A 1,000-Year-Old Seed Grows in Israel

For 14 years, scientists have been growing a tree akin to the Judean balsam -- the source of the balm of Gilead -- but with no modern counterpart.

In 2010, Dr. 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, Dr. 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 Dr. 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.

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

The original Sheba seed before planting.Credit...Guy Eisner

Sheba is the latest in a series of horticultural resurrections by Dr. 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 the 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," Dr. Sallon said.

In 2005, she 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, Dr. Sallon enlisted Elaine Solowey, a desert plant expert at the Areva Institute for Environmental Studies, based at Ketura, a kibbutz in the southern Negev. Using a process that she would later repeat with Sheba, Dr. 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 A.D. When the seeds were later genetically sequenced, their DNA did not match up with the date palms of today.

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