BC,could potentially date back to 230 BC. This revised timeframe corresponds with the era in which the biblical book was composed.

According to a statement released by the study’s authors via Eureka Alert, “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.”

The statement continued, “Especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors.”

The research team also posits that fragments written in Herodian Aramaic and Hasmonaean Hebrew, languages believed to have emerged in the First and second centuries BC, are, in fact, older than initially assessed. This finding offers a fresh viewpoint on the presumed expansion of writing during that period.

These updated dating claims contribute to “a new chronology of the scrolls and the re-dating of ancient Jewish key texts that contribute to current debates on Jewish and Christian origins,” as stated in the study.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were initially discovered in 1943 by two Bedouin shepherds in caves located in Qumran, Israel, near the dead Sea.They represent the oldest known fragments of Jewish manuscripts, written in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Aramaic, dating back to the Third and Second centuries BC.

Scholars attribute the collection of religious manuscripts to the Essenes, a Jewish sectarian group active around the turn of the first millennium.

“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.”