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Liber XV · History & Scholarship

Liber XV · History & Scholarship · Chapter III: Historians & Scholars

The Enoch AI Model and the Redating of the Dead Sea Scrolls

How the Enoch AI model (2025) combined radiocarbon dates and handwriting analysis to suggest that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought.

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In June 2025 a team led by Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen published a study in PLOS One presenting "Enoch", a machine-learning model that estimates the age of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts from their handwriting. Trained on new radiocarbon dates, it suggested that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than the dates long assigned by palaeographers, and that some biblical fragments were copied around the time their books are thought to have been composed. The result matters for the history of Jewish apocalyptic, angelological and magical literature preserved at Qumran, including the oldest copies of the Book of Enoch.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the dating problem§

The Dead Sea Scrolls are some 900–1,000 manuscripts, most of them fragmentary, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, with related finds at other desert sites. They include the oldest surviving copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, previously unknown sectarian works such as the Community Rule and the War Scroll, and many writings of the Second Temple period that never entered any canon.

Only a handful of the scrolls carry dates. Scholars have therefore relied on palaeography, the study of the development of handwriting. In a classic study published in 1961, Frank Moore Cross arranged the scripts into a sequence, archaic, Hasmonean and Herodian, and assigned approximate dates to each stage: Hasmonean hands to roughly 150–30 BCE and Herodian hands to roughly 30 BCE to 70 CE. This framework was refined by later scholars but remained the basis for dating most manuscripts.

Palaeography has known limits. It assumes that scripts changed in a steady, linear way; it cannot easily allow for older scribes continuing to write in old-fashioned hands, or for regional styles; and it depends on a few fixed points. Radiocarbon tests carried out in the 1990s on a small number of scrolls broadly supported the Second Temple dating but were too few and too imprecise to settle individual cases.

How the Enoch model works§

The Groningen project, funded by the European Research Council, combined two independent methods. First, the team obtained new accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dates for 30 manuscripts from four sites: Qumran, Masada, Wadi Murabba'at and Naḥal Ḥever. Samples were pretreated to remove contaminants, a known problem because some fragments had been treated with castor oil in the 1950s. After quality checks, 24 manuscripts with reliable dates formed the training set.

Second, the team digitised the handwriting itself. A neural network first separated ink from background on high-resolution images. The model then measured two kinds of features: the curvature and direction of ink strokes, a texture-like measure of a scribe's hand, and the shapes of individual letters, grouped into a catalogue of characteristic forms. A Bayesian ridge regression model, named Enoch, learned to relate these features to the radiocarbon dates. On test images it predicted dates with an average error of roughly thirty years.

The model was then applied to 135 undated manuscripts. Experienced palaeographers reviewed each prediction and judged about 79 per cent of them realistic; the rest were considered too early, too late or inconclusive. The name of the model alludes to the biblical patriarch Enoch, the scribe of heavenly secrets in Jewish tradition.

What the study found§

The most general result was that both the radiocarbon dates and Enoch's estimates tended to be older than the traditional palaeographic ones. Manuscripts in the Hasmonean style could date from the first half of the second century BCE, and sometimes earlier, rather than only from about 150 BCE. The Herodian style appears to have emerged earlier than Cross had proposed, so that the two scripts coexisted for longer. Writing styles, in other words, did not succeed one another as neatly as the old typology assumed.

Several individual results drew attention:

  • 4Q114, a copy of Daniel 8–11, was given a range of about 230–160 BCE, overlapping the period in which most scholars place the composition of the book's final chapters in the 160s BCE.
  • 4Q109, a copy of Ecclesiastes, received a predicted date in the third century BCE, close to the time many scholars assign to the book itself.
  • The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ) was dated to about 180–100 BCE for the work of both its scribes.
  • The Community Rule (1QS) and a commentary on Isaiah (4Q163) received second-century BCE dates.

The authors argued that 4Q114 and 4Q109 are the first known biblical manuscripts that can be dated to roughly the lifetime of their presumed authors. Such claims depend on scholarly assumptions about when the books were composed, and specialists continue to discuss them.

Enoch, angels and the esoteric literature of Qumran§

For the history of esotericism, the Qumran library is significant well beyond its biblical texts. It preserves the oldest copies of the Aramaic Book of Enoch, the collection now known as 1 Enoch, in which the patriarch is shown the secrets of heaven, the courses of the sun and moon, and the fate of the fallen Watchers who taught humanity sorcery, metallurgy and astrology. One of these copies, 4Q201, was among the manuscripts examined in the study, and its older palaeographic date was found to overlap with the radiocarbon evidence. The caves also yielded the related Book of Giants.

Other Qumran texts belong to the prehistory of Jewish mysticism and magic. The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice describe angelic priests worshipping in the heavenly temple, a theme developed later in Merkavah and Hekhalot mysticism. Small texts contain protective songs and incantations against demons, a physiognomic "horoscope" that links bodily features to the proportion of light and darkness in a person's spirit, and a calendrical omen text predicting events from thunder. These are among the earliest Jewish witnesses to the angelology, demonology and divination later found in Jewish magic and folklore and in the wider history of angels and spirits.

If many of these manuscripts are older than once thought, the traditions they record must also be older, or at least must have circulated earlier in written form. The redating thus touches directly on questions of when Jewish apocalyptic and esoteric speculation took shape.

Reception and limits§

The study was widely reported in 2025 and welcomed by many specialists as a methodological advance. It offered, for the first time, a way to date manuscripts from handwriting that was independent of a single scholar's eye, testable against physical evidence and repeatable. The team noted that the approach could be applied to other partly dated manuscript collections.

Specialists also stressed its limits. The training set of 24 dated manuscripts is small; radiocarbon dates themselves are probability ranges, sometimes spanning a century or more; a model trained on the hands of particular scribes may not generalise to all; and dating a copy is not the same as dating the composition of a text. Several experts suggested that the most secure conclusion is the broad one, that the traditional typology was too rigid, rather than any single new date. Future radiocarbon tests and further refinements of the model will show how far the new chronology holds.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the Enoch AI model?§

Enoch is a machine-learning model developed by a team led by Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen. It estimates the age of ancient manuscripts by analysing the style of their handwriting, after being trained on radiocarbon-dated examples. The study was published in PLOS One in June 2025.

Are the Dead Sea Scrolls older than we thought?§

The study suggests that many are somewhat older than traditional handwriting-based dates indicated, often by decades rather than centuries. The scrolls still belong broadly to the last centuries BCE and the first century CE.

Why is the model called Enoch?§

It is named after the biblical patriarch Enoch, the scribe to whom Jewish tradition attributed knowledge of heavenly secrets. Fragments of the Aramaic Book of Enoch are among the scrolls found at Qumran.

Does the new dating change the Bible?§

No text changes. The findings concern when particular copies were written, and they bear on debates about when some biblical books, such as Daniel and Ecclesiastes, were composed and circulated.

Sources and further reading§