Inside BAR

If archaeology ever produced a complement to the “Whatever Became of … ” books—a series about the fates of minor entertainment personalities—the Ammonites would surely be included. One of the ancient peoples of modern Jordan and a traditional enemy of the Israelites, the Ammonites quietly disappeared from the Biblical stage about the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 B.C. This led scholars to assume that the Ammonites too had succumbed to the Babylonians. Twenty-five years of modern archaeological excavation in the Ammonite territory, however, have overthrown this assumption, as Larry G. Herr demonstrates in “What Ever Happened to the Ammonites?”

Herr serves as professor of religious studies at Canadian Union College in Alberta. Among his publications are The Amman Airport Excavations, 1976 (ASOR, 1983) and The Scripts of Ancient Northwest Semitic (Scholars Press, 1978). Herr currently directs the Tell el-‘Umeiri excavation, part of the Madaba Plains Project in Jordan. He contributed “An Off-Duty Archaeologist Looks at Psalm 23,” to the April 1992 Bible Review, BAR’s companion magazine.