Enter Enoch
The authors of this last article wanted to find a better way than paleography alone to determine the chronology of parchments, in order to reconstruct the evolution of ideas. They thought that given the small set of data in the case of scrolls, it was wiser not to count on a pre-formed model and to “let the data available”.
By combining writing styles with carbon 14 dates of manuscripts using artificial intelligence, the Enoch dates prediction model is capable of producing a specific date for the manuscript.
University of Groningen / CC by-Sa
Mladen Popovic and Maruf Dhali working with Enoch with a manuscript of Dead Sea scrolls.
University of Groningen / CC by-Sa
The development of Enoch was born from the anterior deep neural network of the team to find handwritten models of ink trace in digital manuscripts, involving a geometric micro-level form analysis. “Enoch emphasizes the shared characteristics and the similarity correspondence between the manuscripts formed and tests, where traditional paleography focuses on subtle differences which are supposed to be indicative for the development of style”, wrote the authors. “The combination of dissimularity and learning adaptive strengthening can discover hidden models.”
They tested Enoch by evaluating the age estimate of the AI ​​program for several scrolls. The results: around 79% of Enoch estimates were deemed “realistic”, while its age estimates for the remaining 21% were either too young, too old or simply undecided.
This new model has revealed that many dead sea rolls are older than previous estimates based solely on paleography. This should be relevant to knowing when two old Jewish script styles – “Hasmonean” and “Herodian” – have developed, for example. The old script would have emerged between 150 and 50 BCE, but the authors believe that Hasmonean could have emerged much earlier; Ditto for the Herodian script. Thus, the two scripts may have coexisted since the end of the second century, which called into question the dominant opinion they pre-existed in the middle of the century BC.
Enoch may even be able to shed light on biblical authorship. For example, the authors concluded that two of the scrolls are the first known fragments of Daniel's book, which would have been finished by an anonymous author around 160 BCE. And Ecclesiastes was probably completed by an anonymous author in the third century BCE, rather than by King Solomon in the 10th century BCE.
“With the Enoch tool, we have opened a new door to the ancient world, such as a time travel machine, which allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible, especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two fragments of biblical scrolling come from the time of their alleged authors,” wrote the authors. “It is very exciting to define an important step to solve the dating problem of the Dead Sea and also the creation of a new tool which could be used to study other partially dated handwritten collections.”
Plos One, 2025. Doi: 10,1371 / Journal.pone.0323185 (About owe).
