When The Dead Are Revived

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

The day began badly for the team of American biblical scholars who had been granted a rare opportunity to examine and photograph a precious manuscript in Jerusalem's Shrine of the Book. Hunched over a swath of darkened and decomposing parchment with a powerful magnifying glass, they were barely able to discern a single letter. But that night, as they reviewed photo negatives still wet from the developing tank, their luck changed dramatically. Passages that had been invisible to the naked eye jumped out at them from the film. "It was a moment of exploding consciousness," recalls James Charlesworth, professor of New Testament languages at Princeton Theological Seminary. "You dare not hope, and then -- bingo! -- it springs into view. Whole sentences, paragraphs. Right from the time of Jesus!"

Charlesworth's enthusiastic reaction is understandable, for the text he was examining was not just any scrap of parchment. It was the legendary Genesis Apocryphon, one of the original seven rolls of inscribed sheepskin known as the Dead Sea Scrolls -- and the only one whose contents are still largely unread. Unearthed in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds from rocky caves only 15 miles from Jerusalem, the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered by biblical archaeologists to be the greatest manuscript discovery ever made. Their texts, set down in Hebrew and Aramaic some 2,000 years ago, include long-lost originals of dozens of celebrated religious works, as well as the oldest known copies of Old Testament Scriptures.

But the scroll containing a narrative version of the book of Genesis had deteriorated so badly that scholars despaired of ever uncovering its ancient secrets. That is, until the American team that included Charlesworth arrived in Jerusalem earlier this year. Armed with about 300 pounds of photographic equipment, the team hoped to analyze the aged parchment with sophisticated image-enhancement techniques developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study the surfaces of distant planets. First they planned to photograph the scrolls using infrared and conventional film. Then they would use a computer to magnify and clarify the images. By these means they hoped to & discover a line or two that had been overlooked when the document was first photographed in 1956.

At first glance, even that modest goal seemed too ambitious. The scroll, ravaged by moisture, had deteriorated further than they feared. "The first fragments we saw looked like someone had poured coffee all over them," recalls Charlesworth. "The leather had turned a kind of liquid, a black goo." Even the best-preserved swaths of text were peppered with tiny holes where acids in the ink had eaten all the way through the parchment. Says another member of the team, Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California: "Time has not been kind to the scroll. Like the Titanic, it is sinking."

Even so, the Americans did not give up. They mounted a camera above the scroll and, using powerful flashes and fast shutter speeds to lessen the chance of blurring, worked quickly to capture the document with nearly every imaginable combination of lighting and film. Some blocks of text were photographed as many as 70 times. The breakthrough came when the document was lit from behind and shot with a special Japanese-made infrared film. Recalls Zuckerman: "When we developed the first set of negatives, focusing on one column of text, we could immediately see stuff we couldn't see in earlier photographs." Adds Charlesworth: "The letters unfolded before our eyes like flowers opening up. It was breathtaking."

A total of about 4,000 images were shot in Jerusalem and carted back to Southern Cal for study. Only a few dozen have been developed so far, but they have already shed new light on the customs of the ancient Jews and the cultural backdrop against which Christianity developed. Most startling are new passages that record in great detail the physical beauty of Abraham's wife Sarah. These include descriptions of the contours of Sarah's breasts, which Charlesworth interprets as proof that Judaic culture was not as puritanical or repressed as many scholars have suggested.

In another passage, Noah describes the first festival after the flood, speaking -- significantly -- in the first person: "I began to drink ((wine)) on the first day of the fifth year. Then I summoned my sons and the sons of my sons and the wives of all of us and their daughters, and we gathered together and went . . . to see the Lord of Heaven, to the God most high, to the great holy one, who saved us from ruin." The extended use of the first person represents a noteworthy departure from standard biblical texts, which are usually written in the third person with brief quotations sprinkled throughout. The style of the Genesis Apocryphon, Charlesworth insists, "is not a literary device to make the action more direct. It reflects the theology of the Jews of the period, who were living in what was for them a time of great stress. They believed this was not just a record of what someone thought Noah said, but a direct message from Noah himself to a people who were facing a new world, just as he had faced a new world."

This month the scholars will begin using a process known as digitization to put the pictures into a form suitable for computer analysis. In this procedure, a video camera is used to feed an electronic representation of each black-and-white photo to a special circuit board that can be placed inside an IBM-compatible personal computer. The circuitry divides each picture into tiny dots called pixels, much like the process by which old Hollywood black-and- white movies are colorized. But instead of assigning colors to each pixel, the computer assigns each dot a number according to how light or dark it is. Thus on a scale of one to ten, a dark smudge or scratch might be assigned a nine or ten, while a lighter stroke becomes a five or six. These numbers can then be manipulated to filter out "noise" and bring out hidden features in the text. For example, all the pixels with high numbers can be changed to zeros to make them disappear, while the lighter pixels representing parts of actual letters can be darkened by boosting their values from five or six to ten.

Once the text of the Genesis Apocryphon is safely stored in the computer, it can be retrieved and recopied indefinitely. Given the rate at which the scroll is deteriorating, that may prove invaluable. "We got there in the nick of time," says Charlesworth. "No matter how fantastic your technology, you can't decipher something that isn't there." In the future, digitization may be carried out at the site of the archaeological find. It certainly will if these technoscholars have their way. As Zuckerman puts it, "I think we should treat documents like a murdered body. Leave it where it lies until the evidence can be collected from it."

With reporting by Robert Slater/Jerusalem and David Wilson/Los Angeles