Cracking the Qumran Cryptic B script?

DECIPHERMENT? Unknown Alphabet in Dead Sea Scrolls Has Been Cracked, Scholar Says. Cryptic B was considered impenetrable because there's so little material. Then, Emmanuel Oliveiro, a scholar in the Netherlands, noticed what looked like the word 'Yisrael' (Ruth Schuster, Haaretz).

The code had been considered to be impossible to decipher, mainly because of the sheer paucity of Cryptic B material. All we have are isolated fragments from two scrolls called 4Q362 and 4Q363, and a few spots in other scrolls where scribes briefly introduced Cryptic B in the middle of a Hebrew text, Oliveiro explains, in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries in December.

Oliveiro's process was based on analysis and intuition, similar to the methodology the scholar Józef Milik used when deciphering Cryptic A in 1955. Both began with assuming that they were dealing with a mono-alphabetic substitution system– where each of the 22 letters of Hebrew or Aramaic is consistently replaced with a specific cryptic sign (as in – say A is always be replaced by $).

A simple alphabetic substituion code is easy to decipher—if you have a reasonable-sized corpus. But the tiny size of the surviving corpus writtin in the Cryptic B script presented a huge challenge. Epigrapher Christopher Rollston says that the proposed decipherment is plausible, but hard to confirm, since the corpus is so small. That sound about right to me.

The abovementioned advance-published DSD article is open-access, so you can decide for yourself.

Cracking Another Code of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Deciphering Cryptic B (4Q362 and 4Q363) through Analysis and Intuition

In: Dead Sea Discoveries

Author: Emmanuel Oliveiro

Online Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025

Abstract

Among the Qumran manuscripts, several enigmatic scripts, including Cryptic A and Cryptic B, have been discovered. While Cryptic A was deciphered in 1955, Cryptic B has until now remained undeciphered. This study offers the first decipherment, transcription and translation of two Cryptic B manuscripts, 4Q362 and 4Q363. Their content appears to reflect familiar biblical idioms and eschatological themes, and the findings provide a foundation for future inquiry into the variation within Cryptic B letterforms, its relationship to Cryptic A, its role within Qumran scribal practices, and the development of cryptic scripts.

We can only hope for the discovery of more texts in Cryptic B, so that this decipherment can be tested.

That's a more realistic hope than you might think. Cryptic A was known only in some Qumran texts, and Milik had a go at deciphering it from them. But then in 2009 an inscribed stone cup was recovered by the Mount Zion excavation. The inscription was written in, among other things, the Cryptic A script. It's decipherment remains in progress, but our previous knowledge of Cryptic A seems to have helped.

Whether the cup's inscription will in turn help with understanding the Cryptic A scrolls remains to be seen.

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