BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Cryptic Qumran Code Broken?

Possible breakthrough in reading mystery scroll script

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written in a wide range of languages and scripts, including two scripts written in code, commonly known as Cryptic A and B. Both scripts used signs and symbols that were not part of any known writing system, but rather were crafted to make certain texts more difficult to read. The first of these enigmatic scripts, Cryptic A, was broken in 1955. Now, according to an article published in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries. Cryptic B may have been cracked as well.

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Unlocking a Qumran Mystery

While Cryptic A was solved more than 70 years ago, the key to deciphering Cryptic B has remained elusive, as only two manuscripts and a few fragments written in the script are known. This lack of clear examples has made the script nearly impossible to crack. However, scholar Emmanuel Oliveiro of the University of Groningen thinks he has made a breakthrough. Given the similarities between some of the signs of Cryptic A and B, Oliveiro began with the assumption that the two scripts were related to each other. Oliveiro reasoned that, as with Cryptic A, Cryptic B might represent a form of monographic substitutional encryption for Hebrew or Aramaic.

Such encryption is achieved by substituting each letter in a script with a different sign (for example, replacing each letter of the English alphabet with a particular emoji). Although this type of encryption is simple to implement, it is computationally infeasible to break without the key. A monographic substitution of the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, for example, would result in over a sextillion possible combinations (that is a one with 21 zeros after it!). However, things are less daunting than those numbers suggest, as Cryptic B—like Cryptic A—contains several signs that are remarkably similar to letters from known scripts, just with slight variations. So perhaps, Oliveiro reasoned, maybe this encryption was not so cryptic after all. But what Oliveiro still needed was a hint, and that hint was the word “Israel.”

While reviewing one of the cryptic manuscripts, Oliveiro noticed something: a five-letter word written with five distinct signs. He then turned to the Hebrew Bible and Dead Sea Scroll texts to identify the most common Hebrew and Aramaic terms that would fit such a pattern. That word was “Israel.” Taking that into account, Oliveiro returned to the word in the manuscript and was startled by how obvious it now seemed. The first letter of the word was clearly a yod (the first letter of Yisrael) with an additional stroke. The second letter was then a Paleo-Hebrew he, which is used in Cryptic A as a shin (the second letter of Yisrael), and so on. Suddenly, Oliveiro had a firm idea for the values of five signs, and from there, nearly all of the other letters quickly fell into place, although the values of a few signs are still open to question.

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So, what sort of mysteries did the enigmatic Cryptic B reveal? Not much, unfortunately. Given the fragmentary nature of the available cryptic manuscripts, only a few dozen words, most of which are partial or incomplete, could be translated. Among the extant texts, however, are words such as “grave,” Judah, Elohim, and “wicked.” Taking the words in context, Oliveiro suggests the Cryptic B manuscripts were likely similar to other prophetic judgments and eschatological promises found elsewhere in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. This was also the case with Cryptic A, leaving the reason why such texts were preserved in a secret script still an open question. Perhaps, as Oliveiro suggested to Haaretz, this was done “not to achieve encryption in the modern sense but rather to convey a prestige to a text. If you could read it, you had access to these manuscripts and were probably of a certain class or ranking within this pious community.”

Beyond the rationale for the encryption, another question is whether Oliveiro’s research is truly a breakthrough. “This decipherment of the Cryptic B script strikes me as plausible, but not entirely certain,” Christopher Rollston, an expert on Northwest Semitic languages at George Washington University, told Bible History Daily. “Because of the extreme dearth of well-preserved manuscripts written in Cryptic B, testing and proving Oliveiro’s decipherment on additional manuscripts, with the intent of being able to duplicate the results, is practically impossible. All of this suggests that more work needs to be done before one can declare with certainty the decipherment of Qumran Cryptic B.”

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Related reading in Bible History Daily

Qumran’s True Purpose Discovered?

What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls?

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library

How the Dead Sea Scrolls Were Found

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Christianity: Part One

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Christianity: Part Two