Dead Sea Scrolls analysis may force rethink of ancient Jewish history

Thanks to AI and modern carbon dating techniques, we have a new understanding of when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written – which could revise the story of Judea

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

4 June 2025

The Isaiah Dead Sea Scroll is thought to date to around 100 BC

Zev Radovan/Alamy

Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be up to a century older than previously thought, potentially revising our understanding of how these ancient texts were produced.

This new assessment, based on AI analysis of handwriting and modern radiocarbon dating techniques, even suggests that a few scrolls – like those containing the biblical books Daniel and Ecclesiastes – may be copies made during the lifetimes of the books’ original authors, says Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

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“I’m not saying they were written by the authors themselves,” he says. “But our study is a significant first step in rethinking what we know about literacy in ancient Judea, which now seems to have emerged before its political independence from the empires fighting to control it.”

The scrolls were discovered by shepherds in a cave on the north-west shore of the Dead Sea in 1947, leading to archaeological digs in the area that eventually uncovered nearly a thousand fragmented manuscripts hidden in 11 caves and a few other sites nearby. These Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest known copies of some Old Testament books, and other ancient Jewish texts.

Scholars believed the scrolls were hidden to protect them from the Romans, who destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. Based on the letterforms in the texts – mostly written in Hebrew or Aramaic – the scrolls were thought to date from as early as 150 BC. These assessments were based on comparisons with hand-dated administrative manuscripts from other sites from the 5th and 4th centuries BC and from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, but nothing specific to the time period of the scrolls.