Unlocking the timecode of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Using artificial intelligence and radiocarbon dating to date ancient manuscripts

News Release 4-Jun-2025

University of Groningen

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For this study, writing styles in digitized manuscripts were analyzed using BiNet, a previously developed deep neural network for detection of handwritten ink-trace patterns. By combining writing styles with carbon-14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the date-prediction model Enoch is able to produce an accurate date for the manuscript.

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Credit: Maruf Dhali, University of Groningen

Since their discovery, the historically and biblically hugely important Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of Jewish and Christian origins. However, while the general date of the scrolls is from the third century BCE until the second century CE, individual manuscripts thus far could not be securely dated. Now, by combining radiocarbon dating, palaeography, and artificial intelligence, an international team of researchers led by the University of Groningen has developed a date-prediction model, called Enoch, that provides much more accurate date estimates for individual manuscripts on empirical grounds. Using this model, the researchers demonstrate that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought. And for the first time, they establish that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed biblical authors. They presented their results in the journal PLOS One on 4 June.

Until now, the dating of individual manuscripts was mostly based on palaeography–the study of ancient handwriting–alone. However, the traditional palaeographic model has no solid empirical foundation. For most Dead Sea Scrolls, a calendar date is not known, and there are no other date-bearing manuscripts from the time period available for palaeographic comparison. Between the few date-bearing manuscripts in Aramaic/Hebrew from the fifth–fourth centuries BCE and the late first and early second century CE a gap is present that prevents accurate dating of the more than one thousand scrolls and fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls collection.

Digitized manuscripts

This gap is now closed by researchers in the ERC project The Hands That Wrote the Bible by combining radiocarbon dates from 24 scrolls samples, in combination with palaeographic analysis using a machine-learning-based model applying a Bayesian ridge regression method. The new radiocarbon dates are reliable, empirical time markers that bridge the palaeographic gap between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE. They provide an objective date for the writing styles in the tested manuscripts.

Based on this information, the researchers trained the date-prediction model named Enoch. They used a previously in-house developed deep neural network for detection of handwritten ink-trace patterns, BiNet, in digitized manuscripts. This allows for a subsequent geometric shape analysis at the microlevel of the ink trace, such as curvature (called textural), as well as at the level of character shapes (called allographic). It provides a quantitative and empirical basis for the style analysis of handwriting which traditional palaeography cannot deliver. Cross-validation then showed that Enoch can predict radiocarbon-based dates from style with an uncertainty of some 30 years (plus and minus). This is even more precise than direct radiocarbon dating results in the period range of 300–50 BCE.

The first machine-learning-based model

Now that Enoch is ready for use, it becomes possible to date the roughly one thousand Dead Sea manuscripts from this time period. The researchers took a first step in this by feeding Enoch the binarized images of 135 scrolls and having the date predictions evaluated by palaeographers. With Enoch, researchers have a powerful new tool that they can use to support, refine, or modify their own subjective estimates for specific manuscripts, often to an accuracy of only 50 years for manuscripts over 2,000 years old.

Enoch is the first complete machine-learning-based model that employs raw image inputs to deliver probabilistic date predictions for handwritten manuscripts, while ensuring transparency and interpretability through its explainable design. The combination of empirical evidence (radiocarbon from physics and character-shape-based analyses from geometry) brings a degree of quantified objectivity to palaeography never before achieved in the field. And the methods underpinning Enoch can be used for date prediction in other partially-dated manuscript collections.

New chronology

First results from Enoch’s date predictions, presented in the PLOS One paper, demonstrate that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought. This also changes how researchers should interpret the development of two ancient Jewish script styles which are called ‘Hasmonaean’ and ‘Herodian’. Specifically, manuscripts in Hasmonaean-type script can be older than the current estimate of ca. 150–50 BCE. And the Herodian-type script emerged earlier than previously thought, suggesting that these scripts existed next to each other since the late second century BCE instead of the mid-first century BCE which is the prevailing view.

This new chronology of the scrolls significantly impacts our understanding of political and intellectual developments in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods (late fourth century BCE until second century CE). It allows for new insights to be developed about literacy in ancient Judaea in relation to historical, political, and cultural developments such as urbanization, the rise of the Hasmonaean dynasty, and the rise and development of religious groups such as those behind the Dead Sea Scrolls and the early Christians.

