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Computers Decipher Burnt Scroll Found In Ancient Holy Ark (nationalgeographic.com) 235

bsharma writes: Scientists have formally announced their reconstruction of the Ein Gedi Scroll, the most ancient Hebrew scroll since the Dead Sea Scrolls. This was done by CAT scanning the burnt scrolls and virtually reconstructing the layers of scrolls with ink blobs on them. National Geographic reports: "For decades, the Israel Antiquities Authority guarded the document, known as the Ein Gedi Scroll, careful not to open it for fear that the brittle text would shatter to pieces. But last year, scientists announced that they had scanned, virtually unrolled, and translated the scroll's hidden verses -- a feat now formally described in the scientific literature. Based on preliminary scans, [Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, who specialized in digitally reconstructing damaged texts,] and his colleagues announced in 2015 that the Ein Gedi Scroll was a biblical text from the sixth century A.D. containing a column of text from the book of Leviticus. But the full CT scan results, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, tell a deeper story. Further analysis revealed an extra column of text, ultimately fleshing out the first two chapters of Leviticus -- ironically, a book that begins with God's instructions for burnt offerings. What's more, radiocarbon dating of the scroll suggests that it may be between 1,700 and 1,800 years old, at least 200 years older than previously thought. In fact, the scroll's distinctive handwriting hearkens back to the first or second century A.D., some five centuries earlier than the date ascribed to the scroll last year." University of Cambridge lecturer James Aitken told Smithsonian's Devin Powell in 2015: "There's little of surprise in finding a Leviticus scroll. We probably have many more copies of it than any other book, as its Hebrew style is so simple and repetitive that it was used for children's writing exercises."
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Computers Decipher Burnt Scroll Found In Ancient Holy Ark

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  • by Monoman ( 8745 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @05:02AM (#52945237) Homepage

    "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

    • by tysonedwards ( 969693 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @08:17AM (#52945977)
      Archaeologists near Mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is presently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental." The page has been universally condemned by church leaders.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by sciengin ( 4278027 )

        As if todays church leaders would give a damn about what is written in the bible...

        In one of his letters, Paul explicitly warns the congregation in one city against the teachings of "people who forbid to marry" and linkens this to demon-inspired utterings.
        Did not stop the church to forbid its priests to marry until this day, all for the sake of money (well inheritance really).

        And lets not forget Jesus saying, on the night of hist arrest, "Those who take up the sword will die by the sword". Now preventing th

        • Right footed vicars have been allowed to marry since Elizabethan times. And I don't mean Frau Battenburg Von Schleswig-Holsten Pilsner.

        • Re: Obligatory.. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Dread_ed ( 260158 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @10:21AM (#52946831) Homepage

          Not to be pedantic, just precise, the wording of the passage you mention about "taking up the sword" refers specifically to criminality and not to war.

        • Fun facts (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          1) There are two words for Hell in the greek language (Hades, Tartarus). Jesus never once said either one of them. He sometimes used the valley of Gehenna (which was right on the edge of the city of Jerusalem, and used as the city dump) in his metaphors, but the translators decided to change that to "hell." This isn't a translation..."Gehenna" does not and never did mean "hell" in any language. This is a changing of what he said, which has become codified as the standard in nearly all English translatio

        • For clarity;

          At least in my church our pastors preach FROM THE BIBLE. They give more than a damn about what is written in the Bible.

          My church, and indeed virtually all of Protestant/Reformed Christianity does not forbid pastors, priests, whatever you call them to marry. The Catholic Church still does. Calling the Catholic Church "the church" is imprecise, lazy, or deliberately misleading. Or you don't really care, which is unfortunate.

          Jesus did indeed correct Peter when He was arrested. There may be righte

          • "At least in my church our pastors preach FROM THE BIBLE. They give more than a damn about what is written in the Bible"

            I don't know how to say this as nicely as possible, but..
            are we sure we are talking about the same book? I would be surprised if your pastors advocate the stoning of undisciplined pupils.

            • More clarity :
              As you should know, the Mosaic covenant is superceded, overridden, by the new covenant in Christ. Those who continue to obey the Law at bound by it, but those who believe in Christ not only need not, but are given a new covenant, fulfilled in Him.

              This is a central point of Christianity, one you cannot be ignorant of. Unless you've done no study, in which case I encourage your attention. There is much literature, many essays, much discussion, going back to Christ Himself.

