Science Gives New Life to Part of Dead Sea Scrolls : Scripture: A JPL scientist uses digital imaging to get a better look at previously indecipherable passages in the ancient texts.

The dark writing blended illegibly into the small, blackened piece of parchment from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the timeworn texts that are giving scholars new insight into religion in the era when Christianity and Judaism were born.

But techniques of space-age science revealed a phrase in the ancient Aramaic language: “He wrote the words of Noah.”

That discovery of the ark builder’s name was a victory for Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicist Gregory Bearman.

His science-meets-religion success in deciphering the message on that tiny scroll fragment two years ago led him to Jerusalem last summer to the Shrine of the Book, where he used the same scientific techniques to examine the rest of the same badly damaged text, which retells stories from the biblical book of Genesis.

While he conducted the digital imaging that revealed previously indecipherable words, scholars of the scrolls were literally looking over his shoulder, changing their transcriptions where earlier guesses had been wrong, and filling in gaps that were previously unknown.

The scrolls--written between 250 B.C. and A.D. 68 and discovered in caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956--contain the religious writings of the so-called Qumran community, a small Jewish sect that was at odds with the Jewish authorities of the time in Jerusalem. They contain the oldest versions of biblical texts yet discovered.

The contents of many scrolls have been published, giving scholars much to consider and debate. But because the scrolls date back 20 centuries and more, all that remains of many of them are thousands of tiny scraps, some containing scattered letters and words that are difficult to read because the parchment is now as dark as the ink.

Enter Bearman and his imaging spectrometer, with its unique ability to “tune in” to the original writing.

“I’m one of the people at JPL showing how technology developed for NASA programs can be applied to commercial use,” Bearman said. “This technology also has applications in agriculture and biomedical research.”

Many scrolls have become darkened with age and the black ink has faded into the dark brown paper, said Eugene Ulrich, chief editor of the biblical scrolls. Scholars have been helped in the past by infrared photographs, which show the carbon-based ink as dark, while blanching out the background.

But Bearman’s instruments have the potential to see what the eye cannot. “Everybody saw major advances in their work as a result of this new technology,” Ulrich said.

Bearman’s technique uses an imaging spectrometer to pick up the different wavelengths of light reflected from different substances. An electronic, tunable filter attached to the instrument allows quick switching from one wavelength to another, and their minute differences in light are registered by a computer, creating electronic images that can be manipulated to heighten contrast between the original ink line and the material around it.

His equipment allows him to “tune” the image, creating differences between colors that look virtually identical to the eye.

“With this equipment we could pick out one blue-green jellybean among a million blue jellybeans spread out on the floor,” Bearman said.

Ulrich availed himself of Bearman’s technology last summer in Jerusalem to confirm his thesis that a scroll fragment of the Qumran sect’s Book of Joshua was located in Chapter 4 and not in Chapter 8, as it is in the currently accepted version of the Bible.

Whether the imaging instruments, which are still being refined by Bearman, will be widely available to biblical scholars depends largely on whether their institutions can afford the price: $65,000 to $75,000.

Nevertheless, Bearman said the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center on the campus of the School of Theology at Claremont is seeking to raise funds for their own imaging center.

Bearman’s wife, Sheila Spiro, is the executive director of the Center.