Anonymous authors

Furthermore, this study establishes 4QDanielc (4Q114) and 4QQoheleta (4Q109) to be the first known fragments of a biblical book from the time of their presumed authors. We do not know who exactly finished the Book of Daniel but the common assumption is that this author did that during the early 160s BCE. Likewise, for Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) scholars assume that an anonymous author from the Hellenistic period (third century BCE) was behind this biblical book, instead of the view of tradition that it was King Solomon from the tenth century BCE. Our novel radiocarbon dating for 4Q114 and the Enoch date prediction for 4Q109 place these manuscripts in the same time as these anonymous authors from respectively the second and third centuries BCE. Thus, these results have now created the opportunity to study tangible evidence of hands that wrote the Bible.

Reference: Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, Lambert Schomaker, Johannes van der Plicht, Kaare Lund Rasmussen, Jacopo La Nasa, Ilaria Degano, Maria Perla Colombini, Eibert Tigchelaar, Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis. PLOS One, 4 June 2025.

This photo shows prof. Mladen Popovic, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism and Director of the Qumran Institute (front) and his colleauge Dr. Maruf Dhali, Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence, working with Enoch to date a manuscript from the Dead Sea scrolls.

This is a still from a short video on the project, which is linked from the PLOS One paper.

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University of Groningen

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Journal

PLOS One

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0323185 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis

Article Publication Date

4-Jun-2025

AI analysis of ancient handwriting provides new age estimates for Dead Sea Scrolls

Program trained on radiocarbon dating suggests some Dead Sea Scrolls might be older than previously thought

PLOS

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Enoch’s date prediction estimate for 4Q319. (a) from full spectrum color image to binarized image to 14C plot for 4Q259 that went into the training of Enoch. (b), from full spectrum color image to binarized image to Enoch’s date prediction plot for 4Q319 (see also illustration 9 in S5 Appendix). Red bars represent the probability of each date bin. The blue curve shows the smoothed distribution. Grey spikes indicate the local uncertainty of the estimate.

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Credit: Popović et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

An AI program trained to study the handwriting styles of centuries-old manuscripts from the Middle East suggests that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls might be older than previously thought, according to a study published June 4, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Mladen Popović from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and colleagues. This method could give researchers a new way to place undated manuscripts into the timeline of ancient history.

While some ancient manuscripts have dates written on them, giving archaeologists a precise understanding of when they were created, many manuscripts have no date information. By studying the evolution of handwriting styles over time, researchers can sometimes determine the approximate age of some undated manuscripts by evaluating their handwriting. But to use this method, researchers need enough manuscripts with accurate dates from that period of history to create a reliable timeline of handwriting styles.

For this new paper, researchers evaluated the age of historic manuscripts from various sites in modern-day Israel and the West Bank through radiocarbon dating, and then used machine learning to study the handwriting styles of each document. By pairing those two datasets together, the team could create an AI program — named Enoch, after the biblical figure — that could use the handwriting style of other manuscripts from the region to objectively determine an approximate age range.

To test the program, ancient handwriting experts evaluated Enoch’s age estimates for 135 of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The experts determined that approximately 79% of the AI’s estimates were “realistic,” with the remaining 21% determined to be either too old, too young, or indecisive.

Enoch has already helped the research team discover new things about these ancient manuscripts. For example, both Enoch and radiocarbon dating methods estimated older ages for many of the Dead Sea Scrolls than did traditional handwriting analysis. Although the authors note that more data and further research could help understand the timeline, their work provides new insights into when these documents might have been created.

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

“It is very exciting to set a significant step into solving the dating problem of the Dead Sea Scrolls and also creating a new tool that could be used to study other partially dated manuscript collections from history. This would not have been possible without the collaboration between so many different scientific disciplines, a real team effort!"

