Dates from time of Maccabees & Jesus are revived, bring Jewish, Arab unity

Recently, a version of such a restoration took place in the Holy Land, eretz hakodesh – not with dry bones, but with 2,000-year-old dry date seeds from the time of the Maccabees and Jesus.

When the archaeologist Yigal Yadin dug at Masada in the 1960s, he found a catchment of Judean date seeds (Phoenix dactylifera). Through radiocarbon analysis, the seeds were shown to be around 1,990 years old, or from 35 BCE to 65 CE. The Roman philosophers Strabo and Pliny wrote about the medicinal qualities of the Judean date.

Fifteen years ago, in 2005, Dr. Elaine Soloway of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, along with Dr. Sarah Salon of Hadassah Medical Center, were able to miraculously germinate one of the seeds! In honor of its longevity, it was named Methuselah, after the longest-living human being in the Bible (Genesis 5: 21-27).

While astounding, Methuselah, being a male tree, would not be able to produce a date without a female partner. So in 2014, six seeds were germinated from 32 seeds unearthed in archaeological digs between 1963 and 1991 in the Judean Desert and near the Dead Sea, with their estimated ages ranging from 1,800 to 2,400 years old.

They were given Biblical names: Adam, Boaz, Hannah, Jonah, Judith and Uriel. Judith and Hannah were female, but only Hannah flowered. In March of this year, she was pollinated using pollen from Methuselah. Eventually, Hannah produced 111 dates weighing between 15 and 18 grams each. These semi-dry dates with a reddish blonde color were recently harvested. Most of the dates will go to research, but those that were tasted had, as Dr. Soloway said, “a honey or caramel aftertaste.”

The home of these extraordinary trees is the Kibbutz Ketura campus of the Arava Institute located on the Israeli-Jordanian border in the dramatic Arava Valley, with the steep, mile-high, red mountains of southern Jordan – biblical Edom – on one side and the whitish limestone from ancient ocean floors on the Israeli side. Colorful sandstone is found on both sides of this valley, a wide section of the Great Syria-African Rift.

Some six miles south of Kibbutz Ketura lies the Yotvata oasis, mentioned in the Bible (Numbers 33:34, Deuteronomy 10:7) as one of the locations where Moses and the Children of Israel camped during their 40 years in the desert. 

There is something else remarkable about the home of these dates. Since 1996, the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies has brought together Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian and international college students from around the world to learn to cooperatively solve the regional and global challenges of our time. It is a Middle East environmental and academic institution that advances cross-border environmental cooperation and cross-border environmental discourse at a time when it is so needed.

Track II Environmental Forum, the institute's latest initiative, enables key civil society organizations and individuals who represent both state and non-state actors to discuss, negotiate and develop practical cross-border strategies to facilitate formal and informal environmental agreements between Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians.

Reduced to one of its core components, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is about land – more precisely, the borders that nations draw on the land. When the land is looked upon solely as a geopolitical instrument, it is viewed as one of the major stumbling blocks to any reconciliation or just settlement of the conflict. However, when the land is approached, as it is at the Arava Institute, from an environmental perspective – which does not know from political borders, walls and fences – new frameworks open up, including in the political sphere: New dynamics are created. 

The student body of the Arava Institute is made up of Jews, Christians and Muslims, as well as others. In the three monotheistic religions, born in the deserts of the region, dates and date trees have always played an important role. Following the example of Muhammad, Muslims traditionally break their daily fast during Ramadan with a date. In the Torah, dates are considered one of the seven most important species of the Land of Israel. And Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem with his supporters waving date palm branches. 

Grown on the Arava Institute campus with its predominantly Palestinian, Israeli and Jordanian student body, the dates of Methuselah and Hannah, like Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, remind us that what today appears to be beyond reach can in fact be overcome for a better, more just and redeemed tomorrow.