Bible Synapse
En-Gedi Scroll
Manuscript · 1st–4th century AD · Bible manuscripts · also called Ein Gedi Leviticus scroll
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- Date
- 1st–4th century AD (the copying: radiocarbon tests point to the 3rd–4th century, the handwriting to the 1st–2nd)
- Found
- Ancient synagogue at Ein Gedi, on the west shore of the Dead Sea, 1970. Recovered by Yosef Porath on 5 May 1970 as charred lumps in the burnt Torah ark of the synagogue, which was destroyed by fire around AD 600, during the excavations of Dan Barag and Ehud Netzer.
- Now
- Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem
- Passages
- Leviticus 1:1 – Leviticus 2:16
What it is
A burnt parchment scroll reduced to a lump of charcoal, too fragile ever to be opened. It was scanned with X-ray micro-CT, and in 2015 a University of Kentucky team led by Brent Seales unrolled the scans on the computer, a method called virtual unwrapping, which revealed text from the first two chapters of Leviticus.
How it connects to the Bible
The recovered verses of Leviticus 1–2 match the consonants and paragraph breaks of the medieval Masoretic text exactly. No older piece of a Torah book is known from a synagogue ark, and if the radiocarbon date holds it shows the standard text in use in a period from which very few Hebrew Bible manuscripts survive.
What scholars debate
Its date is debated: radiocarbon tests point to the 3rd or 4th century AD, while Ada Yardeni dated the handwriting to the late 1st or early 2nd century.