The Dead Sea Scrolls Just Got DNA Tested — And the Results Are Shocking

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Seven decades since the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, around 80 new fragments of the ancient texts have been revealed to the public. Portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls are here at DC's Museum of the Bible, removing all obscurity.

[00:00:14]In March 2017, archaeologists excavating a cliff face in the Judean Desert sealed off an area the size of a basketball court and told the world they had found Cave 12, the first new Dead Sea Scroll cave to be identified since 1956.

[00:00:32]They found the cave intact, ancient clay jars still sealed, wrappings of the same linen used in the other caves.

[00:00:40]The physical infrastructure of a scroll deposit preserved in near perfect condition.

[00:00:45]>> [music] >> The scrolls themselves were gone, not destroyed, not decomposed.

[00:00:51]Gone removed, the excavation team concluded, sometime in the 20th century by looters who knew exactly what they were looking for and got there before the archaeologists did. The cave had been there for 2,000 years.

[00:01:05]The scrolls had survived 2,000 years of desert conditions, and in a narrow window of modern history, sometime after 1947, when the world learned the scrolls existed and before [music] the archaeologists arrived, someone walked into that cave and took them. Where those scrolls are right now is unknown.

[00:01:25]They may be in a private collection.

[00:01:28]They may be in fragments in the antiquities black market. They may This is a sample of one of the big scrolls. We have five of them. Really be in a locked room somewhere waiting for the right buyer.

[00:01:42]What was written on them?

[00:01:43]>> [music] >> Nobody can say because nobody who has read them has come forward.

[00:01:48]>> [music] >> But here is what is known. Cave 12 was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of a new chapter one in which the questions being asked about the Dead Sea Scrolls are not just what do they say, but what the else is still out there, and who already has it. And the answers to those questions, which have been slowly emerging from scientific laboratories, [music] from investigative journalism, from leaked legal documents, and from a database of stolen artifacts that nobody was supposed to see, are rewriting the story of the most significant archaeological discovery of the 20th century. Tonight on Openly, >> [music] >> we go through all of it. What the Dead Sea Scrolls actually are, and what nobody told you before you can understand what has been found, what has been hidden, and what is still missing, you need a clear picture of what the Dead Sea Scrolls actually are, because the version most people carry is significantly incomplete. The standard summary goes something like this.

[00:02:51]Ancient Jewish manuscripts found in caves near the Dead Sea, containing old copies of biblical texts and writings from a sect called the Essenes. Very old, very significant, now mostly studied and translated. Every part of that summary is either incomplete or, in light of recent findings, demonstrably incorrect.

[00:03:13]Let's start with what they actually are.

[00:03:15]Between [music] 1947 and 1956, roughly 25,000 fragments representing approximately 900 to 1,000 manuscripts were recovered from 11 caves >> [music] >> in the Judean Desert near a site called Qumran. The fragments span a period from approximately 250 BCE to 68 CE, three centuries of Jewish religious, legal, liturgical, and philosophical writing from the most turbulent period in the history of the ancient Near East. The period covered includes the the revolt against Greek Seleucid rule, the rise of the Hasmonean dynasty, the Roman conquest of Judea, the reign of Herod the Great, [music] the public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, the First Jewish-Roman War, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, three centuries of history during which the foundational texts of both Judaism and Christianity were being written, debated, revised, and in some cases argued over with sufficient intensity.

[00:04:21]That community split and separated over what a specific passage meant.

[00:04:26]The scrolls are not a snapshot of ancient Jewish thought.

[00:04:29]They are a cross-section of it, a library that preserves not one tradition but several, not one version of the biblical text but multiple versions, not one theological position but a spectrum of competing positions that were still actively contested at the time the scrolls were deposited in the caves.

[00:04:47]That diversity is the first thing the standard summary gets it wrong.

[00:04:52]The scrolls are not theologically unified. [music] They preserve an argument that was still in progress when Rome shut the argument down by force.

[00:05:01]The second thing the standard summary gets wrong is the Essenes.

[00:05:05]For 70 years, the dominant [music] theory was simple. The Essenes, a Jewish monastic sect described by ancient writers including Josephus, Pliny the Elder, [music] and Philo of Alexandria, lived at Qumran, copied texts there, and hid their library in the caves [music] when the Romans came.

[00:05:23]The Qumran the settlement was their scriptorium.

