Researchers using advanced digital imaging have revealed new characters inside a multi-layered Dead Sea Scrolls fragment from Cave 11. The discovery, announced following work by the Digital Restoration Initiative, adds to ongoing efforts to read damaged ancient texts while scholars debate the historical use of the community’s unique 364-day calendar.
Virtual Unwrapping Reveals Hidden Writing in Qumran Fragment
In November 2018, the Israel Antiquities Authority invited the team – commonly referred to as the Digital Restoration Initiative (DRI) – to continue their work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 2015, the team achieved a significant breakthrough with the IAA’s scroll from En Gedi. For the most recent project, micro-CT scans were conducted on five different items from the collection, including a small fragment found in Cave 11 at Qumran.
The following spring, Anthony Tamasi – a computer science undergraduate in the College of Engineering – began working on the data. Using cutting-edge technology, he was able to virtually unwrap five layers of the multi-layered fragment – revealing clear images of ancient writing.
“When I first saw the text inside the scroll, it felt like I was a kid again – like digging through the sand for fossils at one of those museum exhibits and actually finding one. I was so excited,” Tamasi said. “I was the first person to see the contents of the scroll this millennium. There aren’t many opportunities like that.”
Scholars from the antiquities authority recovered some thirty characters across the unwrapped layers. Oren Ableman and Beatriz Riestra, the scholars from the IAA who are charged with deciphering the text, noted that while the letters can be easily deciphered, the extant text is still not enough to recognize whether it is written in Hebrew or Aramaic.
“The continued research of the digital restoration and the possible detection of any further traces of ink recovered using the imaging analysis of the Digital Restoration Initiative will make it possible to read a text that is still a mystery,” Oren Ableman and Beatriz Riestra stated.
Oren Ableman
Scholars from the Jewish Studies Program in the UK College of Arts and Sciences were also excited by the results of the imaging technology and the newly-discovered letters.
“The script itself is Aramaic “square” style (Ashurit script), which is the same writing system as what one would recognize as written Hebrew today,” said Jim Ridolfo, an associate professor in Jewish studies and Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies. “But at the time the Dead Sea Scrolls were penned, Ashurit script could be used to write Aramaic (the language) or Biblical Hebrew. Qumran also contained palelo-Hebrew manuscripts such as 11QpaleoLev.”
The Astronomical Puzzle of the Qumran Calendar
While digital imaging unlocks physical texts, separate research addresses the intellectual framework of the community that produced them. A longstanding mystery surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls may have a new explanation. Researchers have debated for decades whether the Qumran sect actually followed its unusual 364-day calendar or whether the system existed mainly as a religious and theoretical ideal. A study from Tel Aviv University argues that both possibilities may be partly correct.
According to the proposed reconstruction, the sect likely used the calendar during its early history, when disagreements over religious dates contributed to its separation from the Jerusalem establishment. Later, however, the system may have been abandoned because of a fundamental astronomical problem and changing political relations with the Hasmonean leadership under Alexander Jannaeus. The research was conducted by Prof. Eshbal Ratzon of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at the Entin Faculty of Humanities. The findings were published in the Tarbiz Quarterly for Jewish Studies.
A Calendar Built Around 52 Perfect Weeks
The Qumran calendar differed sharply from the lunisolar calendar that shaped Jewish religious life during the Second Temple period. Its year contained exactly 364 days, which can be divided evenly by seven. That produced 52 complete weeks every year and ensured that religious festivals always occurred on the same day of the week. For members of the Qumran sect, this orderly structure was more than a mathematical convenience. They regarded it as reflecting a perfect divine system.
The calendar also carried political and religious significance. Authorities at the Temple in Jerusalem determined important dates using the prevailing calendar, but the Qumran sect rejected the idea that human leaders should have that power. Its members believed the dates had already been established by God during the Creation of the world and therefore should not be altered by people.
The Hidden Problem With 364 Days
The very feature that made the Qumran calendar so elegant also created a serious practical problem. A 364-day year is about one day and a quarter shorter than the roughly 365-day astronomical year. That discrepancy seems small at first, but it grows steadily over time. After 20 years, festivals would have shifted by almost four weeks relative to the seasons. Given enough decades, a celebration intended for spring could eventually fall in winter or even autumn.
Disputed Origins and Multiple Authorship Theories
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves near an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes—thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.—wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls. But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem.
“Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews,” said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, which airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel.
The new view is by no means the consensus, however, among Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.
“I have a feeling it’s going to be very disputed,” said Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (NYU).