 

 

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/44KpPfy

Citation: Popović M, Dhali MA, Schomaker L, van der Plicht J, Lund Rasmussen K, La Nasa J, et al. (2025) Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis. PLoS One 20(6): e0323185. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0323185

Author countries: The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Belgium

Funding: This project has received funding by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 640497 (HandsandBible). The funding was received by M. Popović. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Journal

PLOS One

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0323185 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis

Article Publication Date

4-Jun-2025

UPDATED
BUSTED: ‘Dead Sea Scroll’ exhibit at right-wing supported Museum of the Bible is filled with fakes

March 13, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


The National Geographic revealed in a story on Friday that what the Museum of the Bible has claimed are fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls are a complete fraud.

The museum, founded by Hobby Lobby CEO Steve Green, already faced problems when they were “forced to forfeit thousands of cuneiform texts from Iraq, and pay a $3 million fine for illicit importation,” reported Politico.

Now the museum is back in the news as independent researchers funded by the museum announced that all of the 16 fragments are forgeries. The museum says that they were duped by the collector and Green, as well as biblical scholars.

“The Museum of the Bible is trying to be as transparent as possible,” says CEO Harry Hargrave. “We’re victims—we’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.”

The museum researchers released a report of over 200 pages detailing how “these fragments were manipulated with the intent to deceive,” said fraud investigator Colette Loll.

“The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem,” said National Geographic. “However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the ‘post-2002’ Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes.”

“Once one or two of the fragments were fake, you know all of them probably are, because they come from the same sources, and they look basically the same,” said Norway’s University researcher Årstein Justnes, who has tracked the post-2002 pieces.

“It really was—and still is—an interesting kind of detective story,” says Jeffrey Kloha, the Museum of the Bible’s chief curatorial officer. “We really hope this is helpful to other institutions and researchers because we think this provides a good foundation for looking at other pieces, even if it raises other questions.”

Read the full expose at the National Geographic.

Museum of the Bible's Dead Sea Scrolls are fake, analysis shows


All of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Museum of the Bible's collections have been determined to be fake. File Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Photo

March 13 (UPI) -- An art fraud investigation team announced Friday that none of the Museum of the Bible's Dead Sea Scrolls fragments is genuine.

The results of the third-party scientific analysis by Art Fraud Insights came more than a year after the museum determined that five of its fragments were fake and removed them from exhibition.

"After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is evident that none of the textual fragments in Museum of the Bible's Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic," said Colette Loll, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights. "Moreover, each exhibits characteristics that suggest they are deliberate forgeries created in the 20th century with the intent to mimic authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments."

Museum officials said they planned to continue using the services of Art Fraud Insights to analyze the facility's entire collection.

"Notwithstanding the less than favorable results, we have done what no other institution with post-2002 DSS fragments has done," Museum of the Bible Chief Curatorial Officer Jeffrey Kloha said. "The sophisticated and costly methods employed to discover the truth about our collection could be used to shed light on other suspicious fragments and perhaps even be effective in uncovering who is responsible for these forgeries."

Before it opened in November 2017, the Museum of the Bible's collection came under scrutiny by critics of the collecting practices of Hobby Lobby President Steve Green, who donated some of the exhibits at the museum. He donated the five fragments discredited in 2018.

The Green family has collected about 40,000 artifacts worth more than $205 million over the past decade.

In May 2018, Hobby Lobby returned thousands of historic artifacts from modern-day Iraq that Green purchased in Dubai and improperly brought to the United States. He paid $1.6 million for 5,500 pieces, which included 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets and stone cylinders, in 2010. The company also agreed to pay a $3 million fine.

The Department of Justice found that the company had the tablets shipped to its Oklahoma headquarters, but that the boxes were labeled as containing ceramic tile samples. Green promised more oversight at the time and blamed the incident on his own inexperience as a collector.

"We made mistakes, but we've learned from them," he said.

"Before this, we weren't collectors or museum-goers," Green added. "We didn't know we needed to ask for all this paperwork" to prove provenance.

Proving prior ownership of an artwork or artifact is meant not only to verify the authenticity of the piece, but to prevent the sale of looted items.

The misstep cast doubt on the veracity of other objects the Green family owns, including some that are on display at the Museum of the Bible.

Loll praised Museum of the Bible officials for being transparent about the inauthentic items.

