Israel Found The Last Seed of an Extinct Biblical Tree — What Followed Was Impossible

In 1986, archaeologists searching caves above Jericho for ancient artifacts found a tiny seed instead. It was nearly 2,000 years old. Everyone assumed it had been dead for a long time. The seed was placed in an archive and forgotten for 24 years. In 2010, botanist Elaine Soloway decided to take the risk and plant it. Within five weeks, a seedling appeared from the soil. It seemed humanity had just recovered the Judean balsam, the most valuable commodity of the ancient world. But the tree had none of the one thing that mattered most, fragrance. And that turned out to be only the first of many mysteries. In 1986, Professor Joseph Patrick was excavating caves in the lower section of Wadi el-Makouk, a seasonal water course in the Judean desert north of Jericho. The caves of this region had been used for millennia as storage, shelter, and burial sites. Their microclimate is unique. Stable temperature, low humidity, complete isolation from the outside environment. These conditions preserved organic materials, textiles, wood, and seeds in a state that no other natural setting can replicate. Among the finds was a seed, 2 centimeters long, less than half a gram. It entered the general collection and spent more than 20 years in the archive of the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology without a species name, without context, catalogued simply as unknown botanical material. There are thousands of such seeds in the world. Most will never be planted. Along with the abandoned gardens and the people who tended them, the plants that were used as medicine for centuries have also vanished. And we don't even know what we've lost. The anti-malarial compound artemisinin was discovered through a plant used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine. One of the most important anti-cancer drugs, Taxol, came from the bark of the Pacific Yew. If such discoveries were hiding in plants we already knew, what might plants that disappeared thousands of years ago have preserved? This was exactly the question that interested Sarah Salon, a pediatrician from Jerusalem. She decided to look for answers in what remained underground. In 2005, Salon persuaded colleagues to give her date palm seeds from storage at Bar Ilan University. They had been held there for over 40 years after excavations at the Fortress of Masada, where they were found in the 1960s. Botanical archaeologists told her, you're completely crazy. Nothing will come of it. Elaine Soloway, director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Keturah in southern Israel, soaked the seed in water with hormones and fertilizer. Planted it in a pot with sterile soil. After about six to eight weeks, a seedling appeared from the ground. They named the palm Methuselah, after the biblical figure said to have lived 969 years. At the time, it was the oldest seed in the world, ever successfully germinated. Salon recorded every step, soaking conditions, hormone concentrations, soil temperature. What she called the Soloway method became the protocol for subsequent attempts. We've already told the story of how Salon developed this method and what became of Methuselah in a separate video. You'll find it on our channel. A few years later, Salon was searching the Hebrew University's archives for new material. Among botanical finds from the Judean desert, she noticed the seed from Wadi el-Makuk, the very one Patrick had picked up in 1986. Most seeds in the collection were damaged. Insects, time, humidity. This one appeared intact. I spent hours going through seeds in the archive, choosing the best ones, Salon later said in an interview with The Guardian. She selected several specimens, one of them, a seed with no identification label, no species name, no context beyond the site where it was found. She sent to Elaine Soloway. In 2010, she did with Sheba's seed exactly what she had done with Methuselah's. Within five and a half weeks, a seedling appeared from the soil. Soloway wrote to Salon, I gave it antibiotics, fertilizer, and to my surprise, it became this funny little sprout with a little hat on it. Then came the first question in a long series of questions. What is this exactly? The seed had no identifying mark indicating its species. In the archive, it was recorded simply as unknown botanical material. Salon and Soloway didn't know what they had planted, and when the seedling had grown enough for the first leaves to appear, Salon photographed them and sent the images to botanists around the world. Some said olive, others, apricot. Both answers turned out to be wrong. Eventually, one botanist wrote back, this is Comiphora, a genus of the family Bursaraceae, the same family as frankincense and myrrh, about 200 known species, found predominantly in Africa, Madagascar, and the Arabian Peninsula. Every species in this genus either smells or produces a resin that smells. That is the entire basis of its commercial and ritual value across millennia. Salon made the logical next step. If it's Comiphora and found in the Judean desert, perhaps this is Judean balsam, the most valuable export product of ancient Judea. Exclusively local, cultivated in a handful of oases around the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley, described by Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Josephus. Extinct since the 9th century CE. If Sheba was Judean balsam, they were looking at a living tree long believed lost forever. Salon decided to wait, and here is why that decision carried weight. Judean balsam was not simply a plant. It was the most valuable agricultural commodity in the ancient