A 2,000-Year-Old Seed Sprouted

In the 1960s, archaeologists digging at Masada, Herod’s fortress by the Dead Sea, found ancient date seeds buried under rubble. Radiocarbon dating put them at about 2,000 years old. The Judean date palm, praised in ancient times for its flavor and medicine, had long since disappeared. For over 40 years the seeds sat in storage. Then in 2005, Dr. Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute in Israel took on a challenge people thought was botanically impossible: getting one to grow. In March 2005, one of them germinated, becoming the oldest seed ever successfully sprouted. They named it Methuselah, after the oldest man in the Bible. It now grows in the Arava Institute’s research park at Kibbutz Ketura. What looked dead for twenty centuries still had life in it. Never write off what God has planted.