The scrolls could be centuries older than initially thought, according to a study that combined radiocarbon dating with AI to better analyze the remnants of ancient documents, The Times of Israel reported.
"The Dead Sea Scrolls ... completely changed the way we think about ancient Judaism and early Christianity," said Mladen Popovic, lead author of the study that was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
"Out of 1,000 manuscripts, a bit more than 200 are what we call biblical Old Testament," Popovic told CNN. "They are the oldest copies we have of the Hebrew Bible."
Popovic is the dean of the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Archaeologists recovered thousands of remnants of scrolls that were first discovered in 1947 in the Judean Desert by Bedouin shepherds in an area that has become the West Bank.
Instead of dating the scrolls based on the form of their lettering, researchers used carbon dating to analyze samples from 30 of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were provided by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
They also created high-resolution copies of the scripts and used an AI-powered model called "Enoch" to analyze the textual characters contained in 135 scrolls.
The study revealed the scrolls are older than initially thought, which is from the 3rd century B.C. to the 1st century A.D.
A paleographic study of the text within the scrolls narrowed their origin to that timeframe in 1961, but little else was done to analyze their origin until now.
The new study pretreated pieces of parchment to remove any chemical traces from prior studies before undertaking carbon dating, and AI analysis corroborates the results.
It suggests some of the scrolls were one or two centuries older than originally thought, including Old Testament books like Ecclesiastes.
The study also suggests literacy was much more widespread in the region.
"These manuscripts are not just the earliest copy of these [Old Testament] books that survived," IAA Dead Sea Scrolls Unit leader Joe Uziel told The Times of Israel.
They are "one of the oldest copies of these compositions ever written," he said.
Only about 10% of the scrolls were studied, which Popovic said means there is a lot more to learn through more studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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