By Whitney Harder
Special to KyForward
A “virtual unwrapping tool” created by University of Kentucky’s Brent Seales and a team of students has helped make it possible to read parts of a scroll that is at least 1,500 years old.
The scroll, which was excavated in 1970 but at some point earlier had been badly burned, was discovered inside the Holy Ark of the synagogue at Ein Gedi in Israel. Seales’ advanced technology, along with high-resolution scanning, revealed verses from the beginning of the Book of Leviticus suddenly coming back to life.
The rare find was presented Monday at a press conference in Jerusalem, attended by Israel’s minister of culture and sports and the director of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Seales, who attended via Skype, was quick to credit numerous people and technologies.
“The text revealed today from the Ein Gedi scroll was possible only because of the collaboration of many different people and technologies,” said Seales, who is professor and chair of the UK College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science. “The last step of virtual unwrapping, done at the University of Kentucky through the hard work of a team of talented students, is especially satisfying because it has produced readable, identifiable, biblical text from a scroll thought to be beyond rescue.”
The parchment scroll was unearthed in 1970 in archaeological excavations in the synagogue at Ein Gedi. However, due to its charred condition, it was not possible to either preserve or decipher it. To date, this is the most ancient scroll from the five books of the Hebrew Bible to be found since the Dead Sea scrolls, most of which are ascribed to the end of the Second Temple period (first century B.C.E.-first century C.E.).
The Ein Gedi scroll was scanned with a micro-computed tomography machine. The scanning process is x-ray-based and completely non-invasive as the Ein Gedi scroll is badly damaged from fire and cannot be physically opened. Results were produced from scan data alone – the Ein Gedi scroll itself remains intact and unopened.
The results come from research and a software prototype designed to do “virtual unwrapping” of surfaces from within volumetric scans. This unwrapping process allows the visualization of evidence of writing on a surface from within a scanned volume. Because the surfaces of the object being scanned are not flat like a book – rather they are rolled up as a scroll – the visualization of the surface and the evidence of writing upon the surface is a complex process.
“I have been using the word ‘surface’ to refer to the page of biblical text we have revealed. But this is a term of geometry, not of precise position,” Seales said. “The page actually comes from a layer buried deep within the many wraps of the scroll body, and is possible to view it only through the remarkable results of our software, which implements the research idea of ‘virtual unwrapping.'”
The first eight verses of the Book of Leviticus were revealed:
“The Lord summoned Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When any of you bring an offering of livestock to the Lord, you shall bring your offering from the herd or from the flock. If the offering is a burnt-offering from the herd, you shall offer a male without blemish; you shall bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting, for acceptance in your behalf before the Lord. You shall lay your hand on the head of the burnt-offering, and it shall be acceptable in your behalf as atonement for you. The bull shall be slaughtered before the Lord; and Aaron’s sons the priests shall offer the blood, dashing the blood against all sides of the altar that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. The burnt-offering shall be flayed and cut up into its parts. The sons of the priest Aaron shall put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire. Aaron’s sons the priests shall arrange the parts, with the head and the suet, on the wood that is on the fire on the altar. (Leviticus 1:1-8).”
This is the first time in any archaeological excavation that a Torah scroll was found in a synagogue, particularly inside a Holy Ark.
“Today we are recovering evidence of an important text — one that was thought to be beyond repair,” Seales said. “But more than that, we are delivering hope for revealing other lost texts, and a systematic, scientific blueprint for how to do it.”
UK students participating in the project were:
Seth Parker, project manager
Abigail Coleman, graduate research assistant
Chao Du, graduate research assistant
Nick Graczyk, undergraduate research assistant
Whitney Harder, information specialist
Sean Karlage, undergraduate research assistant
Stephen Parsons, undergraduate research assistant
David Pennington, undergraduate research assistant
Michael Roup, undergraduate research assistant
Melissa Shankle, undergraduate research assistant
Whitney Harder writes for UKNow.