Digging In: Celebrate Discovery

This year marked the anniversaries of some of the most important archaeological discoveries from the world of the Bible. We celebrated 200 years since Egyptian hieroglyphs were first deciphered, the centennial of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, and perhaps most significantly for biblical archaeology, the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These remarkable discoveries, which opened up entirely new areas of study and rewrote our histories of the ancient and biblical past, remind us why archaeology continues to captivate so many. A single swing of the pick or swipe of the trowel can completely transform our view of the past, revealing new, exciting, and often unexpected insights into peoples, events, and even everyday lives about which we previously knew little.

Just in time for the holidays, our Winter 2022 issue celebrates the latest discoveries—from the monumental to the mundane—that continue to shape our understanding of the biblical world. In “Mesha’s Stele and the House of David,” André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme take a detailed look at the famous monumental inscription of the Moabite king, Mesha, and the new photographic evidence that they believe confirms its long-suspected reference to the kingdom of David. Similarly, in “The Genesis of Judaism,” Yonatan Adler systematically examines the archaeological and historical evidence to determine when early Jews first began to observe the laws of the Torah—and reaches a surprising conclusion.