The En-Gedi scroll is an ancient and fragile parchment found in 1970 at Ein Gedi, Israel. It contains a portion of the Biblical book of Leviticus. It is significant as one of the oldest portions of the Bible in existence, and showing an important stage in the development of Hebrew scripture.
Contents
Text
According to radiocarbon testing performed by the Israel Antiquities Authority, the scroll has a probability of 88.9% of dating to 210-390 AD and 68.2% of dating to 235-340 AD. The scroll was written at Ein Gedi where there was a community of Essenes, the Jewish sect made famous for the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The text translated so far consists of 18 complete lines and 17 partial lines of the first two chapters of Leviticus. The text is identical to the medieval era Masoretic Text, unlike the Dead Sea scrolls which have variations from the Masoretic. Emanuel Tov, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem described the scroll "This is the earliest evidence of the exact form of the medieval text".
Recovery
The ancient scroll was discovered in 1970 but was in such fragile state it disintegrated on touch and so was unable to be studied.
To read the fragile parchment, researchers used a micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scan followed by volume cartography software to locate the ink within the burned scroll, and thus reconstructed the text of the document.