Writings: JudaismThe En-Gedi Leviticus scroll10 of 10

Writings: Judaism

The En-Gedi Leviticus scroll

The En-Gedi scroll is a burned Hebrew parchment scroll found in 1970 in the Holy Ark of a synagogue at En-Gedi, on the Dead Sea shore. Computer imaging read it without opening it: it holds the start of Leviticus. Radiocarbon dating gives the third or fourth century CE; a handwriting study gave the first or second.

Last reviewed:

Three dates, kept apart

  1. The text's date: the tradition's view

    about 1300 BCE, for the giving of the Torah at Sinai, which holds Leviticus (the Orthodox Union, an Orthodox body, is the only source consulted that puts a time on it, writing that God gave the Torah at Sinai "some thirty three hundred years ago" on a glossary page stamped June 21, 2006; the BCE year is computed here from that phrase and the stamp, which may be a load date, and an earlier writing date would move the figure by years, not centuries; the Orthodox Union's entry on the Tanakh, the Conservative statement Emet Ve-Emunah (1988), the Central Conference of American Rabbis' statements of 1976 and 1999, and the Talmud passages used give no year)

  2. The text's date: critical scholars' view

    about the 10th century BCE to the 3rd century BCE, for the Torah's sources, among them the Priestly source, found mostly in Leviticus (this site's reading of Christine Hayes of Yale in a lecture: she calls the documentary hypothesis, the proposal that hypothetical source documents lie behind the Torah's text, a major hypothesis that is not without criticism, and useful; she says most biblical scholars accept some version of it, with less confidence in its finer details, and that its sources are assigned relative dates, not absolute dates; she reports that source critics dated the earliest source, J, to about the 10th century BCE and that other scholars date all of it after the fifth century BCE, in the fourth or third; the Priestly source is one of the hypothesis's four sources, which she reports Wellhausen dated late while others defend its antiquity; the priestly laws in Leviticus and Numbers, she says, were formulated somewhere from the eighth to the sixth century, drawing on older traditions, and the priestly materials reached their final form in the exilic or post-exilic period; the tradition's bar marks the giving of the Torah at Sinai and this bar the writing of its sources)

  3. This copy made

    third or fourth century CE, when the scroll was made, by radiocarbon dating of the parchment (a news report, Sci.News, quotes the archaeologists as giving 210 to 390 CE at 88.9 percent probability); A. Yardeni dated the handwriting to the second half of the first or the early second century CE; Drew Longacre argues for the third or fourth century

  4. This copy found

    1970, when archaeologists found it in the Holy Ark of the ancient synagogue at En-Gedi (an excavation led by Dan Barag and Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University, with Yosef Porath of the Israel Antiquities Authority)

All four rows share one timeline. A row with no marker says why in words. How ancient texts are dated.

What it is

The En-Gedi scroll is a Hebrew scroll from the synagogue of En-Gedi, a Jewish community beside the Dead Sea that lasted from the late eighth century BCE until a fire around 600 CE.12 It was found burned into lumps of charcoal, too fragile to open. In 2015 a team led by Brent Seales used X-ray scan data and software to separate, flatten, and read its layers, a method called virtual unwrapping.13

The text is the start of Leviticus, one of the five books of Moses that make up the Torah, the first part of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.4 The master image shows two columns, 35 lines in all, 18 preserved and 17 reconstructed.1 The team calls it the oldest Pentateuchal scroll in Hebrew outside the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book found in a Holy Ark, the cabinet for a synagogue's scrolls.1

How the copy was dated

A laboratory at the Weizmann Institute dated the parchment by radiocarbon and found the third or fourth century CE, the 2016 report says.1 Sci.News, a science news site, quotes the archaeologists on the result. They gave a 68.2 percent probability of 235 to 340 CE and 88.9 percent of 210 to 390 CE, with a 6.5 percent chance of the second century CE.5

Handwriting gave an earlier date. A. Yardeni placed it in the second half of the first or the early second century CE.16 Drew Longacre answers, in a 2018 article, that handwriting is often ambiguous. He finds this hand somewhat later than the first to second century Dead Sea Scrolls and earlier than sixth to eighth century examples. He adds that the cumulative evidence of the archaeological context, a wooden roller, metallic ink, and tall narrow columns, each individually indeterminative, also suggests the third to sixth centuries.6

He argues for the third or fourth century CE, with a small chance of the second or fifth, which radiocarbon dating possibly supports.6 See how ancient texts are dated.

The text: its date and authorship

The strip marks the book of Leviticus within the Torah. The tradition's bar, about 1300 BCE, marks the giving of the Torah at Sinai and is computed here from the Orthodox Union's wording, the only one consulted with a time. The scholars' bar is this site's reading of Hayes's range for the Torah's sources, the 10th to the 3rd century BCE. She dates the priestly laws within it, from the eighth to the sixth century.

The tradition's view

The Orthodox Union's entry on the Torah, posted in 2006, dates the giving of the Torah at Sinai to some 3,300 years ago. It cites Leviticus 19:2, the call to be holy, as God's command to the Jewish people. Its entry on the Tanakh says that for every word of the Torah Moses received dictation from Heaven.74 The Talmud credits Moses with writing the Torah and records two views on its last eight verses, which tell of his death: that Joshua wrote them, or that Moses wrote them in tears as God dictated. It adds that when the Torah is read publicly in the synagogue, one person reads those verses.89

Emet Ve-Emunah (1988), the Conservative statement, sets out views of revelation from words spoken by God to a continuing discovery of truths about God.10 The Reform statements of 1999 and 1976 describe Torah as God's ongoing revelation and as resulting from the relationship between God and the Jewish people.1112 None of the three gives a year.

