Out of the Ashes

It’s not often that two of my interests – computer technology and the Bible – intersect, but they did in a science discovery announced this week. A team of computer specialists at the University of Kentucky were able to read the writing on a 1700-year old Torah scroll that had been turned into charcoal by a fire in 600 CE. How this miracle of science was accomplished and what it uncovered is fascinating.

The Spring of the Young Goat

The story begins on the Western shore of the Dead Sea, a barren desert without tree or shrub except for those around oases such as the one at En-gedi, 35 miles southeast of Jerusalem. En-gedi (the name means “spring of the young goat”) is mentioned a few times in the Bible, most notably as one of the spots where David fled from Saul (1 Sam 24). It was the site of a Jewish community beginning in the 8th century BCE and by the 4th century CE, it was a large Jewish city with at least one synagogue. The city was destroyed by fire in the 7th century during the Arab conquests.

Archaeological excavations in 1970 uncovered the Holy Ark in the ruins of the city’s synagogue. The Holy Ark is a cabinet in a synagogue that holds the scrolls used for synagogue readings. Inside the En-gedi Ark were the charred fragments of its Torah scrolls. The blackened lumps of charcoal fell apart at the touch and there was no way to unwrap them, so the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) preserved them on the chance that some future technology would allow them to be read.

Start with a Good Scan

Did the charred scrolls contain any writing at all or were they a total loss? Sefi Porat, one of the excavators who worked on the En-gedi synagogue, asked his colleague, Pnina Shor, head of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) Project at the IAA, if she could scan the En-gedi scrolls as part of the project to create images of all DSS material.

Modern X-ray-based micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scans of the En-gedi scrolls can reveal there was writing on the layers inside because the ink, containing metals like iron or lead, is denser than the parchment on which it was written and provides a good contrast. The micro-CT scan, designed for high-resolution scanning of biological tissues, can also visualize the layers in the scroll.

But it was impossible to decipher the writing. The Hebrew letters appear on a 3D cylindrical image and cannot be read without conversion to a 2D image. It would be as if you wrote a message on a piece of paper, rolled it up and tried to read it by holding it up to a light. The letters on one layer would be superimposed on the letters on the other layers.

Computer-Assisted Archaeology

This is where the University of Kentucky comes in. Similar charred scrolls were unearthed in the library of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law in Herculaneum, destroyed along with Pompeii in 79 CE. W. Brent Seales, professor and chairman of the computer science department at the University of Kentucky, has spent the last 13 years working on ways to read such damaged scrolls. Dr. Seales and his team developed a technique to “virtually unwrap” the charred scrolls once they had been scanned.

Learning of Dr. Seales’ work, Dr. Shor sent him the micro-CT scan of one of the En-gedi scrolls and asked if he could analyze it.

The program developed by Dr. Seales’ team builds a triangulated surface mesh to identify the layers of material in the scroll. The team identified five complete revolutions of parchment in the scroll. Once the layers had been identified and modeled, the program renders readable textures on the layers by assigning a “brightness” value from the appropriate layer of the CT scan to each point on the segmented surface in the computer model.

Video from The New York Times describing the technique.

Because the layers were rolled-up in the scan, the next step was to flatten the segments. This was done via common 3D-to-2D mapping techniques. The final step was to merge the flattened segments into a composite image. The final image revealed the scroll to be two columns of text that include 35 lines (18 preserved and 17 reconstructed) of Hebrew text from the first two chapters of Leviticus, the third book in the Torah.

A composite image of the completed virtual unwrapping of the En-gedi scroll (source: B. Seales)

The Findings

Radiocarbon results date the scroll to 3rd-4th century CE. This puts the En-gedi scroll a century or two after the period of the Dead Sea Scrolls (3rd century BCE to 2nd century CE) and centuries before medieval biblical fragments found in Cairo dating to the 9th century CE.

The text on the En-gedi scroll is identical to the Masoretic Text (MT). The MT is the text printed in most modern Hebrew Bibles and used as the source for translations into English. This is interesting because the DSS written just one or two centuries earlier reveal some variations in the biblical texts. This discovery pushes back the date for the standardization of the MT to the 3rd-4th century CE.

The work of Dr. Seales and his team was financed by a government grant. The suite of software programs, called Volume Cartography, will be released as open source once the grant ends. Use of the software on the damaged scrolls from the Herculaneum library could re-discover long-lost works of Latin and Greek literature. It is a remarkable accomplishment.

Details of the “virtual unwrapping” technique are detailed in an article published in the 21 Sept 2016 issue of the journal Science Advances.

Rejoice in the Lord Always

Like most people, I like a good mystery. Paul’s letter to the Philippians (abbreviated hereafter as “Phil”) is something of a mystery because we don’t know when or where it was written. There is also some debate as to whether the letter as we have it today was one, two or three separate letters.

