THE ASSYRIAN INVASION AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEN TRIBES OF ISRAEL (885-721)
Capture And Plunder Of Samaria (Beginning Of 721) And Deportation Of The Population
Sargon II appears to have been a typical merciless eastern potentate. In the Louvre Museum there is a striking and rather frightening portrait of him; seeing it we can understand how he struck fear into the whole Middle East, Egypt and Ethiopia. In addition to his military exploits he was a great builder; to the north of Nineveh he established the splendid and very large capital, Khorsabad (Our Sharrukin).
Sargon, enamoured of fame, had the account of his exploits inscribed in various places. Here are some of the texts in which he recounts his victory.
'I besieged the city of Simirina and captured it. I deported 27,290 of its inhabitants. I took fifty chariots. The other inhabitants I allowed to keep their possessions. I appointed a lieutenant over them and demanded the same tribute as the previous king.'
On the famous cylinder known as 'Sargon's cylinder' there is a similar inscription: 'The man of Samaria who had united with a king 5, had entered an alliance not to do me homage and not to pay me the tribute; he engaged me in battle; by the power of my great gods, my lords, I fought against them: 27,280 persons with their chariots, the gods in whom they put their trust; for my royal army I seized 200 chariots.'
The cylinder provides us with summary details on the place of deportation to which the inhabitants of Samaria were sent, The remainder [that is, the survivors of the massacre after the capture of the city] I instructed to settle in the middle of Assyria.'
On the other hand the Scripture (2 Melechim 18:11), which is rather reticent about the siege of Samaria, provides more detail about the various places of deportation: The king of Assyria deported the Yisraelites to Assyria and settled them in Halah on the Habor, a river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.'6
Such was the method of pacification introduced and largely used by the Assyrians to break down national resistance. The operation was threefold; first came the systematic massacre for the purpose of causing terror, and the destruction of the principal buildings; many prisoners were impaled, murdered, flayed alive, had their hands struck off or their eyes put out. Then those who were left of the leading inhabitants were transported to a more or less remote region. Finally, the country which had thus been depopulated received a contingent of other deportees coming from a foreign land. This mixing of populations ensured a certain amount of tranquility to the conquerors in countries which were too turbulent.
The Assyrians obviously had no interest in reducing these exiles to conditions of extreme poverty. Usually they were allowed to take with them, from their country of origin, a portion of their possessions. Once they were established in their new home they were able to enjoy a certain freedom; they could farm or even engage in trade. The Book of Kings provides practically no information on the daily existence of these 'displaced' Yisraelites, but some idea of it can be obtained from certain passages in the story of Tobit.
The siege of a city attacked by the Assyrians. Notice the mobile tower with six wheels armed with a battering ram. After Layard. Nineveh and its remains
5 Probably the petty king of Hamath, or So of Egypt
6 Halah, probably to the south of Nineveh. 'In the cities of the Medes': a far more remote place of deportation than the first mentioned; it is the region on the other side of the Tigris and the Zagros mountains. Here, at a later date, the story of Tobit was set.
The Curious Repopulation Of Samaria, they called them Samaritans
Taken as a whole, Samaria and its territory was harshly treated. The city was plundered; then, anything of commercial or artistic value was carried off to the banks of the Tigris. The former kingdom of Yisrael had now to be repopulated in accordance with Assyrian military practice.
The prism of Sargon relates this event as follows. 'I built [it is Sargon speaking] the city of Samaria so that it was greater than it had been before. I established there a population from countries that I had annexed by conquest. Over the country I installed my officer as governor and I incorporated this people in the administrative system of Assyria.'
The Scripture (2 Melechim 17:24) furnishes details which support this statement but are more precise: 'The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Yisraelites; they took possession of Samaria and lived in its towns.' 7 (See map on previous (back) page). The Scripture describes this repeopling of the northern kingdom in a rather schematic way. As a matter of fact there were several bodies of deportees sent to Samaria one after the other at intervals of some years. According to Sargon's annals the first of these operations took place directly after the fall of the capital. And according to the Book of Ezrah the last arrival of deportees was in about 671 in the reign of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria.
All these very diverse elements of population, coming from different countries in the Middle East, brought with them to the former Yisraelite territory their local gods which they quickly set up in their new country. The city temples, like the high places in the country, were peopled therefore with idols hitherto unknown in this Yahwist land. Thus the Chaldaeans, who came from Babylon, worshipped a god called Succoth-Benot; the people from Cuthah adored Nergal, those from Hamath worshipped Ashima, those from Avva Nibbaz or Tartak. Lastly, the people from Sepharvaim burned their newborn children to draw down the blessing of their local deities Adrammelek and Anamelek.
While the newcomers still kept their own deities they could see nothing wrong in adopting in addition the "religion" of the country in which the Assyrians had made them settle by force. They saw no reason why they should not worship YAHWEH, the protector of Canaan, as well as their ancestral gods. The odd spiritual mixture which this produced can be imagined. It was composed of the primitive rites preserved by the deportees, the Canaanite cults which had remained fairly strong on the high places, and the Yahwist set apart spirit. In Yerusalem men veiled their faces before the curious pantheon in which YAHWEH, the one Sovereign Ruler, was surrounded by cruel and notoriously immoral idols. It was a dreadful insult to the one Sovereign Ruler.
These barbarous settlers, established in the capital founded a century and a half previously by Omri, continued to be regarded by the Judaeans with distrustful hostility even in YAHSHUA our MessiYah's time; aggressively they called them Samaritans. And in fact these Samaritans remained at a primitive stage of spiritual development, accounted for by their very mixed racial origins. At the end of the Babylonian Exile (538) when the Judaean's returned to the City of David, their neighbours, the Samaritans, had then become Yahwists, although certain beliefs and special rites still distinguished them from orthodox Judaism.
The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim, and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Yisraelites
...They worshipped YAHWEH and served their own gods at the same time...
2 Melechim 17:24,33
7 Cuthah: a Chaldaean city (Chaldaean inscriptions call it Kuthi) which could be the modern Tel-Ibrahim, about nine miles to the north-east of Babylon Avva: on the Euphrates Hamath on the Orontes. Before falling into the hands of the Assyrians this city resisted very strongly Sepharvaim a Babylonian city
The End Of The Ten Tribes Of Yisrael (721)
The deportation of the remaining element of the northern kingdom, established two centuries previously by Jeroboam, sounded the death knell of Yisrael. The Ten Tribes were dispersed among crude ethnical elements of Babylon. They disappeared for ever, absorbed by the very varied elements which made up the milieu in which they were plunged. Yahwism of the north was not spiritually strong enough to withstand the test of deportation. At Yerusalem only a vague memory was preserved of the various places assigned as the residence of their brothers of the north who only too often had shown hostility to Yahudah. In any case there was no communication between Yerusalem and the displaced populations. It was the end of the Ten Tribes of Yisrael.
There now remained only the tribe of Yahudah (to which, to preserve the principle of the Twelve Tribes, was joined the small, almost imaginary tribe of Simeon).
At this stage of the story it may well be wondered how long Yerusalem would remain sheltered from the great political upheavals.
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