After 70 Years, One Of The Most Mysterious Dead Sea Scrolls Has Been Deciphered

For than 70 years, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ writing systems, known as “Cryptic B”, remained undeciphered. Its strange symbols have given rise to dozens of hypotheses. Some scholars believed that they had encrypted heretical ideas, others assumed the presence of secret rules, forbidden knowledge or the internal “language” of the closed religious community of Qumran. The very fact of using the code where ordinary Hebrew was usually used looked suspicious and only increased interest.

Manuscripts are in almost hopeless condition

The main problem was not the code itself, but the physical condition of the manuscripts. Only two texts are written in completely cryptographic letter B – 4Q362 and 4Q363. They came to us in the form of fragments several millimeters in size. The ink has bleed, the surface of the parchment is cracked, and the letters look different even within the same line.
Additional confusion was created by the fact that in the two manuscripts the writing was made by different hands. In one case, the letters are microscopic, about two to three millimeters, in the other – several times larger and heavier. The symbols sometimes resemble Paleo-Hebrew signs, sometimes Greek letters, sometimes slightly distorted standard Hebrew. This combination has long misled researchers.

Analysis, patience and intuition

Emmanuel Oliveiro from University of Groningen (Netherlands) decided to approach the problem in the same way as cryptographers of the mid-20th century, when they deciphered another Qumran system. He assumed that this was a simple substitution, where each character corresponds to one letter of the alphabet. It’s like a puzzle with too many options to try blindly.
To narrow it down, the scientist analyzed repeated combinations of symbols and compared them with the frequency of words in the Hebrew Bible and other Qumran texts. He also carefully studied the shape of the signs, suggesting that the scribes did not invent new letters, but only disguised familiar ones. The results were published in Dead Sea Discoveries.

Keyword

The breakthrough came when one of the frequently occurring sequences was matched to the word“Israel”. The frequency and structure coincided too precisely to be an accident. Testing this hypothesis on other fragments confirmed the guess. After this, the alphabet began to “unfold”, like a lock to which the correct key finally fits.Most of the text is now legible, although a few rare characters are still unclear.

What was hidden under the code?

The content turned out to be unexpectedly traditional. The texts contain biblical formulas, prophetic phrases, and references toIsrael and Judah, the image of the tents of Jacob, expressions of divine glory and precise time indications such as “second year, fifth month.”
One of the most interesting fragments says thatthat someone “built mounds” at the tomb.The term used can refer to both actual tombstones and symbolic signs, so researchers are not yet sure whether we are talking about a funeral ritual or a metaphor. Another manuscript repeats formulaic expressions, but too little text has survived to reconstruct the plot in full.

Why did the mystery last so long?

The riddle of Cryptic B turned out to be not secret knowledge, but a complex combination of poor preservation, unstable handwriting and a small amount of text. There was simply not enough material to apply classical statistical methods. In addition, the scribes themselves made the task difficult by deliberately changing the shapes of the letters and creating the illusion of alien writing.

The question that remains

The main intrigue now lies elsewhere. Why did the Qumran community encrypt ordinary religious language? Perhaps the code itself was a sign of status and was intended for a narrow circle of initiates. According to another version, such texts could serve as educational exercises or a way to symbolically separate sacred scripture from everyday life.