John Strugnell

Radiocarbon Dating of Fourteen Dead Sea Scrolls

The name Dead Sea Scrolls refers to some 1200 manuscripts found in caves in the hills on the western shore of the Dead Sea during the last 45 years. They range in size from small fragments to complete books from the holy scriptures (the Old Testament). The manuscripts also include uncanonized sectarian books, letters and commercial documents, written on papyrus and parchment. In only a few cases, direct information on the date of writing was found in the scrolls. In all other cases, the dating is based on indirect archaeological and paleographical evidence. To check this evidence, radiocarbon ages of 14 selected scrolls were determined using accelerator mass spectrometry. The calibrated radiocarbon ages agree well, except in one case, with the paleographic estimates or the specific dates noted on the scrolls.

The effects of possible contamination on the radiocarbon dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls I : Castor oil

Some fragments of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts were contaminated with castor oil in the late 1950s. We have conducted experiments in order to establish if the AAA pretreatment cleaning procedures conducted on Dead Sea Scroll manuscript samples in the last two dating series (Bonani et al. 1992; Jull et al. 1995) were effective in removing oil contamination. Our experiments show that not all oil contamination can be expected to have been removed by the acid-alkaline-acid (AAA) pretreatment, and that the radiocarbon ages previously reported therefore cannot be guaranteed to be correct. Any samples contaminated with castor oil were most likely reported with ages that are too young by an unknown amount.

Reply to Israel Carmi (2002): “Are the 14C Dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls Affected by Castor Oil Contamination?”

Carmi (2002) is a response to our study published in Radiocarbon 43(1) by Rasmussen et al. (2001). We noted widespread possible exposure to castor oil of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) in the Rockefeller Museum in the 1950s and reported experiments showing that the AAA pretreatment used in the first 2 series of radiocarbon datings of the DSS (Bonani et al. [1992] and Jull et al. [1995]), “cannot be guaranteed to have removed all of the modern carbon in any samples if they had been contaminated with castor oil and hence could have produced some 14C dates that were younger than the texts’ true ages.” Carmi, a coauthor of the Bonani et al. (1992) study, criticizes our analysis on 4 grounds:

The Epistles of Heraclitus and the Jewish Pseudepigrapha: A Warning

The more complete of modern lists of ancient Jewish Pseudepigrapha include the 4th and 7th Epistles of Heraclitus. The suggestion that these are of Jewish origin goes back to Jacob Bernays; it met with little favour among classical philologians, who preferred to see in these letters typically Cynic or Stoic documents, but historians of the pseudepigraphical literature of early Judaism, though they sometimes take note of this rival explanation, continue to list these works in their uncanonical canon.