Tall al-‘Umayri. By Bashar Tabbah – Bashar Tabbah, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83039308

A four-room house provides a clue to where the oldest Israelite tribe settled.

We were lucky. There’s no other way to explain it. When our archaeological survey team, part of a larger expedition known as the Madaba Plains Project, discovered Tall al-‘Umayri1 in 1976, we had no idea it would yield great treasures.2 But now, almost 25 years later and after seven excavation seasons (beginning in 1984), we can only stand back and marvel as the Holy Land’s best-preserved site from the time of the Judges slowly emerges from beneath more than three millennia of accumulated dust and debris.

Tall al-‘Umayri lies in the highlands of Transjordan (the part of the Holy Land east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea) just south of Jordan’s capital, Amman. We naturally wanted to know who lived there in Biblical times. Could they have been, we wondered, the Ammonites, the enemies of King Saul and King David (1 Samuel 11 and 2 Samuel 10)? The Ammonites were the most prominent people in the region during the time of the monarchies of Israel and Judah. They also gave their name to the modern city of Amman.

Or could the inhabitants of ‘Umayri have been the Amorites, whom the Bible says Moses and Israel encountered at Heshbon and then destroyed on their way to the promised land (Numbers 21)?

Read the rest of Excavating the Tribe of Reuben in the Biblical Archaeology Society Library.