With Enoch, AI touches religion

There has been a modern development in an ancient story.

For decades after the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by Bedouin shepherds in 1946, they were treated like religious dynamite. A small group of scholars maintained tight control of the ancient texts, even as territorial control of the area where they were discovered shifted from Jordan to Israel.

The scrolls, painstakingly reassembled from thousands of fragments, come from the period leading up to the formation of both early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. They include all but one of the books from the Hebrew Bible as well as religious literature of that time that was known to early Christians. Small wonder that there was anxiety in a lot of religious circles over how the material would be presented.

After a campaign led by the American scholar Robert Eisenman, the Israeli government finally agreed in the 1990s to make the scrolls more accessible. Since then there has been no end to the arguments over the scrolls and their meaning.

One of the most fundamental arguments has to do with exactly when these manuscripts were written. Researchers have based their previous estimates on radiocarbon dating and their knowledge of ancient handwriting. Recently, they brought a very novel, or maybe we should say ancient, application of artificial intelligence into play. They called it Enoch.

The Book of Enoch, which was among the Dead Sea Scrolls, was not included in the Hebrew Bible or most versions of the New Testament, although it is part of the Ethiopian Bible. With its visions of fallen angels and final judgment, it seems to have an enduring fascination. The podcaster Joe Rogan has recently discussed it on his show with a theologian.

The AI version of Enoch was fed scans of ancient manuscripts that had been dated with Carbon-14 to teach it how to date the handwriting, then fed scans of scrolls that hadn’t been carbon-dated. According to this new analysis, the scrolls were as much as a century older than previously thought. According to Enoch, a segment of the Book of Daniel and a copy of Ecclesiastes were written within the lifetimes of the authors of those books.

When Enoch’s work makes it on the cable history shows, as it eventually will, its findings will probably be hyped as shocking. They’re actually just part of an ongoing scientific investigation, a small but significant advance in our understanding of an unfolding story.

And yet, this encounter between modern technology and ancient religion raises some troubling questions.

The experts believe Enoch’s estimates because while they are different from their own, they are not so different. In the long run, we’ll have to become more sensitive to the ways AI wins us over, or we will trust it more than we trust ourselves.

This year we asked Enoch to compare the writing on thousands of tiny fragments. A difficult task but a straightforward one. What questions might we put to later versions of Enoch? The responsible researchers who came up with Enoch wouldn’t dream of using AI to referee a religious schism or to develop personalized moral codes for paying customers. But as the Bible teaches, there are others who would. In the future, AI, religion and the profit motive could make a powerful combination.