Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

March 13, 2026

Digging Up the Biblical Kingdom of the Ammonites

In the capital of modern-day Jordan.

The Ammonites, a Semitic people living east of the Jordan River, are mentioned numerous times in Numbers, Judges, and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible—often as rivals or enemies of the Israelites. According to Genesis, they are descendants of Abraham’s nephew Lot. The seat of their kingdom was Rabbat-Amman, the ruins of which archaeologists have located in the modern-day Jordanian capital of Amman. Describing the excavations conducted there in the past two years, Katharina Schmidt writes:

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