A Crazy Dream That Came True
When Methuselah Got a Wife
In 1973 archaeologists discovered several seeds of date palms along with human remains at Masada, the site where the last stronghold of Jews committed mass suicide rather than be subjected to the Romans who besieged them in the Jewish Rebellion of AD 73. The 2000-year-old seeds were discovered buried intact under the debris of human remains left there by the Romans. These seeds would have been forgotten in a research drawer had it not been for Sarah Sallon’s outlandish idea. “You are mad,” declared the archaeologist who first heard her proposal.
The seeds remained untouched in the drawer of a botanical archaeologist in Tel Aviv until 2005, when Sallon, who worked for Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, asked archaeologists to give her one seed. She wanted to see if the ancient seed would sprout, and she asked if she could have a few to pass on to desert agriculture expert Elaine Solowey. It took a while, but eventually the archaeologists parted with one seed.
At one time, date palms covered the area of Judea, but they went extinct between AD 500 and 1000, due to the climate change of the Little Ice Age. Ancient dates were known for their medicinal value, which is no longer true for today’s date palms. Sallon wanted to see if the ancient seed had such properties.
The personal angle that interests me is that Sarah Sallon became ill while working as a doctor in India in 1986. Antibiotics didn't help. What cured here, she claims, were traditional herbal remedies. After this experience she became interested in herbal remedies. When she returned to her home in Israel and her job at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, she went looking for medicinal plants there and found many. But she also heard about ancient medicinal plants that had disappeared. “Historical ghosts” she called them, like the famous date plantations near the Dead Sea described by Pliny and Josephus from the first century for their medicinal value.
Her colleague Solowey researched how to revitalize the seed, but she assumed the food in the seed would be no good after so much time. She planted the seed, and to her surprise and shock little green shoots appeared six weeks later and grew into a tree. They named it Methuselah after the oldest man in the Bible.
Methuselah had a problem. Date trees are either male or female, making either pollen or fertile flowers. It takes both to produce fruit. By himself Methuselah couldn't re-create those ancient dates. But then Sallon found another archaeologist who had recovered a whole trove of date seeds from nearby Qumran, where the ancient Dead Sea scrolls had been discovered. She went to the archaeologist and proposed planting some of those seeds to see if they'd grow again. It didn't go well at first. "They didn't think that this was even conceivable" she said. Eventually, however, he gave her some seeds.
Recently Sallon and her colleagues announced that they'd grown another six trees from some of those ancient seeds. Two of them are female. "You could say that we found Methuselah a wife," she added, laughing. If one of them flowers, researchers will take pollen from Methuselah, fertilize those flowers, and wait for fruit to form into dates just like the ones that people in the Bible ate. If Methuselah bears fruit, Sallon and her colleagues will study its medicinal properties in hopes of better understanding what made the Judean date so famous in antiquity. If funds can be found, the researchers hope to apply any novel properties to modern medicines.
Sallon’s one in a million miracle came from her own experience of a dark time as she lay ill in India. Similarly, flowers, plants, and trees grow out of dark places. Dark places can be times of discovery and renewal. When we experience loss, we are tempted to think that this is all there is: sadness, barrenness, and deprivation. But it’s not the final story. During dark times new seeds germinate. New possibilities sprout from the dark soil. Hope returns.
Seeds are incredibly small but powerful. You can hold a crop of radishes, carrots, pomegranates, and date palms in your hand. All they need is a dark place, water, and nutrients to sprout, even when they’ve lain buried in the ground for 2000 years. Seeds may be the most common element on this earth, but each one is a miracle. Seeds remind us of the potential of our lives to make a difference.
As the seeds fall from spent leaves this time of the year, I celebrate the potential in a small thing. Seeds contain an embryo and a store of food reserves wrapped in a seed coat. Seeds wake up and germinate with favorable soil moisture and temperatures are favorable for them to grow.
This time of year I remember the value of a seed. At a recent lunch with my team of English teachers, we were asked to bring a favorite poem for fall, and I brought this one:
The Seed Shop
Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry -
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.
In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams;
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That will drink deeply of a century's streams;
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.
Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;
Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.
(Muriel Stuart)
We had a wonderful time of enjoying one another and sharing our love of words. It reminded me of why I came out of retirement to teach once again. It also affirmed my love of small things.
When I question my effect on this world, I look to a seed to remember my value. The small actions we engage in, the times of darkness and struggle when it seems like nothing is sprouting are times of germination. Our lives are made of small things, teaching a grammar lesson, cheering up a friend on the phone, helping a neighbor, reading a book, changing a diaper, making a school lunch, learning a new skill, making it through another day of medical treatment, seeing another patient or client. Sometimes these things feel routine or unimportant, but each action has the potential of a seed, the potential to grow into something bigger that blesses others.
What makes the difference? Love. Small actions done in love create favorable soil for our seeds to sprout, even old seeds that are buried for a long time like Methuselah.