[00:05:27]The scrolls were their Bible.

[00:05:29]This theory was elegant, consistent, and as it turns out, wrong, not in every detail but in its central claim.

[00:05:37]The scrolls are not the archive of one community. They are something far more significant, and the evidence that proved it did not come from a scholar or a theologian. It came from a geneticist eating lunch.

[00:05:49]The science that changed everything in 2012 at Tel Aviv University, molecular biologist Oded Rechavi sat across a table from biblical scholar Noam Mizrahi and listened to the problem that had consumed scroll scholarship for decades.

[00:06:05]25,000 fragments, [music] no titles, no page numbers, no reliable method for determining which fragments belong to which manuscripts, which manuscripts came from which community, or which communities had any connection to each other.

[00:06:21]70 years of brilliant scholarship had produced a consensus that a single piece of evidence, one that no one had thought to look for, would completely overturn.

[00:06:31]Rechavi asked what the scrolls were made of, animal skin, parchment. Then the parchment has DNA. That sentence opened a research program that took the better part of a decade and produced findings that rewrote the field. Not because the genetics revealed new texts, it didn't.

[00:06:49][music] It revealed something more fundamental.

[00:06:52]Where the scrolls came from.

[00:06:54]The methodology was painstaking and the obstacles were formidable.

[00:06:58]The scrolls were sacred objects that could not be cut or drilled.

[00:07:03]The parchment making process damages DNA.

[00:07:07]2,000 years in desert caves damages it further. 70 years of handling by researchers deposits modern DNA on the surface that must be distinguished from ancient sequences. The team worked in clean room conditions with full protective gear, collecting microscopic dust particles from blank margins and storing areas dust that contained ancient collagen with traces of genetic material embedded within it. What they found when they successfully sequenced those traces was this.

[00:07:38]Most fragments came back as sheepskin, expected. Sheep were ubiquitous in ancient Judea. Sheep can survive in desert conditions. Sheep could have been kept at Qumran, but some fragments including fragments of specific significant texts came back as cowhide.

[00:07:55]Cows cannot survive in the Judean desert. The environment around Qumran receives almost no rainfall. Cows require abundant water and substantial grazing land. There was no way a community at Qumran could have produced cowhide parchment. [music] Any scroll written on cowhide came from somewhere else.

[00:08:16]Somewhere with water, somewhere with fields, somewhere that was not Qumran.

[00:08:22]The one community theory died in the data, but the cowhide finding was only the beginning. What the genetic analysis could now do was determine whether specific fragments came from the same individual animal. Identical mitochondrial [music] DNA means the same animal. Related DNA means the same flock. Unrelated DNA means >> [music] >> different geographic origins entirely.

[00:08:47]For the first time, researchers could match fragments to manuscripts with molecular precision.

[00:08:53]And what those matches revealed about the nature of the collection was not what anyone expected.

[00:08:58]Two versions of the Bible and what that means the most consequential specific finding from the DNA analysis involves the Book of Jeremiah.

[00:09:07]The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve two dramatically different versions of it.

[00:09:11]One is broadly similar to the Hebrew Bible most people read today, the longer familiar sequence of chapters.

[00:09:20]The other version is significantly shorter, missing entire passages with chapters arranged in a completely different order.

[00:09:27]Before the scrolls were discovered, this shorter version was known only from the ancient Greek translation called the Septuagint, and scholars had debated for decades whether it represented an earlier draft, a deliberate theological revision, or a scribble error.

[00:09:43]The DNA resolved the question.

[00:09:45]Fragments of the shorter that Jeremiah came from calf hide. Fragments of the longer Jeremiah came from sheepskin. Different animals, almost certainly different geographic regions.

[00:09:58]Different communities in different parts of ancient Judea, each preserving their own received version of Jeremiah as authoritative scripture, and neither version wrong because there was no single authoritative version. There were two, and possibly more, >> [music] >> living simultaneously in different communities. Each treated by those communities as the word of God.

[00:10:21]Read the implication directly.

[00:10:23]At the time of Jesus, there was no single agreed upon text of Jeremiah.

[00:10:28]Depending on where you lived [music] and which community you belonged to, Jeremiah said different things in a different order with different passages present or absent. [music] If that is true of Jeremiah, and the genetic evidence confirms it is, it is almost certainly true of other books as well.

