Methuselah’s Date

“Poor Methuselah will never have a date,” I told my biology class. I received the appropriate eye rolls for my corny joke. That was back in 2011, and at the time, I wasn't lying. As far as anyone knew, Methuselah was the only Judean date palm on the planet, and he had sprouted quite an interesting story all on his own.

In 1963, archaeologists excavating Herod's palace at Masada, the desert fortress above the Dead Sea, found a jar of date seeds. The seeds went into storage at a university, where they waited in a drawer for another forty years. Then, in 2005, a botanist named Elaine Solowey planted a few of them in a research garden, and one sprouted. The Judean date palm, a tree presumed extinct, sent up a single green shoot. They were able to radiocarbon date the shell after it sprouted, and the testing showed that Methuselah was from around the time of Jesus.

By 2011, Methuselah had flowered, and they discovered that he was indeed a male. Yes, apparently date palms come in both male and female varieties. Who knew? Methuselah, then, could offer pollen, but the fruit would have to come from another Judean date palm that was female. You can see the problem. I don't know why that made me so sad, but it really was depressing to think that Methuselah would literally never have a date!

Then, I lost track of the story until 2018, when I wrote Dr. Solowey to ask how the date palm was doing. Methuselah was thriving, she said, and the team was trying to sprout more ancient seeds in hopes of finding a female. They succeeded with seeds found at Masada and at Qumran, the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Six of them sprouted, and each received a biblical name: Adam, Jonah, Uriel, Boaz, Judith, and Hannah. And guess what? Hannah turned out to be female, and her seed was nearly 200 years older than Methuselah's. Think about that. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, John tells us the crowd went out to meet him carrying branches of palm trees, and it is not out of the realm of possibility that a branch may have come from Methuselah or Hannah’s direct lineage.

A species that had disappeared hundreds of years ago was always waiting to sprout. Eventually, these two Judean date palms that had lain dormant through the fall of Rome, the travels of the Vikings, Shakespeare writing plays, and Voyager being hurled out into space were finally ready to meet. In 2020, Hannah bore fruit, and the people who tasted those first dates described them as having a unique, honeyed sweetness; Hannah now produces hundreds each season.

Sunset Ridge knows a little something about seeds that only look forgotten. Last week, I had the honor of sharing part of our own story through the sermon. A few years ago, our vision team asked a brave question: Would our neighbors even know if we closed the doors? The honest answer was perhaps not, but they certainly weren't interested in going dormant for two thousand years. They decided to nurture a new story, one that took root and kept growing through coffee, kids, and community until the whole church was sprouting new stories everywhere. That's typical of God's work. Just when you think all you've got is a handful of old seeds in a forgotten clay jar, God sends a sprout.