A new study reveals that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are significantly older than scholars had previously estimated, with some aligning with the era in which they were originally composed.

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands employed artificial intelligence to scrutinize the handwriting on these ancient pieces. They assert that this approach has allowed them to determine more precise dates for several manuscripts, including the Book of Daniel, as detailed in a paper published in Plos One.

The AI program “Enoch,” was designed to analyze a wide range of pre-dated ancient manuscripts from contemporary locations in Israel and the West Bank, which were also radiocarbon dated. Through machine learning, it examined the stylistic development in the handwriting of 135 Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

The study claimed that the fragment of the Book of Daniel 8-11, which was thought to be dated to 160s BC, could be as old as 230 BC, which overlaps with the period in which the biblical book was authored.

“With the Enoch tool we have opened a new door into the ancient world, like a time machine, that allows us to study the hands that wrote the Bible,” the study’s authors wrote in a statement, Eureka Alert reported. 

“Especially now that we have established, for the first time, that two biblical scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed authors,” the statement continued.

Researchers also claim that fragments written in Herodian Aramaic and Hasmonaean Hebrew — considered to have emerged in the First and Second centuries BC — are actually older than initially thought and provide a new lens for the presumed proliferation of writing during that era.

These new dating claims result in “a new chronology of the scrolls and the re-dating of ancient Jewish key texts that contribute to current debates on Jewish and Christian origins,” the study stated.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1943 by two Bedouin shepherds who found them secreted in caves in the Qumran section of Israel near the Dead Sea and are the oldest known fragments of Jewish manuscripts written in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Aramaic dating back to the Third and Second century BC.

Scholars attribute the trove of religious manuscripts to the Essens, who were Jewish sectarians at the turn of the first millennium.