People often ask me where I find the stories I write about, turn into films or share in my lectures. After years of storytelling, I’ve learned that in the same way that “mitzvah goreres mitzvah,” one story often leads to another.
He told me that he had watched my Tishah B’Av film Hidden Light, which attempts to solve the mystery of what happened to the keilim of the Beis Hamikdash. After seeing it, he felt he had no choice but to reach out, believing he had a story that needed to be told. The story centered on an archaeological discovery made in 1992 that was never fully investigated. If what he was telling me was true, it had the potential to be one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries in history.
Jim had worked alongside the famed biblical archaeologist Vendyl Jones back in the 1990s. He claimed that Jones and a team of volunteers had uncovered a large stone vessel containing nearly 600 kilos of reddish-brown spices in a cave overlooking the Dead Sea near Qumran. Scientific testing, he told me, indicated that the substance contained compounds consistent with the spices used in the ketores of the Beis Hamikdash.
He explained that the urgency wasn’t about the discovery itself; that had taken place over 30 years ago. It was about the people involved. Several of the central figures, including Jones himself, had already passed away. The remaining eyewitnesses were now elderly, and Jim feared that if someone didn’t document their firsthand accounts soon the story would disappear,
At first I was skeptical and maybe even a little dismissive. What were the chances that this was true? Then Jim pulled out the scientific reports. Those piqued my curiosity.
I immediately traveled to Wichita, Kansas, to speak to Dr. Terry Hutter, a scientist who was part of the original investigation decades ago. The wildfires around Los Angeles were still blazing; I remember taking off from LAX and seeing them from the sky. A few hours later the plane made its descent into Wichita in the middle of a blizzard; the city was covered with several feet of snow and ice, and there were monstrous winds. The contrast reminded me of the pasuk in Tehillim (148:8): “Eish u’varad sheleg v’kitor, ruach se’arah osah devaro—Fire and hail, snow and vapor, a storm wind performing His word.” Dr. Hutter is an internationally recognized expert in ancient plants, pollen and microscopic botanical remains. He is not Jewish.
He told me that at the time he received the sample, he had never heard of the ketores. Jones intentionally told him nothing about what he believed the substance might be. He simply mailed him a jar containing a reddish-brown powder and asked him to identify its botanical composition.
As part of his analysis, Dr. Hutter put approximately one teaspoon of the material into a petri dish. He then poured hydrochloric acid on it and it began effervescing, meaning that vapor came out. Within moments, an extraordinary fragrance filled his laboratory. The aroma was so powerful that it awakened his dog, which had been sleeping nearby. Dr. Hutter told me that the fragrance clung to his clothing and even his hair. When he arrived home that evening, his wife immediately asked him if he had started wearing cologne.
During our interview, Mrs. Hutter smiled as she recalled the experience. “I’d never smelled anything like it,” she said. “It was the most pleasant, calming odor I’d ever encountered,”
Then something unusual happened. Dr. Hutter’s laboratory was located near the Arkansas River, where flies, mosquitoes and gnats are a constant nuisance. Yet for several months after that single teaspoon of the substance effervesced, there were virtually no flies inside the laboratory or even around the building’s ventilation system.
As I listened to him describe what he observed, I couldn’t help thinking of the words of Chazal. The Gemara tells us that no fly was ever seen in the slaughterhouse of the Beis Hamikdash. Elsewhere, our Sages describe the fragrance of the ketores as being so powerful that it could be detected all the way in Yericho, where even the goats would sneeze.
Another aspect of the sample fascinated him. When he examined it under a microscope, he found that the particles had been ground with astonishing precision. Every fragment was nearly identical in size. In all his years studying ancient botanical materials, he told me, he had never encountered spices ground so uniformly. To him, it was obvious that whoever prepared the mixture had done so with extraordinary care.
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