The oldest version of the Old Testament revealed by 3D imaging

Researchers in Kentucky and Jerusalem were able read it using three dimensional digital analysis of an X-ray scan, the Science Advances Journal announced.

In a statement, Seales said: “This work opens a new window through which we can look back through time by reading materials that were thought lost through damage and decay”. In fact, En-Gedi hasn’t been read for millennia.

The digital technology, funded by Google and the U.S. National Science Foundation, is slated to be released to the public as open source software by the end of next year.

The charred scroll from En-Gedi. Archaeologists in 1970 uncovered En-Gadi, a site west of the Dead Sea which was once home to a large Jewish community from the eighth century BCE until it was destroyed by fire around 600 CE.

The ark from En-Gedi stored crumpled debris that had once been holy biblical scrolls. Because the scroll wasn’t just rolled-but actually crushed and burned-each page surface has an arbitrary shape. “It can’t be coincidental that the synagogue in Ein Gedi that was burned in the sixth century housed an early scroll whose text was completely identical with medieval texts”.

“Although more automation in the pipeline is possible, we have now achieved our overarching goal, which is the creation of a new restoration pathway – a way to overcome damage – to reach and retrieve text from the brink of oblivion”, writes Seales. In 2015, Italian scientists were able to reveal a few words and letters embedded in a charred scroll that survived the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius almost two millennia ago.

Their first step was to overlay a mesh of tiny triangles onto the 3-D structure of the scroll to separate out the individual layers.

The opened ancient Dead Sea Scroll shows the wonderful truth!

So, they increased the spatial resolution of the scan, allowing them to capture whether or not each layer had detectable ink.

However, the text was illegible.

Yet a team of archaeologists and computer scientists led by Brent Seales, a computer imaging expert at the University of Kentucky, has digitally unwrapped it.

“It was certainly a shot in the dark”, Shor said. The En-Gedi manuscript is the first heavily damaged ancient scroll to be virtually unraveled and read, line by line, without opening it.

Digital manipulation adjusted the virtual scroll’s texture and flattened it so the text was legible. So they took one scroll and after several calibration scans, picked up what they thought was probably ink. The damaged layers were then isolated digitally through a process called segmentation. Now an global team of scientists has managed to do so by virtually unrolling the scroll, revealing the text hidden deep within: the first few verses from the book of Leviticus. Through virtual unwrapping, they have revealed it to be the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book – Leviticus – ever found in a Holy Ark. Each line has 33 to 34 letters.

Michael Segal, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a coauthor on the study, said that he and a colleague, Emanuel Tov, analyzed the scroll after the team in Kentucky made it readable.

Radiocarbon analysis has shown that the En-Gedi scroll dates to the third or fourth century AD.

“Hence, the En-Gedi scroll provides an important extension to the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls and offers a glimpse into the earliest stages of nearly 800 years of near silence in the history of the biblical text”, the researchers wrote in the study. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to as early as the 3rd century B.C., featured versions of the text that are radically different than today’s Hebrew Bible.Scholars have believed the Hebrew Bible in its standard form first came about some 2,000 years ago, but never had physical proof, until now, according to the study. When they first looked at the results… they didn’t really know what they were looking at.

The En-Gedi text has already provided insight into religious history.

“It doesn’t tell us what was the original text, only that the Masoretic Text is a very ancient text in all of its details”, Dr. Segal said.