Discovered in 1970, the secret of the holy scrolls was finally revealed using advanced technology. This scroll contains the covenant between God and the Prophet Moses.
Quoted from the University of Kentucky website, the Ein Gedi scroll is an ancient and fragile parchment in Hebrew. Based on carbon testing methods, these scrolls are thought to date from the third or fourth century AD.
Based on a report in the journal Sciences Advances, researchers at the University of Kentucky, United States, and Jerusalem managed to read the manuscript in it through three-dimensional analysis with X-ray scanning.
Reading the manuscript with special software technology that detects the parchment layers and opens them digitally, revealing for the first time the Hebrew text was written on scrolls some 1,500 years old.
"I've never seen an actual scroll, to me, it's a testament to the power of the digital age," said Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky.
To distinguish the contours of rolled papyrus, Seales wrote a computer program. He likened the process to cartography, in that the density data from a micro-CT scan is all information in a garbled form. Moreover, the scroll found near the sacred ark near the Dead Sea was also burned.
Unfortunately, the x-rays and their algorithm couldn't read the carbon-based ink on rolls from Roman times. News of the Seales software reached the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). They then scanned the Ein Gedi scroll with a micro-CT machine but were unable to make sense of the information.
Luckily for Seales, the Hebrews added metal to their ink, which is clearly visible as a bright white dot in the CT data. When the software opens the layer from the middle of the scroll, a text appears that reads: "God called Moses and spoke to him."
Israeli translators identified these words as the first verse in Leviticus, the part of the Torah in the Hebrew or Christian Bible.
"This discovery really surprised us, scanned the burning scroll and managed to uncover it," said Pnina Shor, curator and director of the IAA's Dead Sea Scrolls Project.
While Seales worked on decoding the rest of the Ein Gedi scrolls, he planned to study other scrolls found at the same site. And with his reputation known for "raising texts from the dead", other projects await him to explore, including a novel from the early 20th century that caught fire in a house fire.
"When you have new technology like this, it will drive anything that might be possible. People start thinking about learning material that they couldn't previously learn," he concluded.
