Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - HandsandBible (The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls)

Teaser

The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish manuscripts from the third century BCE to the second century CE. They come from eleven caves near the site of Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea and from other Judaean Desert sites such as Masada. The scrolls contain the...

Summary

The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish manuscripts from the third century BCE to the second century CE. They come from eleven caves near the site of Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea and from other Judaean Desert sites such as Masada. The scrolls contain the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and many hitherto unknown ancient Jewish texts.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s–1960s has fundamentally transformed our knowledge of Jewish and Christian origins. The scrolls’ importance can hardly be overstated. The manuscripts provide a unique vantage point for studying the dynamic and creative engagement with authoritative scriptures that were to become the Bible, not only because they are the oldest known biblical manuscripts but also because of the presence of a large number of so-called non-biblical texts in the collection, which include commentary texts, poetic hymns, community rules, religious law, wisdom, and so-called retellings or rewritten biblical narratives, but also texts on magic, demons, astrology, and calendars. Before the discovery of the scrolls, our oldest, complete manuscript in Hebrew of the Old Testament was from around the year 1000. The scrolls allow us to jump back 2000 years and more in time and observe what people wrote, copied, collected, read, and studied. The caves from the Judaean Desert with the scrolls are a time machine as it were.
The Dead Sea Scrolls enable us to trace important moments in the development of those texts that were to become the Bible. The Bible is one of the most influential books in world history and deserving of academic study. From an academic point of view, processes of textual growth, development, and transmission are taken as manifestations of cultural evolution, which is also exciting in light of contemporary claims as to the divine or holy status of books such as the Bible, or the Qurʾān for that matter.
The ERC project The Hands that Wrote the Bible combines image processing and machine learning—including artificial neural networks—, ancient manuscript studies, and new C14 samples of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer evidence for a scribal culture “in action”. Palaeography can provide access to this scribal culture, showing the human hand behind what came to be regarded as holy texts. The exciting aspect of this project is that it will, through the innovative and unconventional digital palaeographic analysis that we use, bring these scribal identities back to life as it were.
The project investigates two fundamental aspects of the scrolls’ palaeography, “when” and “who”: handwriting recognition (the typological development of writing styles), “when was a manuscript written,” and writer identification, “who wrote a manuscript.” The basis is an assessment of the Cross-model of palaeography for the scrolls, which will generate new data in the form of manuscript clusters and scribal profiles. The subprojects ask after specific manuscript groups or scribes. The combination of new C14 samples of the scrolls and the use of Artificial Intelligence in order to assess the development of handwriting styles and to identify individual scribes will provide a new and much-needed quantitative basis for the typological estimations of traditional palaeography. This quantitative evidence will be used to cluster manuscripts as products of scribal activity in order to profile scribal production and to determine a more precise location in time for their activity. It will enable scholars to sharpen their focus, from literary and cultural-historical perspectives, on the content and genres of the texts that scribes wrote and copied, and on the scripts and languages that they used. The basic aim is to understand the relationship between these texts and the people producing, writing and copying them, collecting them, reading, and studying them.

Work performed

The ERC project The Hands that Wrote the Bible of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen uses state-of-the art image processing and pattern recognition developed by Artificial Intelligence in Groningen in order to analyse high-resolution multispectral images of the Dead Sea Scrolls made by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The pattern recognition aspect is addressed using new techniques and methods developed within Artificial Intelligence. For the purpose of writer identification and handwriting recognition for the Dead Sea Scrolls, a secure software environment with High-Performance-Computing (HPC) ability is utilized using the cutting-edge tools within the Monk system, designed by Lambert Schomaker’s research group at ALICE, University of Groningen. Using the tools of Digital Palaeography (traditional palaeography–the study of ancient handwriting–and Artificial Intelligence combined) presents a significant step forward for the Dead Sea Scrolls, enabling the use of quantitative methods for palaeographic assessments.
Some previous radiocarbon samples from the 1990s were not completely clean from contaminations. C14 methods and procedures have improved since then, also in dealing with contaminated samples. The so-called “third radiocarbon revolution” combines Bayesian statistical methods and the processing power of modern computers in order to reach more accurate and precise dating.
Therefore, the University of Groningen and the Israel Antiquities Authority undertake new C14 samples of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hans van der Plicht (Centre for Isotope Research, University of Groningen) and Kaare Rasmussen (Cultural Heritage and Archaeometric Research Team at the University of Southern Denmark) will conduct the C14 analyses for the project, for which we also collaborate with Perla Colombini and her team at the University of Pisa.

Final results

The ERC project The Hands that Wrote the Bible of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen aims to shed new light on the relationship between these texts and the people producing, writing and copying them, collecting them, reading, and studying them.