[00:10:45]>> [music] >> The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve multiple versions of Psalms with different ordering and different included texts. Multiple versions of Deuteronomy.

[00:10:55]Variants of Exodus significant enough to have generated scholarly debate for decades about which represents [music] the earlier tradition.

[00:11:04]The textual tradition was not fixed. It was alive, and it was different in different places.

[00:11:11]This has implications that extend well beyond the academic study of ancient manuscripts.

[00:11:17]The world in which early Christianity developed was a world of genuine biblical pluralism, multiple communities, multiple authoritative texts, that multiple theological frameworks, all simultaneously present, [music] and none of them yet declared definitively correct by any authority with the power to enforce the declaration.

[00:11:38]The canonical Bible as it exists today is the result of specific decisions made by specific people in specific historical circumstances.

[00:11:47]The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve the world those decisions closed off the world before the closure when the argument was still in progress.

[00:11:55]>> [music] >> That world was more diverse, more contested and in many respects more intellectually alive than what replaced it. The stolen library and where it is now Cave 12 is not an isolated incident. The history of the Dead Sea Scrolls since their discovery in 1947 is in significant part a history of black market transactions, institutional deception, forged authentication and the systematic looting of archaeological sites by people who understood commercial value of what they were finding before the academic world had worked out the full picture.

[00:12:35]The initial scrolls found by Muhammad ed-Dhib in 1947 were sold to two separate buyers before buyer scholars became aware of them. Bishop Mar Samuel of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem and Professor Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University who bought his fragments from an antiquities dealer on the same day that the United Nations voted on the partition of Palestine. He later described haggling over ancient manuscripts while the radio in the background reported the vote that would that would change the region forever.

[00:13:10]The commercial market for scroll fragments that opened in 1947 never fully closed. When archaeologists systematically excavated [music] the Qumran caves between 1951 and 1956, they were in a race with Bedouin looters who were often ahead of them, reaching caves first, removing fragments, and selling them to dealers in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

[00:13:34]The academic team sometimes bought fragments back from the same dealers who had acquired them from the looters, creating a transaction chain that was legally murky and archaeologically catastrophic. The provenance records documentation of where specific fragments came from were often incomplete, incorrect, or deliberately falsified to obscure the looting origins of specific pieces. This matters enormously because provenance is how you date and contextualize an ancient manuscript. A fragment pulled from a known stratigraphic context can be dated by the materials around it. A fragment pulled from a clay jar in the dark by >> [music] >> someone looking for something to sell cannot. The problem compounded in 2002 when a group of previously unknown scroll fragments began appearing on the antiquities market with documentation claiming they had been in private family collections since before 1947, the legal threshold established by Israeli antiquities [music] law.

[00:14:36]The documentation was in many cases fabricated. The fragments had been looted from unexcavated Qumranarian caves in the 1990s and 2000s, given false provenances, and sold to institutions willing to pay significant sums for authenticated Dead Sea Scroll material.

[00:14:56]The most prominent institutional buyer was the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which between 2009 and 2014 acquired a collection of approximately 16 scroll fragments at a cost reported in the tens of millions of dollars. In 2018, after subjecting the fragments to scientific testing, the museum announced that all 16 were modern forgeries. The forgery operation how IT worked the Museum [music] of the Bible.

[00:15:26]Forgeries are not the end [music] of the story. They are an opening into something larger and more troubling.

[00:15:34]The investigation into the forgeries conducted by a team of scholars and scientists, including papyrologist Kipp Davis and forensic document examiner Christopher Calvin, revealed a sophisticated operation that was not producing crude fakes. The forgers understood how authentication worked.

[00:15:53]They understood what technical tests would be applied to any fragment claiming to be a Dead Sea Scroll. The And they designed their forgeries specifically to pass [music] those tests.

[00:16:03]The base material was genuine ancient parchment leather from the same period, sourced from legitimate fragments of ancient manuscripts that contained no significant text.

[00:16:14]Blank edges, worn portions, pieces with minimal historical value on their own.

