After years of mystery, a scholar now claims to have made a breakthrough in understanding a long-unreadable script hidden in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Emmanuel Oliveiro, a researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, believes he has decoded a little-known writing system called “Cryptic B.” This rare script appears in only a few fragments of the ancient scrolls and had previously been dismissed by experts as impossible to understand. His findings were recently published in the Dead Sea Discoveries journal.
For decades, researchers could not make sense of these symbols. The script appeared in bits and pieces across heavily damaged scrolls, with no complete sentences or consistent lines to study. Without repeated symbols or longer passages, decoding the alphabet seemed out of reach.
Only fragments remain, making decoding difficult
The symbols of Cryptic B mostly appear in two badly damaged scrolls known as 4Q362 and 4Q363. In a few other cases, the unusual script was inserted briefly into regular Hebrew texts before scribes switched back to the standard language.
This scattered use made it difficult to find patterns. Unlike well-known languages, which can be studied through repeated words and long passages, Cryptic B offered very little to go on.
To tackle the challenge, Oliveiro used an approach first applied in the 1950s by Józef Milik, a scholar who cracked a different secret script found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, called Cryptic A. That method is based on the idea that each symbol in the secret script matches one letter in Hebrew or Aramaic, following a one-to-one pattern.
Haaretz (İsrail):
— Yabancı Basın (@yabancibasin) December 12, 2025
Ölü Deniz Parşömenleri’ndeki bilinmeyen alfabe çözüldü 📜
🔹 Hollanda’daki Groningen Üniversitesi’nden araştırmacı Emmanuel Oliveiro, Ölü Deniz Parşömenleri’nde yer alan ve “Gizemli B yazısı (Cryptic B)” olarak adlandırılan alfabeyi çözdüğünü açıkladı 🔍
🔹… pic.twitter.com/GWcE4iBlLO
Oliveiro also noticed that some of the Cryptic B symbols resembled known Hebrew letters, just slightly changed in appearance. He found several similarities to the earlier Cryptic A script, suggesting both systems were created with a similar logic.
One word opens the door
The turning point came when Oliveiro spotted a sequence of five symbols in a damaged scroll that seemed to spell “Yisrael,” the Hebrew word for Israel. The symbol patterns matched letter shapes found in other ancient scripts, including a modified yod, a known form of resh, and a symbol used for aleph in Cryptic A.
A comparison with the Hebrew Bible showed that “Yisrael” was one of the few five-letter words with no repeated letters—a key factor for this type of decoding. Once that word became clear, more symbols started to make sense, and Oliveiro began to map out much of the script.
The fragments written in Cryptic B do not appear to directly copy biblical texts. Instead, they use similar words and phrases, often linked to biblical themes such as Judah, abandonment, and symbolic references like the “tents of Jacob.” In some cases, the texts include numbers that may point to important events or dates, following the style often seen in ancient religious writings.
Experts remain cautious but interested
Some experts have welcomed the new research but remain cautious in their conclusions. Christopher Rollston, a professor of ancient languages at George Washington University, described Oliveiro’s work as reasonable but hard to confirm due to the lack of more scrolls containing the script.
At least five letters in the 22-letter system are still unclear because of damage and the rare use of those symbols.
Even so, Oliveiro argues that the script may not have been created for secrecy, as once believed. Instead, he suggests it was likely used to show learning or social rank—something only a few people in a community could read, marking them as educated or elite.
Though a full understanding of Cryptic B may remain out of reach, Oliveiro’s findings open a new path. What was once considered undecipherable now seems to follow rules and patterns. This progress offers a rare glimpse into how ancient writers used language to shape identity and status, not just to record history.