"Usually, items that are determined to be fake are quietly removed from display and transferred to the euphemistic 'study collection.' Museum of the Bible has opted to be as transparent as possible with its collection of Dead Sea Scrolls -- from the interim gallery labels, to the public announcement of the results of the research and the subsequent release of all of the associated research materials. This data can now be used for comparison to other questioned fragments. What a tremendous contribution to the field," she said.

DNA research uncovers Dead Sea Scrolls mystery

AFP / MENAHEM KAHANA

The parchment and papyrus Dead Sea Scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic and include some of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments

DNA research on the Dead Sea Scrolls has revealed that not all of the ancient manuscripts came from the desert landscape where they were discovered, according to a study published Tuesday.

Numbering around 900, the manuscripts were found between 1947 -- first by Bedouin shepherds -- and 1956 in the Qumran caves above the Dead Sea that are today located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The parchment and papyrus scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic and include some of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments.

Research on the texts has been ongoing for decades and in the latest study, DNA tests on manuscript fragments indicate that some were not originally from the area around the caves.

"We have discovered through analysing parchment fragments that some texts were written on the skin of cows and sheep, whereas before we thought they had all been written on goat skin," said researcher Pnina Shor, who heads the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) project studying the manuscripts.

"This proves that the manuscripts do not come from the desert where they were found," she told AFP.

The researchers from the IAA and Tel Aviv University were unable to pinpoint where the fragments came from during their seven-year study, which focused on 13 texts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls date from the third century BC to the first century AD.

- 'Parts of a puzzle' -

Many experts believe the manuscripts were written by the Essenes, a dissident Jewish sect that had retreated into the Judaean desert around Qumran and its caves. Others argue that some of the texts were hidden by Jews fleeing the advance of the Romans.

"These initial results will have repercussions on the study of the life of Jews during the period of the Second Temple" in Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Romans in AD70, said Shor.

AFP / MENAHEM KAHANASome 25,000 parchment fragments have been discovered and the Dead Sea Scrolls texts have been continuously studied for more than 60 years

Such archaeological research remains a sensitive subject in Israel and the Palestinian territories, as findings are sometimes used by organisations or political parties to justify their claims to contested land.

Beatriz Riestra, a researcher who took part in the study, pointed to "differences at the same time in the content and the style of calligraphy, but also in the animal skin used for the parchment, proving they are of different origin".

In total, some 25,000 parchment fragments have been discovered and the texts have been continuously studied for more than 60 years.

"It's like piecing together parts of a puzzle," said Oded Rechavi, a professor who led the Tel Aviv University team.

"There are many scrolls fragments that we don't know how to connect, and if we connect wrong pieces together it can change dramatically the interpretation of any scroll," he said.
3JUN2020

NEWLY EXCAVATED

Israeli experts announce discovery of more Dead Sea scrolls

JERUSALEM — Israeli archaeologists on Tuesday announced the discovery of dozens of Dead Sea Scroll fragments bearing a biblical text found in a desert cave and believed hidden during a Jewish revolt against Rome nearly 1,900 years ago.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The fragments of parchment bear lines of Greek text from the books of Zechariah and Nahum and have been dated around the first century based on the writing style, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority. They are the first new scrolls found in archaeological excavations in the desert south of Jerusalem in 60 years.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of Jewish texts found in desert caves in the West Bank near Qumran in the 1940s and 1950s, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. They include the earliest known copies of biblical texts and documents outlining the beliefs of a little understood Jewish sect.

The roughly 80 new pieces are believed to belong to a set of parchment fragments found in a site in southern Israel known as the “Cave of Horror” — named for the 40 human skeletons found there during excavations in the 1960s — that also bear a Greek rendition of the Twelve Minor Prophets, a book in the Hebrew Bible. The cave is located in a remote canyon around 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Jerusalem.

The artifacts were found during an operation in Israel and the occupied West Bank conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority to find scrolls and other artifacts to prevent possible plundering. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war, and international law prohibits the removal of cultural property from occupied territory. The authority held a news conference Tuesday to unveil the discovery.

The fragments are believed to have been part of a scroll stashed away in the cave during the Bar Kochba Revolt, an armed Jewish uprising against Rome during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, between 132 and 136. Coins struck by rebels and arrowheads found in other caves in the region also hail from that period.

