DNA unravels Dead Sea Scroll secrets

摘要

Genetic clues are revealing the diverse origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls.The ancient scrolls are made of sheepskin and cowskin, which retain DNA from those animals, say molecular biologist Oded Rechavi of Tel Aviv University and colleagues. Analyzing that DNA is a new way to see which of the more than 25,000 Dead Sea Scroll fragments come from the same or related animals, and thus likely the same documents.The origins of the fragments studied so far indicate the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect religious and biblical developments across southern Israel about 2,000 years ago, not just among people living near the caves where many scrolls were stored, as some scholars argue, the researchers report in the June 11 Cell.The Dead Sea Scrolls were probably written between the third century B.C. and the first century A.D., during the Second Temple period, a crucial time in the development of Judaism and the emergence of Christianity. "Our results demonstrate the heterogeneity inherent in Second Temple Judaism, which formed the matrix for [early] Christianity," says study coauthor and biblical scholar Noam Mizrahi of Tel Aviv University.About 1,000 manuscripts make up the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the earliest known versions of books of the Hebrew Bible. The largest set of scrolls comes from 11 caves near Qumran, a desert site on the Dead Sea's northwest shore.