2000-Yr-Old Cryptic Dead Sea Scrolls Reveal a Very Advanced 364-Day Solar Calendar Used by Ancient Priests

A groundbreaking discovery revealed the successful decoding of one of the last remaining Dead Sea Scrolls, which contained an ancient priestly calendar used by a Jewish sect over 2000 years ago, stated the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2018. University of Haifa researchers, Dr. Eshbal Ratson and Professor Jonathan Ben-Dov, spent a year meticulously piecing together over 60 tiny fragments written in cryptic script to uncover this significant historical document. "It's always exciting to discover a pile of tiny fragments that were basically considered to be a hopeless conglomerate of fragments and realize that meaningful text can be extracted from that," said Professor Noam Mizrahi, adding weight to this discovery from Tel Aviv University, according to The Times of Israel.
At over 2,000 years old, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain the oldest known copy of the Ten Commandments. #StoryOfGod pic.twitter.com/ijeT5X1688
— National Geographic TV (@NatGeoTV) April 7, 2019
The deciphered scroll presented a very advanced 364-day solar calendar that the Qumran sect used and which was opposed to the conventional 354-day lunar calendar used everywhere in those times, according to The Conversation. This was a special calendar that made certain that no holy day of festivities ever coincided with the Sabbath because of the very strict adherence to the view of this sect concerning holiness and perfection. Indeed, Dr. Ratson has been working on this project for digital manipulation and decryption. It was like "putting together a jigsaw puzzle — without knowing what was the picture," she described the challenging process of reconstructing the ancient text, stated The Guardian.
Its contents were of special interest because the scroll contains the earliest known use of the word "tekufa" for seasonal festivals and referred to festivals not previously known, such as the "Feast of Wood Offering," stated The Times of Israel. The text of the document was primarily written by a single scribe, but there are corrections and comments by someone else, throwing an insight into the practices of ancient scribes.

| Photo by Mark Rasmuson)
The encryption, called "Cryptic A script," substituted Hebrew letters with other alphabetic characters or special symbols. "It's quite a simple encryption... the language itself is Hebrew," Ratson said, as per The Times of Israel. Professor Ben-Dov even went on to speculate that the use of encrypted text was "a matter of prestige" for the scribes. The calendar was important to the Qumran sect, a hermitic group living in the Judaean Desert. Unlike the imperfect lunar calendar that depended on human observation and discretion, their calendar was perfect because it was strictly mathematical. The number could be divided without any remainder by four and seven alike, ensuring special occasions consistently fell on the same days.
LUIS ELIZONDO (@LueElizondo) mentions the DEAD SEA SCROLLS in an interview with ROSS COULTART (@rosscoulthart):
— GΔRRΞTT (@libertybirb) December 19, 2024
"I think there are several aspects to this that could be very… cause a great deal of social angst and anxiety, internationally. It is potentially destabilizing… https://t.co/VsmGqoNfxO pic.twitter.com/FOnqOVF24K
The finding has thrown light on the tussle of power during the Second Temple Period, as the Qumran sect fought against the religious authorities of Jerusalem for control of the calendar. The deciphering was successful because state-of-the-art digital technologies were applied with the help of the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library operated by the Israel Antiquities Authority. Originally, Dead Sea Scrolls were found by two Bedouin shepherds at Qumran, near Qumran Khirbet, in the 1940s. The collection numbers around 900 manuscript compositions dated from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D., according to The Guardian.