Researchers finally decipher ancient Jewish Dead Sea scroll written in secret code

One of the last unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls has finally been deciphered bringing researchers one step closer to unravelling the mystery of the texts written more than 2,000 years ago. Most of the scrolls were deciphered in the years after they were found in the 1940s and 1950s. The ancient religious texts, which are written in a range of different languages including Hebrew and Aramaic, the ancient language believed to be spoken by Jesus Christ, have long been restored and published. However the newly decoded scroll was so damaged that some researchers didn’t even realise it was a full document, instead believing it was fragments of other works. A team from the University of Haifa in Israel spent an entire year painstakingly reassembling more than 60 tiny pieces of the ancient document which is written in a long forgotten secret code. “The scroll is written in code, but its actual content is simple and well-known, and there was no reason to conceal it,” the researchers, Dr Eshbal Ratson and Prof Jonathan Ben-Dov, said in a statement.

DEAD SEA SCROLLS

a reply to: CaptainBeno

The pay off for unravelling the archaic cipher was fresh insight into the highly unusual 364 day calendar used by the ancient Judean sect who wrote numerous scrolls.

What a let down.

a reply to: notsure1

My thoughts exactly lol..

Literally anything else would be better. Lol.

The Dead Sea scrolls are some of the oldest religious documents ever discovered. Most of the stuff that survives was created after the big Roman purges to combat Jewish rebellions.

The Dead Sea scrolls were buried to stop the Romans from destroying them.

So that means they are some of the only documents that were almost certainly not written or edited by Rome. So even copies of bible passages we already have are hugely important.