A language scholar has solved one of the longstanding riddles involving the enigmatic Dead Sea Scrolls, after finally deciphering a hidden script within the texts that has long perplexed researchers.
Previously considered indecipherable, Emmanuel Oliveiro, with the University of Groningen, now reports that he has deciphered what scholars call “Cryptic B,” one of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ most enigmatic writing systems.
The achievement marks a new milestone, given the poor state of the surviving fragments of the ancient texts. Oliveiro’s findings, recently published in Dead Sea Discoveries in December, bear new promise for scholars, in that they could fundamentally reshape the way researchers study encoded texts dating back millennia.
An Unbreakable Ancient Code Yields Its Secrets
Cryptic B is known to modern scholars only through its survival in a precious handful of scattered fragments, all of which are remnants of two scrolls—4Q362 and 4Q363—along with a scattering of appearances in Hebrew manuscripts.
The material was limited enough to intrigue—and frustrate—ancient language scholars, who for decades recognized this paucity of material as being insufficient for allowing the mysterious text to be decoded.
Taking a cue from work more than half a century ago by Józef Milik, who decoded a similar system known as Cryptic A in 1955, Oliveiro began with the premise that he was dealing with a monoalphabetic substitution cipher and began studying the patterns to an almost obsessive degree.
With time, careful analysis, and a healthy amount of intuition, Oliveiro’s approach eventually bore fruit.
A Sequence Emerges
The breakthrough, Oliveiro says, came once he noticed a particular sequence of five cryptic signs, which he guessed might correspond to a single Hebrew word: Yisrael (ישראל). While part of the sequence he had been viewing was badly damaged, technology offered a solution: specifically, high-resolution infrared imagery, which revealed an unmistakable pattern.
From here, the code’s logic began to unfurl. Five signs aligned statistically with one of the most common five-letter, all-unique-consonant words in biblical Hebrew, a discovery that Oliveiro says opened the door toward unlocking much of the remaining secrets held within the ancient script.
The Revelations of “Cryptic B”
Rather than being exact copies of known biblical passages, what the uncoded texts revealed were familiar idioms, concepts, and themes that are already known to scholars from other Qumran writings associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. These included references to Judah, as well as traditional motifs like the tents of Jacob, among others.
Oliveiro also identified a recurring numerical structure that bore similarity to dating formulas from the biblical period, like those known from the book of Ezra, all of which suggested the manuscripts once conveyed chronological or ritual material.
This was significant, as it seemed to run contrary to past speculations that the cryptic scripts potentially concealed supernatural information. Instead, Oliveiro contends, the full ancient manuscripts may have represented a form of ancient prestige scripts that marked status within the Qumran community at the time.
The Challenge of Interpretation
Decoding Cryptic B represents a remarkable achievement, although scholars still advise caution over the fragmentary nature of the manuscripts, since in their fragmentary state, several questions will inevitably remain.
Still, Oliveiro’s work has been viewed favorably by other language scholars, having drawn comparisons with similar approaches in the past that have led to the successful decoding of ancient scripts once deemed “impossible” to decipher.
Presently, the few existing examples of Cryptic B offer no evidence of novice scribes at work, and while the handwriting used by their ancient authors displays certain irregularities, they are also marked by sophistication, showing signs of precision that seem to reveal the work of scribes who wrote quickly, and even informally—all of which are hallmarks of authors who would have possessed a mastery of their craft, rather than novices learning a unique script.
A Breakthrough Two Millennia in the Making
Despite the lingering uncertainties, which, in the absence of other surviving samples of Cryptic B, are unlikely to ever be fully resolved, the decipherment marks a major leap.
While there are still five letters of the total 22-character alphabet that remain difficult to identify, most of the system is now intelligible, and Oliveiro’s success is notable, especially after decades of research by scholars and even modern machine-learning technologies that remained unable to decipher Cryptic B.
For Oliveiro, once the pattern became evident, deciphering the rest of the script came surprisingly quickly.
Despite the uncertainties, the decipherment marks a significant leap. Five letters of the 22-character alphabet remain difficult to identify, but most of the system now appears intelligible. After decades during which the script confounded scholars—and even resisted modern machine-learning attempts—Oliveiro says the solution came surprisingly quickly once he recognized the pattern.
“After spotting Yisrael, everything changed,” Oliveiro recently told Haaretz.
Roughly two months later, as opposed to the many decades some of his colleagues suspected such an achievement might take, an ancient script once thought unreadable had finally revealed its long-kept secrets.
The study, “Cracking Another Code of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Deciphering Cryptic B (4Q362 and 4Q363) through Analysis and Intuition,” was published in the December edition of Dead Sea Discoveries.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.