Clarifying Scripture : Physicist Uses Technology to Help Decipher Dead Sea Scrolls

The dark writing blended illegibly into the small, blackened piece of parchment from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the timeworn texts that are giving scholars new insight into religion in the era when Christianity and rabbinical Judaism were born.

But a little Space Age science revealed a phrase in ancient Aramaic:

“He wrote the words of Noah.”

That discovery of the ark builder’s name was a victory for physicist Gregory Bearman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His science-meets-religion success two years ago eventually took Bearman to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem for digital imaging of the rest of the same badly damaged text, which retells stories from the biblical book of Genesis.

When Bearman was in Jerusalem for four weeks last summer, scholars of the scrolls were literally looking over his shoulder as he worked, changing their transcriptions where their guesses had been wrong and filling in gaps in some sentences.

Discovered in caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956, the scrolls--written between 250 BC and AD 68--contain the religious writings of the so-called Qumran community, a small Jewish sect that was at odds with the Jewish authorities of the time in Jerusalem. They contain the oldest versions of biblical texts yet discovered.

The contents of many scrolls have been published, giving scholars much to consider and debate. But with the passage of 20 centuries and more, all that remains of many of the scrolls are thousands of tiny scraps, some of them containing scattered letters and words difficult to read because the parchment is now as dark as the ink.

That’s where Bearman and his imaging spectrometer come in, with the unique ability to “tune in” to the original writing.

“I’m one of the people at JPL showing how technology developed for NASA programs can be applied to commercial use,” Bearman said. “This technology also has applications in agriculture and biomedical research.”

Bearman, who this week gave his first Los Angeles-area talk on the research tool at Adat Ari El Synagogue, said in an interview that the instruments also have the potential to see what the eye cannot see on papyri, frescoes, mosaics and, for example, on red pottery with faded inscriptions in red ink.

“Many scrolls are seriously darkened with age--black on dark brown,” said Eugene Ulrich, chief editor of the scroll translations. Scholars have been helped in the past by infrared photographs, which show the carbon-based ink as dark, while blanching out the background.

“But everybody saw major advances in their work as a result of this new technology,” Ulrich said.

Bearman’s technique uses an imaging spectrometer to pick up the different wavelengths of light reflected from different substances. An electronic, tunable filter attached to the instrument allows quick switching from one wavelength to another, and their minute differences in light are registered by a computer, creating electronic images that can be manipulated to heighten contrast between the original ink line and the material around it.

His equipment allows him to “tune” the image, creating differences between colors that look virtually identical to the eye.

“With this equipment we could pick out one blue-green jelly bean among a million blue jelly beans spread out on the floor,” Bearman said.

Ulrich availed himself of Bearman’s technology last summer in Jerusalem to confirm his thesis that a scroll fragment of the Qumran sect’s Book of Joshua was located in Chapter 4 and not in Chapter 8, as it is in the currently accepted version of the Bible.

This is additional evidence that today’s Bible differs from earlier versions copied by Jewish scribes in pre-Christian times.

“Our traditional Book of Joshua in the Bible is probably a secondary, or even tertiary, form of what we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Ulrich, professor of Hebrew scriptures at the University of Notre Dame.

Ulrich said the Joshua scroll fragment he studied was about the building of the first altar in the Promised Land. He said that putting that verse in Chapter 4 made more sense in the biblical narrative, but that Bearman’s clarification of the scroll scrap was additional evidence to show that--at least in the Qumran community--it actually was located in that part of the Book of Joshua at one time in the past.

Jonas Greenfield, one of two scholars who was working on the Genesis Apocryphon, the text that contains the phrase, “He wrote the words of Noah,” spent four or five hours at Bearman’s house in Pasadena in February making changes in his transcriptions.

Greenfield died in his sleep the next month, Bearman said, but Bearman sent his complete set of images several weeks ago to the other Genesis Apocryphon scholar, Elisha Qimron of Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel.

“He likes what he sees,” Bearman said after telephoning Qimron last week. “There are lots of new words, though no new sentences.”

The Genesis Apocryphon reflects Jewish speculation of that period, also found in the non-biblical text titled 1 Enoch, which depicts Noah’s father, Lamech, as suspicious that his wondrous child was not his own, but the result of his wife consorting with angels. Only after consulting with his father, Methuselah, was Lamech convinced that Noah was indeed his son.

Whether the enhanced images in the scrolls’ Genesis Apocryphon reveal any significant new twists in the story’s retelling will not be known until Qimron publishes his translation and interpretations.

Whether the imaging instruments, which are still being refined by Bearman, ever get to be used regularly by scholars will depend largely on whether their institutions can afford the price: $65,000 to $75,000.

“This is a stumbling block for many humanities institutions,” he said.

Bearman, meanwhile, is working on space-related projects at JPL, having recently finished a proposal to build an instrument for a European Space Agency mission to a comet.

Nevertheless, he said he knows that the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, located on the campus of the School of Theology at Claremont, “is seeking to raise funds for their own imaging center.”

Bearman knows that because his wife, Sheila Spiro, is the executive director of the center, which has the largest single collection in the world of Dead Sea Scroll photographs and other images.

After their marriage in 1987, Bearman learned biblical Hebrew and studied Jewish history and archeology.

Bearman became intrigued with a new application for his imaging process after he and his wife listened to a talk by USC’s Bruce Zuckerman on new photographic techniques Zuckerman used on ancient manuscripts.

Spiro, who holds a degree from the University of Judaism, accompanied Bearman to Jerusalem last year.

“Who would have ever thought with my background in Bible and his in physics that we’d ever wind up working together?” she said.