“We found a textual difference that has no parallel with any other manuscript, either in Hebrew or in Greek,” said Oren Ableman, a Dead Sea Scroll researcher with the Israel Antiquities Authority. He referred to slight variations in the Greek rendering of the Hebrew original compared to the Septuagint — a translation of the Hebrew Bible to Greek made in Egypt in the third and second centuries B.C.



“When we think about the biblical text, we think about something very static. It wasn’t static. There are slight differences and some of those differences are important,” said Joe Uziel, head of the antiquities authority's Dead Sea Scrolls unit. “Every little piece of information that we can add, we can understand a little bit better” how the Biblical text came into its traditional Hebrew form.

Alongside the Roman-era artifacts, the exhibit included far older discoveries of no lesser importance found during its sweep of more than 500 caves in the desert: the 6,000-year-old mummified skeleton of a child, an immense, complete woven basket from the Neolithic period, estimated to be 10,500 years old, and scores of other delicate organic materials preserved in caves’ arid climate.

In 1961, Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni excavated the “Cave of Horror” and his team found nine parchment fragments belonging to a scroll with texts from the Twelve Minor Prophets in Greek, and a scrap of Greek papyrus.

Since then, no new texts have been found during archaeological excavations, but many have turned up on the black market, apparently plundered from caves.

For the past four years, Israeli archaeologists have launched a major campaign to scour caves nestled in the precipitous canyons of the Judean Desert in search of scrolls and other rare artifacts. The aim is to find them before plunderers disturb the remote sites, destroying archaeological strata and data in search of antiquities bound for the black market.

Until now the hunt had only found a handful of parchment scraps that bore no text.

Amir Ganor, head of the antiquities theft prevention unit, said that since the commencement of the operation in 2017 there has been virtually no antiquities plundering in the Judean Desert, calling the operation a success.

“For the first time in 70 years, we were able to preempt the plunderers,” he said.

How scribes of the ancient world were the pollsters of their day

Andrew Perrin, Associate Vice President Research, Athabasca University 

In modern elections, pollsters have taken on an almost prophetic role. Pollsters read the signs of the times with big data and pulse checks on public opinion to project imminent exchanges of power. But both prophets and pollsters share a common occupational risk: their respectability rests solely in the reliability of their predictions.

© (Shutterstock) The Dead Sea scrolls show scribes using the theme of four kingdoms (Babylon-Persia, Greece, Rome and the kingdom of God) as a flexible way to prophesize.

In the recent U.S. presidential election, Joe Biden won the presidency, but Donald Trump garnered far more votes than predicted. As in the 2016 election, projections by advance poll missed the mark. Further doubt has been cast on pollsters’ methods.

The reality is polling problems are nothing new. There is a controversial history of polling since the modern advent of this art and science in the 20th century. The back story of political projection by reading the numbers, however, has more ancient roots.

My research in the religious identities of ancient Judaism has led me to study the projections of political exchanges that fell to seers, sages and scribes. To unlock the meaning of the past and project political upheavals or continuity, these figures used a number of methods.

One of the more common mechanisms for reviewing and predicting history involved a simple yet profound numerical tool: counting to four. This technique and structure for seeing the world came to influence ways of seeing and describing empires in surprisingly diverse contexts. Some of our earliest examples are found in ancient Judaism but flourish in many forms in later sources that leveraged this motif to make sense of the past, explain the present and project a better future.

© (Wikimedia Commons) ‘Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts,’ woodcut, by Hans Holbein the Younger (ca. 1497–1543).

The book of Daniel

Readers of the biblical book of Daniel are familiar with the motif of counting to four. Characters in the book have multiple nightmares of four-tiered statues or four ferocious monsters, which interpreters later decode as referring to the rise and fall of four empires on the eve of expected divine delivery.

For the writers and readers of Daniel living under the oppressive thumb of empires in ancient Palestine in the centuries leading up to the common era, this meant rule by Babylon, Media, Persia and Greece.

Then the unthinkable happened. Some ancient Jewish groups anticipated the breaking dawn of liberation under divine rule starting in the mid-second century BCE. Instead, the oppression of Hellenistic rulers wore on until Roman warhorses crushed through the horizon in Palestine in 63 BCE. The metrics were misread, the prophecy missed the mark.