Location, Location, Location

Phil is a fairly short letter that Paul wrote from prison (Phil 1:7, 13, 17) to the church in Phlippi, the first church that he founded in Europe. The occasion for the letter is to assure the Philippians that Epaphroditus has survived a life-threatening illness. The Philippians, hearing of Paul’s imprisonment, sent Epaphroditus with a gift (4:18). While with Paul, Epaphroditus fell ill and news of this reached the church in Philippi. Paul sent Epaphroditus back to them (2:25-30) and he hopes to be able to send Timothy soon and come for a visit himself (2:19-24).

What possible locations fit these facts? From later in Acts, we learn that Paul was arrested in Jerusalem and imprisoned in Caesarea for two years. It seems like an obvious choice except that, as summarized above, the letter presupposes frequent contact between Philippi and Paul. Caesarea is 1000 miles from Philippi by sea and travel on the Mediterranean during winter would be out of the question. An overland route would be arduous as well. The turnaround time on a letter would be months.

Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome. While seemingly closer to Philippi, the geography of Italy and Greece would require a 900-mile voyage skirting their coastlines. The shortest route would be overland across the width of Italy, then by boat across the Adriatic to Corinth, and then up the coast of Greece to Philippi. At 700-miles, it still poses a formidable challenge to messengers travelling back and forth between Paul and Philippi.

Ephesus would solve the problem of frequent contact as Philippi is only 400 miles away by sea. A ship could cover that distance in seven to nine days. Unlike Caesarea or Rome, we know that Timothy was with Paul at Ephesus (1 Cor 4:17; 16:10; Acts 19:22). The only problem is that Acts does not mention Paul being imprisoned there. Paul refers (metaphorically) to having fought “wild beasts” at Ephesus (1 Cor 15:32) and almost receiving a sentence of death while in Asia (2 Cor 1:8-10). A lengthy imprisonment in Ephesus could explain why Paul spent three years there and why he later avoided the city on his journey from Macedonia to Jerusalem.

If Ephesus is the city of origin, Phil would have been written around 56 CE.

The Apostle Paul (c. 1657) by Rembrandt

E Pluribus Unum

The other mystery about Phil is whether it is one letter or a compilation of multiple letters Paul sent to the church in Philippi. If you read the first two verses of Phil 3, you can easily see why many scholars think more than one letter may have been combined:

Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord.
To write the same things to you is not troublesome to me, and for you it is a safeguard.
Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!

Up to this point, the tone of the letter has demonstrated the warm affection Paul has for the Philippians with the repeated mention of the word “rejoice.” Starting chapter 3 with “finally,” you think Paul is bringing the letter to a close and he will continue with the theme of rejoicing. But then he abruptly changes subject to repeat admonitions that he has apparently written in previous letters. The shift in tone from “rejoice” to “beware” is quite jarring. But when you get to Phil 4:4, the refrain of “rejoice” returns. And then there’s another conclusion beginning with the word “finally” at 4:8.

Other oddities can be observed. Paul acknowledges receiving Epaphroditus (4:18) after he writes that he is returning the messenger to Philippi (2:25-30). Logically, you would expect it to be the other way round. Paul typically discusses his travel plans at the end of his letters, but in Phil they appear in the middle (2:23-30) right before the false ending (the first “finally”) at 3:1.

Some biblical scholars argue for Phil containing content from two original letters and others suggest content from three separate letters. There’s no consensus on the topic. I’m inclined to the theory that a short note (4:10-20) acknowledging the Philippians’ gift was combined with a later letter sent back with Epaphroditus after he regained his health. The warnings against the circumcisers (3:2-11) could have come from one or both of these letters, or even a separate letter. One can’t be too precise in these matters.

Imitation of Christ

The most famous part of Phil is the christological hymn that appears in 2:5-11. Most scholars believe Paul did not originate these lines, but instead inherited them, either in Greek or Aramaic. If it was originally composed in Aramaic, Paul may have learned the hymn in the years following his conversion in the mid-30s.

The original purpose of the hymn would have been to proclaim Jesus as Lord in a liturgical context. The structure consists of six verses of three lines each (Paul adding the part about “even death on a cross”). The first three verses have Jesus not claiming his equality with God, but taking the form of a slave and becoming obedient to the point of death. The last three verses explain that, because of this, God exalted him so that all of creation should bend the knee to him and confess his new name, “Lord”.

Although the hymn’s original purpose was to praise Jesus as Lord, Paul asks his readers to take as their example the exalted Christ. Instead of having the mindset of bettering themselves at the expense of others, they should take on the mind of Christ and look after the interests of others (2:3-4). The way to God is not through climbing the ladder of success, but by becoming humbly obedient to God, even to the point of death.