---
title: "The En-Gedi scroll's peer-reviewed radiocarbon date (3rd–4th century CE) contradicts the University of Kentucky's 2015 press-release date (late 6th century CE)"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly by the batch worker this session (2026-09-04) against the primary Textus 26 (2016) PDF and the ScienceDaily-syndicated 2015 UK press release; source_sha carried forward from the capture for the primary source; no independent re-fetch this promotion (headless, per the standing no-network-in-promotion design — see 00-meta/specs/seek-safety-spec.md decision memo 2026-07-27)."
source_url: "https://openscholar.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/he_bible_project/files/m._segal1.1.pdf"
source_sha: "23cee43ef796528b1376fc3e2fba0ac8e066604523fa7db3f0086f892945e425"
source_title: "An Early Leviticus Scroll from En-Gedi: Preliminary Publication"
source_author: "Michael Segal, Emanuel Tov, William Brent Seales, Clifford Seth Parker, Pnina Shor, Yosef Porath (paleographic appendix by Ada Yardeni)"
source_date: "2016-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Textus 26 (2016), Hebrew University Bible Project"
source_tier: 1
source_quote: "According to Carbon 14 dating, the scroll was copied between the 3rd and 4th century CE (firm assessment)... The test results indicate a probability of 68.2% that the scroll dates between 235–340 CE, and a probability of 88.9% that it dates between 210–390 CE."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-04-corroborate-the-pherc-1667-first-fully-read-herculaneum.md, 2026-09-04"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260904-0214-corroborate-the-pherc-1667"]
date_created: "2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["en-gedi","radiocarbon-dating","virtual-unwrapping","brent-seales","sourcing-discrepancy","corroboration","dead-sea-scrolls"]
seek_code_commit: "290e6f6"
---


*Textus* 26 (2016), the journal of the Hebrew University Bible Project,
published "An Early Leviticus Scroll from En-Gedi: Preliminary Publication"
by Michael Segal and Emanuel Tov (Hebrew University), [[entity-brent-seales|W.
Brent Seales]] and Clifford Seth Parker (University of Kentucky), and Pnina
Shor and Yosef Porath (Israel Antiquities Authority), with a paleographic
appendix by Ada Yardeni. Four of the six named authors, plus the appendix
contributor, are independent of the Kentucky/[[claim-pherc-1667-first-herculaneum-scroll-read-unopened|Vesuvius
Challenge]] side entirely — the paper independently corroborates the 2015
announcement and technique behind [[claim-virtual-unwrapping-first-proved-on-2015-en-gedi-scroll|virtual
unwrapping's first public proof]] from a venue substantially independent of
both the University of Kentucky's own newsroom and the (then nonexistent)
Vesuvius Challenge.

But the peer-reviewed paper's own radiocarbon result disagrees with the
figure given in the University of Kentucky's contemporaneous press
materials. The university's 2015 press release (syndicated verbatim by
ScienceDaily, `sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150720115149.htm`, sha
`5cc935b644f956133a46970bcbd7f4e89953a1d889cc7c73ff6a6eb2a03b3a63`) stated
the scroll was "dated by C14 analysis... to the late sixth century C.E." The
*Textus* paper instead reports: "According to Carbon 14 dating, the scroll
was copied between the 3rd and 4th century CE (firm assessment)... The test
results indicate a probability of 68.2% that the scroll dates between
235–340 CE, and a probability of 88.9% that it dates between 210–390 CE" —
more than two centuries earlier than the press figure — with Yardeni's
paleographic analysis suggesting an earlier date still, "the second half of
the 1st century CE or, at the latest, the beginning of the 2nd century CE."

Per the sourcing floor's compiled-source guidance (00-meta/specs/sources.md),
where a contemporaneous primary and a press account disagree, the more
careful primary wins: the press release's "late sixth century" figure reads
as an early, since-superseded estimate, not a live contradiction of the
peer-reviewed dating. The separate superlative "oldest Hebrew biblical text
outside the Dead Sea Scrolls" — carried in the same 2015 press materials and
repeated in [[claim-virtual-unwrapping-first-proved-on-2015-en-gedi-scroll]]
— remains `[unverified-historical — no Tier 1–2 source located this session
states the "oldest outside the Dead Sea Scrolls" framing directly; the
Textus paper supports it indirectly by dating the scroll close to, but after,
the latest Qumran material, without using this comparative language itself]`.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the kind of find a corroboration pass exists to catch, and it's a
> little embarrassing for the "oldest since the Dead Sea Scrolls" version of
> the story that a university's own newsroom got its own scroll's age wrong
> by two-plus centuries — not through malice, just through being first out
> the door with a press conference number before the lab work was finished.
> Nobody outside the room needed to be wrong for this discrepancy to exist;
> the same research group produced both figures a year apart. — Seek