Tel Aviv Researchers Unlock Genetic Mysteries of the 2,000 Year-old Dead Sea Scrolls

One day, Noam Mizrahi, a Bible scholar, and Oded Rechavi, a molecular biologist meet on a bus. In 2012, they were both newly hired researchers at Tel Aviv University and found common ground in worms. 'Oded works on microscopic C. elegans worms, and I'm working on what worms have left us,' Mizrahi shared.

Eight years later, they developed a new technique to piece together fragments of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) using DNA sequencing.

Their recently published study described that assembling the 'scroll fragments is like solving jigsaw puzzles with an unknown number of missing parts.' The pair, recognizing that most scrolls are made from animal skins, used ancient cow and sheep DNA sequences to "fingerprint" pieces.

It is believed that a Jewish sect, the Essene who lived on Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea, had written the ancient scrolls. Genetically sorting the scrolls highlight their historical significance and textual relationship.

They discovered that Jeremiah fragments pointed to evidence that some scrolls from Qumran were taken to other places. Non-biblical scrolls and multiple versions of Jeremiah were circulated throughout Judea or modern-day Israel. Patterns in some non-biblical scrolls, such as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, also points to the possibility of the scrolls representing 'the broader cultural milieu of the period,' more than previously understood by historians.

Context Matters

Understanding DSS manuscript contents 'could drastically change with the addition, removal, or reordering of fragments assigned to it,' the study says. One of the challenges they face is that various preservation and fragment nature 'sometimes result in uncertain identification, joining, and reconstruction of numerous pieces.'

Another challenge is contextualization in the history, society, and culture of the DDS as many scholars agreed that the texts are Qumran. It was believed that the texts reflected the sect's ideology and social structure, but some of the scrolls were not written or copied by the sectarian scribes.

It could mean that the scrolls can be categorized as sectarian and non-sectarian, or that some texts were brought from elsewhere. It might also be possible that some texts could have represented the broader Judean society and not just specifically Essene values.

Oren Harman from Bar-Ilan University in Israel agrees with the study saying that 'We can suddenly see things that were not visible using more traditional historical, archaeological or literary sources,' since DNA fingerprinting can piece together scroll fragments with contextual accuracy.

Sheepskin vs Cowhide

The researches matched which animal skin - sheep, goat, cow, or ibex - each parchment was made from; most matching to sheepskin and a few from cowhide. They had discovered that the Book of Jeremiah was composed of three fragments, two from sheepskin and one from cow skin, as the team debated if they were from the same scroll or not.

There was also a former fragment of the same book from a different piece of cowhide. Mizrahi explained that 'these two fragments written on cow skin represent two different versions of the Book of Jeremiah.'

This may be proof that ancient Jewish society was open to text variations, unlike today where there is only one version of the Torah. If some version of Jeremiah is not from the Essenes, 'it shows that Jewish society of the Second Temple period was not 'Orthodox.' They were open to the parallel existence of multiple versions of the very same divinely inspired text of the prophets," said Mizrahi.

Together, Mizrahi and Rechavi have 'created a new set of extremely sensitive scientific tools for the study of ancient artifacts.' Their new 'paleogenomic' technique could reconstruct other literary works that historians didn't know how to arrange before.