How does culture move on from such an epic fail? Rerun the numbers. Rethink the mechanism. Rewrite the prediction.
Dead Sea Scrolls

One of the earliest places we see recalculating predictions is in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This trove of nearly 1,000 fragmentary manuscripts penned or preserved by an ancient Jewish community between 150 BCE to 70 CE includes an Aramaic writing known as the “Four Kingdoms.”

In this text, a Jewish seer beholds four talking trees that disclose that they represent four empires. Though the text is fragmentary, the scribe behind it seems to have conjured a different four kingdom count: Babylon-Persia, Greece, Rome and the kingdom of God. In adapting this theme seen in the book of Daniel, he preserves continuity with the past while accounting for Rome — and sketching apocalyptic hopes for the imminent coming of the kingdom of God.

The beauty and complexity of this four kingdoms motif is it is inherently updatable to new political realities. Following these texts is a long history of writers recalculating four kingdoms projections.
Re-ordering the world

An open-access book I co-edited with New Testament scholar Loren Stuckenbruck, Four Kingdom Motifs Before and Beyond the Book of Daniel, explores the scope and spread of this strategy to read the past and write the future.

More than anything, this project revealed the inherent adaptability of the four kingdoms motif across cultural contexts, throughout time and from diverse perspectives. Well beyond the days of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls, this motif enabled communities and creatives to order the world around them and locate themselves on often tumultuous timelines.

For example, Old Testament scholar Ian Young reveals that the earliest Greek translation of the book of Daniel (included in the translation of Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint) may have included a fifth kingdom to account for the phases of Hellenistic rule following the conquest of Alexander the Great and the divided domains in his wake.

In the medieval period, some Christian apocalyptic writers imagined that Rome had never really fallen because the Christendom inherited its authority to become an empire without end. They therefore believed they were living in the capstone fourth kingdom that was the pinnacle of history.

Apocalyptic literature scholar Lorenzo DiTommaso shows how rethinking the very idea of empire enabled seventh-century writer Pseudo-Methodius to imagine Christian Europe as the capstone fourth kingdom. He then leveraged this idea to critique the emerging imperial forces of Islam in the Levant.

These examples underscore that the timelines of apocalyptic hopes are always responsive to current crises.

Yet the potential of the four kingdoms mechanism cut both ways: some Muslim interpreters also looked to the book of Daniel and found evidence of their own ascendancy. Arabic Bible scholar Miriam Hjälm notes how in the 18th century, the Shiʿah Muslim Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī perceived that the book of Daniel’s mention of a kingdom “that shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44) was the Islamic empire.
Envisioning the world

Scholar of biblical interpretation Brennan Breed highlighted how some European map-makers relied on four kingdoms motifs that influenced earlier writers when they envisioned the world.

The immense medieval Hereford map structures the world around the spiritual centre of Jerusalem, with Christ enthroned at the top. The four empires of Babylon, Media, Macedonia and Rome are placed on the east-west axis to depict the progression of empires as culminating in English rule. The map-maker notes the cartography is inspired by the fifth-century Christian writer Orosius’s descriptions of the world, who relied on the four kingdoms motif to inform his understanding of geography and history.
The ongoing history of empire

Tools for developing political projections and making a claim on the world may endure over time, but their implementation is always bound to a context.

Missing the mark in political speculation is nothing new. It’s as old as politics and government itself. When contexts change, we are forced to revisit the mechanisms or metrics used to account for the unexpected present.

The history of overturning and re-imagining empires through religious motifs should give us pause for reflection.

The motif of centring one’s own interests while acknowledging a changing world is embedded in writings inspired by ancient Judaism’s four kingdoms prophecies — including the cultural, material and religious heritage of imperialistic western powers.

