BARlines

In Memoriam: Siegfried H. Horn

In “The Search for Biblical Heshbon,” BAR 19:06, Larry Herr concludes his story of Horn’s involvement with archaeology in Jordan by saying, “At the age of 85, Siegfried Horn still keeps an eye on [the Madaba Plains Project] and would have it no other way.”

That changed on November 28, 1993, when, instead of attending the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research and Society of Biblical Literature and visiting the Biblical Archaeology Society exhibit at the Smithsonian, which was his intent, he unexpectedly died near his retirement home in California’s Napa Valley. The cause of death was complications from massive lymphoma, something no one knew he had.

Siegfried Herbert Horn was born in Wuerzen, Germany, on March 17, 1908, the son of a Seventh-Day Adventist church worker and one of the world’s first aviators. He attended a Jewish school so he would not have to go to school on the Sabbath and thus learned Hebrew at an early age. His fascination with the archaeology of the Bible lands grew out of his reading the accounts of European travelers. After receiving his undergraduate education at Adventist colleges in Germany and England, Horn served for the next decade as a minister for his denomination in the Netherlands and as a missionary teacher/administrator in what was at the time the Dutch East Indies.