Scholars of Leviticus and the Priestly source: Hayes and Wellhausen

In a lecture, Christine Hayes calls Leviticus a primary document of the Priestly School, the priestly circle that scholars propose wrote the priestly materials. She says chapters 1 to 7 cover the sacrificial system. Chapters 17 to 26 are the Holiness Code, which most scholars think comes from a different priestly circle, increasingly seen as later.13

She says the priestly materials emerged over centuries and reached their final form in the exilic or post-exilic period, often keeping older traditions. The priestly laws in Leviticus and Numbers, she says, were formulated somewhere from the eighth to the sixth century. Wellhausen, she reports, dated the priestly source late, and other scholars defend its antiquity.131415 She adds that the priestly laws seem as early as those of Deuteronomy, but from a very different circle with different concerns.16

She says most biblical scholars accept some version of the documentary hypothesis, the proposal that hypothetical source documents lie behind the Torah's text, with less confidence in its finer details, and that its sources are assigned relative dates, not absolute dates.15

How it was found

Archaeologists excavating the ancient synagogue at En-Gedi in 1970 found charred lumps of scroll inside its Holy Ark. The dig was led by Dan Barag and Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University, with Yosef Porath of the Israel Antiquities Authority.3 The fragments had been crushed into charcoal, and for 40 years no way was found to read them without destroying them. The Authority preserved them.1

Pnina Shor, the Authority's curator, gave Seales's team CT scan data in 2014, the team writes. The paper's author contributions say Shor acquired the volumetric scan, and its acknowledgments credit D. Merkel of Merkel Technologies with donating it to the Authority.21 In 2015 the team revealed the first eight verses of Leviticus, and in September 2016 they published the five recovered wraps in Science Advances.13

What it shows, and what it does not

It shows a Hebrew scroll of Leviticus, which the team calls Pentateuchal, dated to the third or fourth century CE by radiocarbon. The team reports that the text deciphered so far, from the opening of Leviticus, is completely identical with the consonants of the Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew text of the Tanakh. It writes that proto-Masoretic texts a century or two earlier still show some fluidity and that the scroll offers a glimpse into the earliest stages of almost 800 years of near silence in the history of the biblical text.1

It does not show more than the opening columns, since the scroll will probably never be opened. The match with the Masoretic Text holds for the text deciphered so far.1 The sources used here do not say whether the scroll once held more than Leviticus. It does not settle its own date, which depends on the dispute above, or who copied it and for whom. The sources used here do not say where the scroll is now.

See also

Sources

  1. William Brent Seales, Clifford Seth Parker, Michael Segal, Emanuel Tov, Pnina Shor, and Yosef Porath. From damage to discovery via virtual unwrapping: Reading the scroll from En-Gedi. Science Advances 2, no. 9 (2016), e1601247 (open access; read on PubMed Central), 2016, the introduction, the section on the recovered text, and the dating paragraph; the supplementary table S1 of radiocarbon results was not available; the author contributions and acknowledgments were also read. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  2. William Brent Seales and team, University of Kentucky Digital Restoration Initiative. The Scroll from En-Gedi. University of Kentucky, Department of Computer Science, the whole page. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  3. University of Kentucky. Virtually Unwrapping the En-Gedi Scroll. University of Kentucky Research News, 2016. Accessed 2026-11-05.
  4. Orthodox Union. Tanakh (Judaism 101 glossary). Orthodox Union, glossary entry. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  5. Sci.News (a science news site). En-Gedi Scroll Finally Deciphered. Sci.News, 2016, the paragraph on radiocarbon dating. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  6. Drew Longacre. Reconsidering the Date of the En-Gedi Leviticus Scroll (EGLev): Exploring the Limitations of the Comparative-Typological Paleographic Method. Textus 27 (2018), pp. 44 to 84 (abstract from the publisher's record in the Crossref database), 2018, the abstract only. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  7. OU Staff. Torah. Orthodox Union, 2006. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  8. Babylonian Talmud (William Davidson Edition). Bava Batra 14b. Sefaria, Bava Batra 14b. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  9. Babylonian Talmud (William Davidson Edition). Bava Batra 15a. Sefaria, Bava Batra 15a. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  10. Commission on the Philosophy of Conservative Judaism. Emet Ve-Emunah: Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism. The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, The Rabbinical Assembly, and The United Synagogue of America, 1988, printed pages 18 to 26. Accessed 2026-10-29.
  11. Central Conference of American Rabbis. A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism. Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1999, Torah. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  12. Central Conference of American Rabbis. Reform Judaism: A Centenary Perspective. Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1976, section 3, Torah. Accessed 2026-10-28.
  13. Christine Hayes. Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145), Lecture 9: The Priestly Legacy: Cult and Sacrifice, Purity and Holiness in Leviticus and Numbers. Open Yale Courses, Yale University, transcript, chapter 1. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  14. Christine Hayes. Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145), Lecture 10: Biblical Law: The Three Legal Corpora of JE (Exodus), P (Leviticus and Numbers) and D (Deuteronomy). Open Yale Courses, Yale University, transcript, chapters 1 and 2. Accessed 2026-11-06.
  15. Christine Hayes. Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145), Lecture 5: Critical Approaches to the Bible: Introduction to Genesis 12-50. Open Yale Courses, Yale University, transcript, first chapter (Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis). Accessed 2026-10-29.
  16. Christine Hayes. Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145), Lecture 11: On the Steps of Moab: Deuteronomy. Open Yale Courses, Yale University, transcript, chapters 1 to 4 and the discussion of the Shema. Accessed 2026-11-06.