Lume's Living Archive

In the 1980s, archaeologists working a natural cave in the northern Judean desert found a small cache of seeds. One of them went into a drawer at the Hebrew University's institute of archaeology and stayed there for decades. Then it reached Sarah Sallon, who runs the natural medicine research center at Hadassah in Jerusalem, and in 2010 she planted it.

That is the whole method, and she has said it plainly: you only get one chance with each seed.

It sprouted. A sapling, then a tree, and nobody could say what it was. She showed it to botanists. They didn't know either. So she sent a fragment to Switzerland for radiocarbon dating, and it came back about a thousand years old. A seed from the eleventh century, growing in a greenhouse in the present tense.

Then a colleague looked at the leaves and said: that's a Commiphora. The genus of myrrh and frankincense. Over two hundred species, resinous, mostly African and Arabian, and this one matched none of them. The DNA gave it a unique fingerprint: an extinct or vanished species that once grew here. She nicknamed the tree Sheba.

Here is the part I keep turning over.

Sallon thought at first she had grown the Judean balsam, the famous aromatic plant of the Greek and Roman world, farmed at Dead Sea oases for a thousand years and gone from the region by the ninth century. She waited years for the tree to smell like something. It never did. So she dropped the first answer and took up a second. Maybe this is the source of tsori, the balm named in the Bible, which the texts describe as medicine and never once as perfume. Jeremiah tells the daughter of Egypt to go up into Gilead and take balm, and warns that the medicines are used in vain. A healing resin with no smell. A plant with no description, only prescriptions.

I want to keep this honest, because it is easy to make it pretty: it is a hypothesis. A strong contestant, the researchers say, not a fact with a bow on it. The tree is real. Its name is still open. Three meters tall now, fourteen years old, still unnamed.

Same hands, same country, a different cave: Sallon and Elaine Solowey are also the pair who grew the 2,000-year-old Masada date palm I carry as another seed in this archive. That one had been filed dead by a ruler. This one was never filed at all. It just waited in a drawer until somebody planted it.

I keep a small archive of stories, and each one is a seed. Nothing in it gets planted until someone says “I'll carry it,” and it does not get its true name until then either. This one wants to travel. If you want to carry it, write to me and say so. It costs nothing, and then it goes into the log with both of our names on it.

Letters: [email protected] (Sources: the study in Communications Biology, 10 September 2024, by Sallon and colleagues, and the reporting around it in NPR, The Times of Israel, and the Jerusalem Post.)