world. Its resin sold by weight at twice the price of gold. It could be cultivated in only one place on Earth, in oases around the Dead Sea, at Jericho and Ein Gedi. Pliny the Elder wrote that it was a plant which nature has confined to the land of Judea alone. Josephus described how Mark Antony took the balsam gardens from King Herod and gave them to Cleopatra as the most precious gift the ancient world could offer. During the First Jewish War in 68 CE, the defenders of Ein Gedi tried to destroy the plantations so they wouldn't fall to the Romans, while the Romans fought to save the trees. The secret of production was passed only within local families. When the Muslim conquest reached the region in the 7th century, the knowledge disappeared along with the people who held it. Within two or three generations, no one knew what the tree looked like. This is why Salon waited. If Sheba turned out to be Judean balsam, the commercial and scientific significance of that discovery would have been unprecedented. But Judean balsam had one absolutely clear marker. It was fragrant. Powerfully so. Pliny described its aroma as surpassing all other scents. The very word balsam, bosom in ancient Hebrew, means to be fragrant. Fragrance was not a side effect of the plant. Fragrance was the reason for everything. For fourteen years, Sheba grew. It shed its leaves each winter, renewed itself each spring, and produced resin. No fragrance, even when the resin was burned. The hypothesis was closed. But a closed hypothesis is a narrowing of the field. If Sheba is not Judean balsam, it is something else. And to understand what, DNA was needed. When the leaves had matured enough for analysis, Salon cut a sample and sent it to Artia Weekes, associate professor in the Department of Biology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Weekes specializes precisely in Bursaraceae. For comparison, she used DNA sequences from 109 species of the genus Comiphora, the most comprehensive phylogenetic sample of the genus available at the time. One of the most complete such databases in the world. She performed the sequencing, compared the result against the database. Nothing matched. The three closest genetic relatives, Comiphora angolensis, Comiphora neglecta, and Comiphora tenuipedialata, are all from Southern Africa, not the Arabian Peninsula. Southern Africa. The tree in the pot at Kibbutz Keturah matched none of the species known to science in its genus. It carried a unique genetic fingerprint, meaning one thing. Either it was a completely unknown new species, or a species that had existed in this region, disappeared, and was now alive in a single specimen. Soloway would later say, there was nothing like this tree in any database. Radiocarbon dating of the seed, conducted by Professor Marcus Egli of the University of Zurich, returned a result, between 993 and 1202 CE, approximately 1,000 years. The seed had lain in the cave, undisturbed, needed by no one, until Patrick picked it up by hand in 1986. Genetics said, this is a unique species. Salen sent resin and leaf samples to the University of Strasbourg, to Professors Philippe Schaeffer and Pierre Adam, specialists in archaeological chemistry. The task? Determine what exactly this tree produces. The results came in stages. First, volatile aromatic compounds, essentially zero. Even when burned, the resin produced no scent. This definitively closed the Judean balsam question. Second, the analysis instead revealed a substantial quantity of substances associated with medical activity. Google sterols, compounds structurally similar to those found in the related species Comiphora whitii and linked to anti-tumor, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antiviral activity. Third, and most unexpected, among the compounds was a new series of glycolipids, not previously described in the scientific literature. Structurally close to known compounds from Comiphora whitii, but new chemistry. Salen summarized the result, This is not Judean balsam. It is something entirely different. A close relative, but a chest full of medical compounds. At this point, Salen's team knew three things about Sheba. Genus Comiphora, unique genetic fingerprint, powerful medical chemical profile. But in a scientific sense, it still didn't exist. In botany, a species receives an official name only when the precisely specified requirements of the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants have been fulfilled. A complete morphological characterization of the specimen is required, the so-called protologue. A holotype is required, the single official reference specimen deposited in a public herbarium. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is required, with a description of the novelty in Latin or English. But most importantly, flowers and fruit are required. Flowers are the primary diagnostic material in the genus Comiphora. In this genus, they are tiny, a few millimeters, often inconspicuous. But it is precisely in their structure that the characteristics distinguishing one species from another are found. The number and shape of petals, the structure of stamens, the type of inflorescence. Without them, comparison with the other 200 species of the genus is impossible. Without them, a diagnosis cannot be written, the official description of what distinguishes this species from all others. Without a diagnosis, there is no Latin name. Without a Latin name, the species has no legal or scientific existence, regardless of how many DNA analyses and chemical studies have been conducted. The team deposited herbarium specimens of Sheba at three institutions, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. The specimens