A 1,000-year-old seed grows in Israel

Camels laden with spices, gold and precious stones accompanied the Queen of Sheba on her biblical journey to Jerusalem in the 10th century B.C. A thousand years later, Flavius Josephus, the Jewish Roman historian, wrote that the haul had included the balm of Gilead, a fragrant, highly prized resin also known as Judean balsam, which served as the basis for perfumes, incense and medicinal remedies.

The balsam was said to have been harvested from a plant cultivated in oases around the Dead Sea basin; the plant vanished from the region by the ninth century A.D., setting off a long-standing debate about its scientific identity. "In ancient accounts, descriptions vary," said Sarah Sallon, director of natural medicine research at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. "Before the Common Era, the plant is said to be the size of a tree. But in the first century, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder described it as a shrub that resembled a grapevine."

In 2010, Sallon obtained a mysterious seed from the archaeological archives of Hebrew University, hoping that it could germinate. The seed had been discovered in a cave during a 1980s excavation at Wadi el-Makkuk, a winter water channel in the northern Judean desert, and was languishing in storage. After determining that the seed was still viable, Sallon's research team planted, sprouted and carefully tended it. When the husk was carbon-dated to between A.D. 993 and A.D. 1202, a thought occurred to Sallon. "I wondered if what germinated could be the source of the balm of Gilead," she said. On the hunch that it was, she named the specimen Sheba.

Since then, the 1,000-year-old seedling has grown into a sturdy 12-foot-tall tree with no modern counterpart. Sheba's painstaking revival -- kept secret from the public for 14 years -- is detailed in a study that was published in September in the journal Communications Biology. "Why the time lag between the seed's germination and the publication of the research?" Sallon said. "The reason is I wanted to make sure that Sheba wasn't the Judean balsam, which is something that I would only definitively know by smell."

As it turned out, Sheba not only lacks a distinctive scent but is more likely to be the wellspring of a different balm mentioned in scripture.

First Dates

Sheba is the latest in a series of horticultural resurrections by Sallon, a British-born gastroenterological pediatrician who relocated to Israel in 1983. In 1995, she set up the center to study natural therapies, from Tibetan and Chinese medicine to medicinal plants indigenous to the Middle East. Her research, which uses the Hebrew Bible and other holy books from antiquity loosely as botanical reference guides, tests local species for their remedial properties and for potential use as alternative food crops. "We also work to conserve these plants and through the germination of ancient seeds, try to reintroduce ones that have become locally extinct in Israel," she said.

In 2005, Sallon was handed six date seeds that had been unearthed in the 1960s during an excavation in the ruins of Masada, the desert fortress by the Dead Sea where, according to Flavius Josephus, 967 Jewish men, women and children chose to take their own lives in a desperate last stand to avoid capture and enslavement by Roman legions in A.D. 73.

Around that time, Pliny the Elder recorded vast date palm forests between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea and praised the fruit for its "extremely sweet sort of wine-flavor, like that of honey." In other historical texts, Judean dates were cited as both a laxative and a cure for infections before dying out around the 15th century. The Medjool and Deglet Nour dates currently grown in Israel are Iraqi and Moroccan strains imported in the early part of the last century.

To coax her date seeds out of dormancy, Sallon enlisted Elaine Solowey, a desert plant expert at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, based at Ketura, a kibbutz in the southern Negev region. Using a process that she would later repeat with Sheba, Solowey soaked the seeds in warm water to soften their coats before treating them in a hormone-rich acid that encourages germination and rooting, and a fertilizer made of seaweed and other nutrients. She then planted three of the seeds in quarantined pots of sterile soil. Two others were sent to the University of Zurich for carbon dating, which showed that they were from the first century. When the seeds were later genetically sequenced, their DNA did not match up with the date palms of today.

Five weeks after Solowey had planted the three 2,000-year-old seeds, the earth cracked in one of the pots and a tiny shoot emerged. Sallon named it Methuselah, after the longest-lived person (969 years old) listed in the Bible. Louise Colville, a biologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, said the dry conditions in the Southern Levant -- an area encompassing modern-day Israel, Palestine and Jordan -- had probably been a major factor contributing to the longevity of the seeds.

The Methuselah seed turned out to be a male and today has reached a height of 11 feet. In the spring of 2020, Solowey gathered pollen from the tree and brushed it onto the flowers of a female date palm she called Hannah, which had incubated for more than 2,000 years in a burial cave near Jericho, now in the West Bank. "I wanted Methuselah to be the father," Sallon said. Four summers ago, she and Solowey dined on the first of Hannah's fruits, which are 30% larger than those of contemporary dates.

The Rise of Sheba

Sheba's shoot rose out of the soil as a leafless, woody stalk. "It was wearing a little hat that I think was an operculum," Solowey said, referring to the cap-like coverings that some flowers and fruits shed at maturity. "When the hat came off, it was a short woody stalk with a slot on top. I used to call it the Tinkertoy tree."

Eventually, Sheba grew pale, papery bark and yielded resin. Still, none of the experts that Sallon consulted recognized the fledgling plant until she shared a sample of a leaf with Andrea Weeks, a botanist at George Mason University. Weeks placed Sheba within the genus Commiphora, a diverse group of flowering plants in the frankincense and myrrh family, Burseraceae. The genus includes 200 or so species of trees and shrubs found mostly in Africa, Madagascar and the Arabian Peninsula.

To Colville, the most surprising aspect of the study is that with just a single seed, the authors had just a single shot at a favorable outcome. "Not only is it incredibly lucky that this one seed survived for a thousand or so years," she said, "but that the authors managed to successfully germinate the seed and grow the resulting tree to maturity is amazing."

As Sheba aged, the researchers carried out extensive genetic and chemical analyses to test for aromatic compounds typical of other Commiphora species. "None were detected," Sallon said. The leaves did contain pentacyclic triterpenes, a compound medically associated with anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and antiviral properties, and high levels of squalene, a natural substance known for its antioxidant and skin-healing benefits.

Those findings led Sallon to propose that Sheba might be the source of tsori, a substance referred to in Genesis, Jeremiah and Ezekiel as a resin associated with healing and embalming and as an antidote to poisons but not described as fragrant. "If Sheba is not the Judean balsam, it's a close cousin of it, and one of the nonaromatic Commiphora that is a treasure chest of medicinal compounds," Sallon said.

One of Sallon's most intriguing hypotheses is that Sheba was used as rootstock onto which the balm of Gilead was grafted. She maintains that grafting, in which two or more plants are joined together so they grow as one, could account for the disparity in descriptions of the balsam in scripture, from a tree the size of a pomegranate in the fourth century B.C. to a vine covering the hillside by the first century A.D.

Grafting, Sallon said, causes what is known as rootstock-induced dwarfism. "In other words, things get smaller when grafted. This would have been handy for the Judean farmers, as it is a lot easier to prune something small than to have to climb up with ladders."

If Sheba was a native tree -- the biblical tsori -- then its rootstock would have been well acclimatized to the salty conditions around the Dead Sea, perhaps much more than the fragrant Commiphora "imported" from the land of Sheba and used as the scion. So joined, Sallon said, they could have formed the agricultural high tech of ancient Judea.