              Your complaint is note

              • thanks for your answer, I mean it!
                one thing I don't understand is the following - maybe you can help (no irony)

                the new testament is not getting into details on topics that many Christians seem to care about. topics like human sexuality, origins of the cosmos, laws of nature, and more.
                when many Christians are looking for answers on such topics, they tend to refer to the old testament. however, when such answers appear unpalatable in the old testament (see e. g. stoning), they use the argument that the new te

                • I am a Christian, and have attended (and continue to) churches that preach from the Bible, and endeavor to study it and to rightly interpret it.

                  Also, just in case you aren't familiar with the abbreviations, OT = Old Testament and NT = New Testament :)

                  Referring to out-of-context passages in the Old Testament (e.g., Leviticus for things about homosexuality) seems pretty common... unfortunately. It is not treated very well, and, as you have noted, pretty much just cherry-picked to "prove" one's point. It's o

                • by dbreeze ( 228599 )

                  Chuck Missler is simply one of the best teachers of the Bible I've come across in 35+ years of faith in Jesus. He comes from an extensive technical background, focused on information technologies. I highly recommend anyone with honest questions to look into his work.
                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] https://www.khouse.org/ [khouse.org] http://www.youtube.com/user/ko... [youtube.com]

                  Above all else, read for yourself. It takes a decent overall perspective to make sense of much of the specifics, but it's really not

                • by dbreeze ( 228599 )

                  https://www.bible.com/bible/1/... [bible.com]

                  35Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,
                  36Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
                  37Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
                  38 This is the first and great commandment.
                  39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
                  40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

                  Note that this general theme concerni

                  • God is quite an elusive idea - but I do like very much the idea of loving your neighbor!

                    But if really boils down to that, why carrying forward all the baggage that can be summarized in that one wise and precious sentence?
                    Why loading yourself with the need to explain away everything else, when you could just choose any modern philosopher (say, Peter Singer) that says essentially the same thing, but without the references to goats, stoning and the like? It appears on the face of it an enormous effort and rath

                • Excellent comments all, thank you.

                  In the NT, Hebrews 13 is an excellent passage, not only because it was written to Jewish converts, but because it is a brief, limited, but clear recommendation of how to live the Christian life.

                  The Letter of Paul to the Romans is, to me, the best handbook of the Gospel, living a Christian life, and how to evangelize in the NT. Our church just finished a 2+ year study of it, punctuated with other bits and such. A total of 60+ messages in all. We took months to go throu

    • sonofabitch!
  • Because the older something is, the better it is.
    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @05:11AM (#52945261)

      Well, the closer it is to the original. You know the old joke where the curator of the monastery came up from the vault with the original texts and cried "Dammit, in the original it read 'celebRate'!"

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by rainmouse ( 1784278 )
        But when the original is culturally dependent, word-of-mouth stories that vary more dramatically the 'closer' you get. Surely the culture built up over millennia becomes more important. I suspect the main value of this is just understanding historical cultural ideals 'at the time' rather than any positive or negative religious insights.
        • by Khomar ( 529552 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @07:28AM (#52945729) Journal

          You make an assertion that there are "dramatic" changes in the text, but is that true?

          Here is an example [ancient-hebrew.org] of analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea scroll find. It dates to 200 B.C., only 500 years after Isaiah wrote the original and over one thousand years older than the previously used manuscript (used in the King James Version of the Bible).

          Is that a "dramatic" change the closer you get?

          • If you want dramatic change, you have to translate it to a different language.

            The joke is that the Old Testament we have today is probably closer to the original text than the New one.

          • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @08:43AM (#52946121)

            You make an assertion that there are "dramatic" changes in the text, but is that true?

            This is a good point. The Hebrew text of the Bible is remarkably stable in copies dating back almost 2000 years. Anyone who has spent time tracing families of manuscript sources in, for example, medieval Europe will realize how unstable many sources are compared to the Hebrew text. Copyists in most medieval treatises frequently made errors or omissions or even inserted their own variations, corrections, or commentary.

            That said, rabbis are pretty aware of the variations in ancient sources --- perhaps most notably, the differences between the Masoretic text (the standard Hebrew edition dating to medieval times) and the Septuagint (an ancient translation of the Hebrew text into Greek), as well as the Samaritan Pentateuch (a rendering in the Samaritan alphabet of the first books of the Bible, which has lots of mostly minor variants). These variants are important to rabbinical commentary and exegesis.

