CHRISTIANNEWS.COM.- Farmers from Israel planted a small palm tree called Judith which has a heritage from Biblical times.
Palm trees like this one come from date seeds that are more than 2,000 years old and come from the Judean desert and Masada, said Sarah Sallon, director and founder of the Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah Medical Organization, Jerusalem.
The date is a sweet and considered exotic fruit that comes from a species of Phoenix palm trees. This fruit is used in the preparation of confectionery.
The Judith palm, on the other hand, has been growing in a greenhouse for nine years and was recently transplanted into what Kibbutz Ketura calls the ancient Judean date orchard.
Judith is the fifth tree with a millennial history to be planted. The others are: Methuselah, Adam, Jonah, and Anna.
“We are planting our second female date tree that sprouted from an ancient seed. Actually, this one came from Qumran, it was found in the caves, and to our amazement, it also sprouted,” said Elaine Solowey, the botanist who helped the seeds grow.
Hannah was the first female tree. It was planted in 2019 and pollinated by Methuselah; Hannah had about 100 dates last year and this year she had over 600 dates.
Sarah Sallon says: “Now you say well, but we see dates around here, palm trees and all the kibbutzim are growing plants. And I look at the plantations in Ketura. Those date palms in modern Israel are modern and were imported after the founding of the state in the 1950s. But they are not the original date tree that grew here.”
One that disappeared centuries ago was the Judean date. It is mentioned in the Bible as one of the seven species found in the ancient land of Israel, reports CBNNews.
Years ago at Masada, archaeologists found a jar of those ancient date seeds.
Sallon obtained five of those original seeds and gave them to Solowey. After devising a method to germinate them, Solowey managed to germinate seeds found in other places, such as the Qumran caves in the area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
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