Ammonite

The Ammonites were a Semitic tribe who settled in Ammon north of Moab and east of the Israelite tribes Ruben and Gad .

Representation in the Bible

According to the representation in the Bible, the Ammonites were descendants of Ben-Ammi , a son of Lot ( Gen 19,30-38  EU ), who was inbreeding with his younger daughter , who in turn was the nephew of Abraham . Moab, the progenitor of the Moabites , the son of Lot's older daughter, was conceived in the same way . The brother peoples of the Moabites and Ammonites are thus related to the Israelites . According to Dtn 23.4  EU , Moabites and Ammonites are "forever" forbidden to take part in religious gatherings of Jews.

The name Ben-Ammi ("son of my people" or "son of my grandfather"), formed by folk etymology , gives the name of the Ammonite people a negative interpretation. The Ammonites themselves called their ancestor Ammon.

According to the biblical description, Milkom was the main god of the Ammonites. Milkom, however, has hardly been attested to as a theophoric element onomastically .

The Ammonites were often in combat with the Israelites; according to the biblical story in the Book of Judges (Judges 10-11) , they were fought by Jiftach and subjected to the latter. After the fall of the kingdom of Israel , the Ammonites spread east of the Jordan and were again on the opposing side of the Israelites in the wars of the Babylonians against Judah and in the Maccabees war (165 BC). They often allied themselves with the Moabites. The fall of the kingdom of Judah does not seem to have affected the Ammonites at first. However, they also later perish in the ethnic mix of the Persian Empire .

The main place of the Ammonites was Rabbat-Ammon, the biblical Rabba . After the conquest of the region by the Greeks under Alexander the Great , the city was named Philadelphia. Today, the Jordanian capital Amman is located around the old settlement hill .

See also

• Ammon (state)
• Ammonite language
• Palestine (region)

literature

• Ulrich Hübner: The Ammonites. Investigations into the history, culture and religion of a Transjordan people in the 1st millennium BC Chr. (ADPV 16) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1992. ISBN 978-3-447-03275-9
• Burton MacDonald; Randall W. Younker (ed.) Ancient Ammon (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East XVII). Suffering u. a. 1999. ISBN 90-04-10762-2
• Immanuel Benzinger : Ammanitai . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume I, 2, Stuttgart 1894, column 1842.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Andreas Michel:  Ben-Ammi. In: Michaela Bauks, Klaus Koenen, Stefan Alkier (Eds.): The Scientific Biblical Lexicon on the Internet (WiBiLex), Stuttgart 2006 ff.