            • One of the reasons the Hebrew text was stable was because they used checksums when copying. Each letter in the Hebrew alphabet is also used as a number. That made it easy to calculate checksums for each line of text.

              • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @11:25AM (#52947299)

                One of the reasons the Hebrew text was stable was because they used checksums when copying. Each letter in the Hebrew alphabet is also used as a number. That made it easy to calculate checksums for each line of text.

                Actually, there were a number of reasons for the stability. The "checksums," as you put it, were more associated with medieval Kabbalistic practices that date from probably more than a millennium after the "stable" version had basically been established. (And I'm not sure any scribes actually did this sort of "checksumming" in this way on any scale; only the "Bible code" wackos today seem to think so.)

                Instead, you had a confluence of a number of factors:

                (1) A tremendous set of ritualistic requirements for copying came about at a very early stage, which made copying the Torah distinct from any other scribal task. Scribes were required to take extra care with everything from ink quality to page layout. And they were to make verbal checks when copying every word, as well as other various checks (but mostly involved counting words and letters, not "summing" them).

                (2) A rabbinical tradition was already in place nearly 2000 years ago which created a giant commentary on top of the actual text. Rabbis emphasized that even a single error in a single letter could create problems in accurate commentary, and the commentary itself often depended on tiny details of wording. (Remember all those stories of Jesus where he criticizes the "elders" and such for paying too much attention to details of the text so they forgot the broader meaning... that's what he was talking about. It was a new fad at that time, which caught on.) Hence, even if an error in copying occurred in the text, you could spot it by the fact that it disagreed with the commentaries by learned rabbis. (It's sort of like if you had documentation for code that explained every single operation in detail. Even if the original code became corrupted, you could reconstruct it from the documentation.)

                (3) Finally, you had the fact that a lot of Jews were slaughtered by the Romans and other folks in the early centuries of the first millennium, around the time many of these exacting traditions had developed. Thus, any competing editions/variants were likely to be lost (burned down with synagogues, etc.), with only a few official copies preserved. Those few copies -- whatever their source -- then became the dominant text once the others had been lost.

                So yeah, scribes could check the text in many ways, but there were various events and ideologies that helped that process along.

      • Re:Older = Better (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @08:30AM (#52946047)

        Well, the closer it is to the original

        Actually, something left out of the summary is the textual significance of this find. Some of the researchers involved have noted that this is the earliest text found so far that is identical to the Masoretic text [wikipedia.org], a medieval version which is the standard Hebrew edition often used today (not only in the original but as the basis of many modern translations, etc.).

        Previous finds have shown that a set of "proto-Masoretic" variants begins to emerge as a standard around 2000 years ago (before that, there were wider textual variants). But previous fragments actually identical to the Masoretic were only known to date to centuries after this one. Depending on whose dating you believe, this scroll places the origin of this standard text version perhaps back to 1700-2000 years ago.

        It's also significant because it's a biblical fragment recovered from an ark in a synagogue, where it may have actually been used, as opposed to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were preserved in desert caves and might represent a less 'standard" source tradition.

        Again, a lot of this is speculative, but in this case the find is actually significant in pushing back the date when a "standard" Hebrew text may have begun to emerge.

      • I think the whole point of the bible was summed up nicely in the Battlestar Galactica remake: "All of this has happened before, and shall happen again."

        The older the text is, the more it drives that point home.

      • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        You know the old joke where the curator of the monastery came up from the vault with the original texts and cried "Dammit, in the original it read 'celebRate'!"

        Or the first line of the Bible, saying "The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred."

    • History tends to be distorted over the generations. Where each historian will add their own personal spin on their interpretation. Where some people become savage villains while others become glorious generals. Where they both did what they did with the good and bad.
      The older documents are not necessarily more accurate. But offers perspective with less layers of interpretation. Also offer insight of the culture of the time of the writing.

      Now I disagree with the notion that the ancients were somehow closer

      • But the more about the ancients we discover, the less primitive the people seem

        The older I get, the more I learn about the other people sharing this planet and those that preceded us, the more I believe that we are all the same, for the most part. We all have the same basic wants and needs, the same basic drives. What separates me from a Roman living under Augustus or an Egyptian living in the time of Ramses is more a matter of the trappings of technology than the core of our beings.