[00:16:19]Onto this genuine ancient material, the forgers applied ink containing compounds that would read as authentically ancient under standard chemical analysis. They applied it to create Hebrew text that appeared to be consistent with Dead Sea Scroll content, sometimes reproducing known passages, >> [music] >> sometimes creating what appeared to be previously unknown material. The forgeries passed initial authentication in some cases. [music] They fooled buyers, scholars, and institutions precisely because the underlying material was genuinely ancient and the forgery was applied to that genuine substrate. What ultimately exposed them was a combination of multi-spectral imaging which revealed inconsistencies in how the ink interacted with the parchment surface that would not have been present if the ink had been applied 2,000 years ago, and analysis of the letter forms, which in some cases contained subtle anachronisms inconsistent with any known ancient scribble tradition. The Museum of the Bible forgeries have been documented and acknowledged. But the forgery operation that produced them almost certainly produced more pieces that went to other buyers, private collectors, smaller institutions, individuals who paid for authentication that was insufficient to catch what the museums' eventual testing caught.

[00:17:39]>> [music] >> How many forgeries are currently in collections around the world presenting themselves as genuine Dead Sea Scroll fragments is not known. Estimates from scholars who have worked on the authentication problem range from dozens to over a hundred. The implication is significant. Any institution or collector who acquired fragments from the period between roughly 2000 and 2015 from dealers who were active in the Jordanian or Israeli antiquities markets should consider whether their authentication was rigorous enough to distinguish genuine material from what the Museum of the Bible's fragments turned out to be. Some of them have not yet found out.

[00:18:21]What the new caves contain and what still hidden Cave 12 [music] was not the only new cave found since the original 11.

[00:18:29]In the years following the 2017 Cave 12 announcement, Israeli archaeologists conducting what they call the Operation Scroll Survey, a systematic examination of every cliff face and ravine [music] in the region accessible to ancient visitors have documented dozens of caves containing archaeological material from the Dead Sea Scroll period. Most of these contain pottery, linen, wood, and organic material consistent with scroll storage, the infrastructure of a deposit without the scrolls themselves.

[00:19:01]The pattern is consistent with what Cave 12 showed. The storage system survived, but the contents were removed. In some cases, the removal appears ancient.

[00:19:12]Caves that may have been emptied by communities retrieving their own materials after the immediate crisis of the Roman advance had passed. In other cases, the removal is clearly modern cut marks on clay jar lids consistent with metal tools. Disturbance [music] patterns that preserve footprints in the cave floor sediment.

[00:19:31]The surveys have also identified a category of cave that researchers are being careful about discussing publicly.

[00:19:38]Caves that appear undisturbed, sealed by rock falls or natural processes without evidence of modern entry.

[00:19:46]The Israeli Antiquities Authority has not publicly announced the locations of these sites. Officially, this is because announcement would attract looters before excavation can be conducted under scientific conditions. [music] This explanation is credible and probably accurate. It also means that the contents of these sealed caves are unknown. There may be nothing in them.

[00:20:08]The absence of disturbance does not guarantee the presence of scrolls. Caves throughout the region were used for storage, habitation, and ritual purposes that left organic material behind without written texts.

[00:20:22]But, the caves near Qumran were used for scroll storage over a period of centuries.

[00:20:28]The genetic analysis demonstrated that the collection was assembled from multiple geographic origins [music] over multiple decades. The sheer volume of material represented by the 25,000 known fragments suggests a collection larger than the what the 11 original caves contained. Some of what was placed in those caves for safekeeping in 68 CE may still be there. The cave that a shepherd's rock accidentally opened in 1947 changed the world's understanding of its own history. [music] The sealed caves that have not been opened yet are sitting in the Judean Desert right now, as they have have for 2,000 years, waiting. Subscribe to Openly if sealed cave excavations produce findings in the next 2 years and the survey evidence suggests they may we will cover it here the moment the data is public.

[00:21:20]>> [music] >> Hit the bell so you don't miss it. The text that changed everything we thought we knew beyond the questions of origin, authenticity, >> [music] >> and what remains undiscovered, the scrolls themselves contain material that has genuinely altered the scholarly understanding of the world in which the New Testament was written.

[00:21:40]Three findings deserve to be better known. The first is the Son of God text, fragment 4Q246, >> [music] >> known informally as the Son of God text, is an Aramaic document discovered in Cave 4 that uses language nearly identical to the Angel Gabriel's announcement to Mary in the Gospel of Luke. The document predates the Gospels. It uses the phrase Son of God and Son of the Most High, the exact phrases Luke uses in a political and messianic context that is entirely Jewish, entirely pre-Christian, and entirely consistent with the theological language the earliest followers of Jesus were drawing on when they described who he was. This text demonstrates that the language used to D