Baalis (, Ba‘ălīs; Ammonite: 𐤁𐤏𐤋𐤉𐤔𐤏, B‘LYŠ‘) is the name given in the Book of Jeremiah for the king of Ammon. He instigated the murder of Gedaliah, the Babylonian-appointed Jewish governor of Jerusalem. Seal of Ba’alis When the Babylonians conquered Judah in the early 6th century BCE and destroyed Jerusalem, they made Gedaliah, a member of a prominent Jerusalem family, governor of Judah. But he was soon murdered, an event still commemorated in Jewish tradition by an annual fast. The assassin was sent by none other than Ba'alis, King of the Ammonites (Jeremiah 40:13 - 41:2). Ba'alis's seal (shown on the cover of the issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, where this article was first published) is made of brown agate with white bands and is in fact quite tiny (0.5 inches in diameter and 0.2 inches thick). A small hole was drilled through the center of the scarab-shaped seal for the setting. On the seal are three lines of script, each separated by double rules: "[Belonging to] Ba'alis" "King of" "B[nei Ammo]n" As indicated by the brackets, the first and last letters in the first line have been reconstructed, but their reconstruction was easy.#1 Almost all seals begin with a lamed, or l, meaning "belonging to." The last letter of the line, also missing, completes the spelling of the name. Much more needs to be reconstructed in the damaged third line. Only traces of the first and last letters are visible: the head of the first letter, bet, and upper edge of the last letter, nun. But this is enough to reconstruct the line as Bnei Ammon—literally, the Sons of Ammon, or the Ammonites—since the named king, Ba'alis, is known as an Ammonite king. Indeed, in the Biblical passage that mentions Ba'alis (Jeremiah 40:14), he is referred to as the "King [of the] Bnei Ammon," the same term that we have reconstructed here based on the first and last letters. The same term appears on a well-known bronze bottle, called a situla, found at Tell Siran in Jordan. (see sidebar)#2 The script on our seal is typically Ammonite. It is a mark of how far our epigraphic knowledge has developed that we can distinguish between the closely related scripts of the Israelites, the Ammonites, the Moabites and the Edomites.#3 The name Ba'alis means "Ba'al has saved," or "Ba'al is salvation." This is not the first time Ba'alis has appeared in the