        As a kid I was always struck by this quote from Khan in the Star trek episode Space Seed

        Nothing ever changes, except man. Your technical accomplishments? Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold. I am such a man.

        There's no

        • if you tried living in a cave, fighting bears with bare hands, surviving the decimation of your tribe by a neighbor tribe, to then die at age 25 of a small infection, all the while believing that the god of blood and thunder rules the forest, and moves the sun, his slave and concubine through the sky... ... you would have a different opinion.

    • by dbreeze ( 228599 )

      Here's an interesting read on the "accuracy" of the Bible...
      http://www.icr.org/article/pre... [icr.org]

  • Which frankly is all the faction and outright fairy tales in all religious tomes are really any use for.

  • Pound pastrami
    can kraut
    six bagels - brig home for Emma

  • by rlp ( 11898 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @07:34AM (#52945767)

    Who's reviewing the scrolls? Top men ...

  • by Mr Foobar ( 11230 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @07:34AM (#52945769) Homepage

    Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."

  • by davmoo ( 63521 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @08:07AM (#52945917)

    This thread is a perfect example of what's becoming of Slashdot. Instead of comments and insights on the awesome science and tech it took to read an up-to-now unreadable ancient document, almost every comment here is a comment about whether religion is fact or fiction and is *completely* off topic. The science behind this is pretty amazing, and could lead to being able to read other ancient burned documents like those found at Herculaneum from the time of its destruction by Vesuvius. But you people are apparently more interested in bashing religion than celebrating actual science and technical advances.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2016 @08:21AM (#52945995)

      The obvious conclusion is that we need to get rid of the reddit atheist kiddies who feel the need to shit up every decent discussion with their euphoric fedoras.

      • TBH the media leads with this. When Mother Theresa was sainted recently, the lead NPR story mentioned it then a few sentences later launched into the "raging controversy going on in her town" over her, which consisted of an ancient bitchfest by Christopher Hitchens, and a guy who wrote a book six years ago.

        You are all cogs instantiating the distribution of memeplexes.

    • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @08:49AM (#52946163)

      The science behind this is pretty amazing, and could lead to being able to read other ancient burned documents like those found at Herculaneum from the time of its destruction by Vesuvius.

      Just to note -- the computer techniques for reconstructing text from scrolls here were actually developed within a project for analyzing the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. This biblical scroll application was just another use of this computer analysis technique, showing its power to deal with even very badly burned and less intact fragments.

      • There was an article not too long ago about this technique.

        In the Neal Stephenson book Reamde, they use a technique where a shredded sprays a book up into the air, where high speed cameras digitize each piece of confetti and then computers reassemble the pieces jigsaw-wise and OCR it.

        This technique is even more advanced.

    • This thread is a perfect example of what's becoming of Slashdot.

      So, start a subthread on the technology. Seems like a way to get people talking about technology.

      Slashdot has a seriously diverse readership. In any given topic, you'll get the usual suspects

      The clueless noobs who are still learning.

      The trolls

      The "Get off my lawn" crowd, who probably are suffering from testosterone deprivation.

      People who are actually interested.

      Since this tech was introduced in reference to an ancient burnt Middle Eastern scroll, and it turned out to be Leviticus, of all things, it

  • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Friday September 23, 2016 @08:16AM (#52945967)
    Seales says he's working on hundreds of scorched scrolls uncovered from Herculaneum. To me that would be a FAR more interesting project. They might discover lost Greek texts or other works of antiquity. Even if its just tax returns, local ordinances or mundane records related to daily life it would still be interesting.
    • They might discover lost Greek texts or other works of antiquity

      Or much more interesting: Etruscan texts, of which there woefully few. The Estruscan language appears to be unrelated to any other known language, from the very few inscriptions we do have.

      • They might discover lost Greek texts or other works of antiquity

        Or much more interesting: Etruscan texts, of which there woefully few. The Estruscan language appears to be unrelated to any other known language, from the very few inscriptions we do have.

        If only we could find Caludius' lost works of the Estruscan history and Dictionary.

  • ... I can use this technology to read my collection of Playboy magazines. Where the pages are stuck together.

  • There's no such thing in archeology or any other science.

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