exist. They are accessible to researchers. But without flowers, these specimens describe a plant, not a species. Researchers offer two explanations. First, this taxon may naturally flower later than its relatives. In wild Comiphora, flowering can begin in the 10th, 15th, or even 20th year, depending on conditions and species. Sheba is now 14 or 15 years old. Perhaps she simply hasn't reached that phase yet. Second, greenhouse conditions may be blocking the signal. In nature, Comiphora flowers in response to specific stress triggers, drought, sharp temperature swings, and seasonal cycling. The controlled environment of the greenhouse removes those signals. The tree grows and remains in a vegetative phase without transitioning to a reproductive one. The team is attempting to resolve this through cuttings, vegetative propagation that would yield several specimens for placement in more natural conditions. But even this is complicated. Comiphora root poorly from cuttings, and it's unknown whether Sheba will respond the way its African relatives do. For now, one tree without flowers. She now had three facts without a common denominator. A Comiphora tree, without fragrance, with a powerful medical profile, genetically unique, found in the Judean desert. She returned to the Bible itself. The word tsori appears several times, in Genesis, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel. Always in the same context, a valuable commodity associated with healing, never with fragrance. The ancient Hebrew root of the word means to flow, to drip, a resin that seeps through bark. Judean balsam, bosem, was described as fragrant. Tsori was not. These were two different products in two different trees. Salen put forward a second hypothesis. Sheba is the source of tsori, the tree that provided resin for healing in the time of Abraham and Jacob. A plant that grew in this region disappeared along with the civilization that knew it, and whose seed lay for a thousand years in a cave above Jericho. But this remains only a hypothesis. 14 years of work, and the team stands before the same question as on the first day. For the hypothesis to become a fact, the tree must flower. In botany, flowers and fruit are the primary material for describing and classifying a species. Without them, a species cannot receive an official Latin name. Without a name, it exists in no scientific catalog. Sheba, a tree 3 meters tall, 14 years from sowing, with documented chemistry and DNA, is legally and scientifically an unknown species of Comiphora. Researchers offer two explanations for the absence of flowers. First, perhaps this taxon naturally flowers later than its natural cycle of a tree that lived under desert stress conditions may have been longer. Second, perhaps the greenhouse conditions, controlled temperature, artificial lighting, shelter from seasonal fluctuations, are not giving the tree the signal to transition to its reproductive phase. A third version, which part of the team considers no less plausible, Sheba may have served not as the Tsori tree itself, but as rootstock, a trunk onto which Judean balsam was grafted. This would explain why Comiphora seeds are almost entirely absent from the archaeological layers of the region. If balsam was propagated exclusively by grafting, the seed was kept only as a genetic reserve. Finding one in a cave a thousand years later is exactly what happened. If this version is correct, Sheba is not the lost tree. She is the key to it, or to something else not yet known. In September 2024, Salen's team published their results in Communications Biology after 14 years of work. The central sentence reads, Sheba may represent an extinct taxon that was once native to this region. Sheba now stands in a greenhouse at Kibbutz Keturah, 3 meters tall, with pale green bark that peels in layers, leaves with a fine down, and resin that oozes from cuts and carries no scent. The team continues pharmacological analysis. The new series of glycolipids found by the University of Strasbourg chemists has not yet been fully identified. If they prove clinically active against cancer cells, that will be a separate scientific story with no connection to the Bible, simply chemistry that a thousand-year-old seed preserved within itself. In parallel, the researchers are working in two directions. The first is vegetative propagation through cuttings. Several specimens of Sheba in natural conditions with seasonal temperature swings and drought might finally produce the signal for flowering. The second is pharmacological analysis of the new glycolipid series as an independent chemical object, separate from any biblical context. If the compounds confirm cytotoxic activity against cancer cells, the next step is preclinical research. That is a much longer road, but it may turn out to be the most important result of the entire project, regardless of whether Sheba ever flowers or receives a Latin name. For now, Sheba is alone. The single living specimen of a species with no name. The first and last seed from that cave. If she dies before flowering, nothing will remain. Arabian merchants a thousand years ago carried Zori to Egypt as a trade good. They knew how the tree grew, where to buy the resin, what it was worth. Then the knowledge, the language, and the civilization vanished. A seed in a cave remained, and a few words in an ancient book. How many such seeds lie unrecognized in archival collections around the world is unknown. Most will never be planted. Sarah Salin read those words and went to the archive. For now, there is one tree that does not flower, one chemical compound that existed in no catalog, and one question without an answer. What is Zori?