Lumps of charcoal in a box.

That’s what Pnina Shor, the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority, received from Emanuel Tov, an expert on the Dead Sea scrolls at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

According to the New York Times, what Dr. Shor did next led to an incredible discovery.

“I said, ‘There is nothing we can do because our system isn’t geared toward these chunks,’ ” she said. But because she was submitting other objects for a high-resolution scan, she put one of the lumps in with other items.

Dr. Shor had the lump scanned by a commercially available, X-ray based, micro-computed tomography machine, of the kind used for fine-resolution scanning of biological tissues….”

Read the full story at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrolls-bible.html?emc=eta1&_r=0  to learn how CBCT technology (similarly used in the dental industry) combined with developments by computer scientists at the University of Kentucky identified the scroll’s content – a fragment identical to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible which, “at nearly 2,000 years old, is the earliest instance of the text.”

Might the text in the scroll found at the En-Gedi excavation site in Israel be considered a Dead Sea scroll?

Dr. Tov told the New York Times that “scholars might come to consider the En-Gedi manuscript as a Dead Sea scroll, especially if the early date indicated by paleography is confirmed.”

 Read the full story at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrolls-bible.html?emc=eta1&_r=0