NASA Technology Reveals Existence of Missing Dead Sea Scroll

Advanced imaging technology originally developed for NASA has revealed previously unnoticed writing on fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Israel Antiquities Authority revealed on Tuesday. Moreover, one of the newly discerned and deciphered passages, written in early Hebrew, hints at the existence of a scroll never found and still unknown to researchers.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from the 3rd century B.C.E. to the 1st century C.E and were discovered in the Qumran caves near the Dead Sea in the 1940s, include some whole scrolls and tens of thousands of fragments from as many as 1,000 scrolls and manuscripts. For the sake of posterity, digitalization and research, all are being photographed in high-resolution under different types of light, which among other things brings previously unseen writing invisible to the naked eye, as well as some ink stains, to light. 

The mysterious fragment written in paleo-Hebrew wasn't the first early-Hebrew writing found at Qumran, including in the famous Cave 11 itself, Oren Ableman of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Hebrew University of Jerusalem tells Haaretz. But its handwriting differed from previously found scroll fragments in this early form of Hebrew, Ableman explains. Its uniqueness leads him to speculate that there may be a whole scroll that has disappeared, or at any rate, not been found yet.