The history of the exchanges and evolution of empire is ongoing. Its effects are something we’re only beginning to understand.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The book project featured here was supported by funding from the Canada Research Chair in Religious Identities of Ancient Judaism and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

 

Hasmonean history is combined with the enigma of the Qumran calendar – to solve an ancient mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Tel-Aviv University

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Prof. Eshbal Ratzon 

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Credit: Tel Aviv University

New study by Prof. Eshbal Ratzon of Tel Aviv University

Hasmonean history is combined with the enigma of the Qumran calendar – to solve an ancient mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

• According to the study, the 364-day calendar, a crux of the dispute between the Qumran sect and Jerusalem, was actually used for a time by the Qumran community, but was abandoned when it began to drift away from the seasons, and relations with Hasmonean King Alexander Jannaeus improved.

A new study from Tel Aviv University proposes a solution to a historical mystery that has puzzled researchers for decades: Was the unique calendar of the Qumran sect, based on a 364-day year, ever used in practice, or was it merely a theoretical model?

The study hypothesizes that the calendar was indeed used by the sect in its early years, and even stood at the crux of the controversy that drove the sect to isolation in the desert. However, the calendar was later abandoned due to an inherent problem that made it impracticable over time, as well as warming relations with Hasmonean leadership under Alexander Jannaeus.

The study 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 paper was published in the Tarbiz Quarterly for Jewish Studies.

The Qumran calendar differed from the lunisolar calendar that served as a basis for Jewish life during the Second Temple period. It consisted of exactly 364 days - a number that is perfectly divisible by seven, and thus every year included 52 full weeks, and every holiday always fell on the same day of the week. For the Qumran sect, this reflected a perfect divine order. In the political sense, the calendar represented a rebellion against the political and religious leadership at the Temple in Jerusalem, which determined all significant dates. The sect believed that these dates had already been set by God during the Creation of the world, and humans must not interfere.

Yet the Qumran calendar's mathematical perfection created a serious difficulty: it diverged by one day and a quarter from the 365-day astronomical year. This difference may appear negligible, but it accumulates rapidly. For instance, if the Qumran calendar was used for twenty years, the festivals would shift by almost four weeks relative to the seasons. After several decades, a spring festival would end up being celebrated in winter, or even in the fall. For a community that regarded festivals as agricultural events connected to the harvest, first fruits, and seasons of the year, this posed a fundamental problem.

To understand the significance of the gap, one can compare the calendar to a clock that deviates by one minute every day. At first, no one notices the problem, but after months and years, such a clock no longer represents reality. The study explains that this is exactly what happened to the Qumran calendar: while ideal from a conceptual and mathematical perspective, over time it drifted further and further away from the natural cycles it sought to govern.

Over the past decades, researchers have proposed various solutions to this enigma. Some maintained that the Qumran sect periodically added days or weeks to its calendar, while others claimed that the calendar had never actually been used in the real world, serving only as a theoretical framework. Prof. Ratzon argues that neither option is supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to her study, the evidence indicates that the calendar was regarded by the sect as a key component of their religious identity and a major point of contention with the Jerusalem establishment.

The study notes that almost twenty of the scrolls found in Qumran deal with calendars and astronomy - an exceptional number that attests to the topic's immense importance for the community. The Book of Jubilees, a central work in the Qumran library, fiercely attacks the prevailing lunar calendar, presenting the 364-day calendar as the original calendar received by Moses on Mount Sinai.

Based on this body of evidence, Prof. Ratzon proposes a new historical reconstruction: she contends that the Qumran calendar was actively used during the sect's formative days in the second century BCE, exacerbating its conflict with the religious leadership in Jerusalem. However, as the years went by, the calendar's accumulating digression from the seasons could no longer be ignored. In addition, the sect's relations with the ruling Hasmonean dynasty warmed during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, who supported a halacha similar to their own and opposed the Pharisaic leadership. This enabled the Qumran sect to relinquish their previously adamant position and adopt the more practical calendar used at the Temple. They retained their own calendar as a theoretical concept that had been valid at the time of Creation and might be used again in the End of Days.

Prof. Ratzon concludes: "The Qumran calendar has long been regarded as one of the Qumran sect's defining features, but also as one of the most baffling mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study proposes an alternative for the seeming contradiction between a functional calendar and a theoretical one. It is quite possible that the calendar was in fact used for a certain period of time, but then, losing its practical role due to both inherent problems and political changes, became a religious ideal and a symbol of identity. This would explain both its centrality in the Qumran scrolls and its gradual disappearance from historical reality."