Ammonian

Ammonian is an adjective deriving from Ammon, used to describe things related to the ancient kingdom of Ammon or its people, as well as the region they inhabited. In historical and biblical contexts, the Ammonians (Ammonites) are a Semitic-speaking people who lived east of the Jordan River. Their territory was centered around the area later associated with Rabbah, sometimes called Rabbath Ammon, and they are frequently mentioned in ancient Near Eastern and biblical sources. The Ammonians interacted with neighboring peoples, including the Israelites and Moabites, and their history spans several centuries in the first millennium BCE.

In early Christian textual criticism, the term Ammonian is found in reference to the Ammonian Sections, a system for dividing the four Gospels into smaller readings. This division is traditionally attributed to Ammonius of Alexandria and was used in combination with the Eusebian Canons to guide cross-referencing of parallel Gospel passages in manuscript copies. The Ammonian Sections were widely used in antiquity and the Middle Ages, particularly in Greek manuscript traditions, and they influenced later Gospel study and canon tables.

Outside these contexts, Ammonian may appear as a geographic or ethnographic modifier in scholarly writing when describing matters related to Ammon, its people, or the region they inhabited. The term thus covers both historical-cultural references to the Ammonites and specific scholarly uses in biblical manuscript studies.