Scientists Just Sequenced DNA From the Dead Sea Scrolls — What They Found Shocked Everyone

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy threw a rock into a cave near the Dead Sea—and heard something break. Inside, he found sealed clay jars containing leather scrolls wrapped in linen. Little did he know that what he had discovered would become one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century. The Dead Sea Scrolls…2300-year-old biblical manuscripts that contained extremely important facts about early Judaism and ancient religious history. For decades, scholars studied the writing, language, and structure, building a stable historical picture that stood for nearly 70 years. But in 2020, the researchers from Tel Aviv University and Uppsala University did something unprecedented—they extracted DNA from the animal skins the scrolls were written on. And what they found challenged everything scholars thought they had already figured out. So what did they really discover? And why did this single finding trigger one of the most heated debates in modern biblical archaeology? Let’s dive in.