A collection of roughly 1,000 scrolls discovered by Bedouin shepherds in the 1940s. They contain the earliest surviving copies of books from the Hebrew Bible and other religious texts, mostly written in Aramaic and Hebrew, and are thought to have been compiled between 300BC and 200AD. Dating individual scrolls would help historians understand how literacy spread among ancient Jewish populations and the first Christians, and offer a window into the genesis of sacred texts.
In 2025 a team led by Mladen Popovic, a scholar of religion at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, published an AI model called Enoch that can estimate the age of scrolls from the style of their handwriting. The model measures small angles and curves within individual letters and identifies patterns across larger chunks of text in ways that humans cannot.
To calibrate Enoch, the team carbon-dated tiny samples from 24 scrolls and fed the model both the date estimates and 62 scanned images. When tested on unseen scans from the same dated scrolls, Enoch's age ranges largely overlapped with the carbon-dating results. Applied to 135 undated scrolls, the model's estimates were generally 50 to 100 years older than those given by human scholars.
The most striking findings concerned fragments of the biblical books of Daniel and Ecclesiastes. Historians believe the original Book of Daniel was completed around 160BC and the Book of Ecclesiastes in the third century BC. Enoch suggests the Dead Sea versions were written around those times—potentially contemporary copies, perhaps jotted down as scribes listened to the originals being read aloud.
Remember folks. Street lights timed for 35 mph are also timed for 70 mph.