Digging In: A Season to Refresh, Renew, and Reflect

Spring is the perfect time to refresh and renew, a chance to embrace new challenges and ideas and turn from the past toward new horizons. Of course, it is also when we observe and celebrate two cherished religious traditions, Passover and Easter, both of which have their origins deep in the biblical past. For our Spring 2022 issue, we’ve brought together a fascinating array of articles that provide both fresh outlooks on old questions and insightful reflection on the history behind the season’s holidays.

In the article “Piece by Piece: Exploring the Origins of the Philistines,” archaeologist Daniel Master examines the background to one of biblical archaeology’s most debated origins questions and presents new DNA evidence from Philistine Ashkelon that may settle the issue once and for all. Similarly, in “Jesus in Arabia,” scholar Ahmad Al-Jallad highlights an extraordinary new inscription that may not only offer the earliest evidence of Christian worship in the Arabian Peninsula but also indicate the Arabian adoption of monotheism centuries before Islam.