What we pass over from the previous lesson is a long list of kings both north and south whose reigns were unremarkable in terms of what it tells us about the Covenant. However, the Fall of Samaria is quite significant.
Hoshea was the last King of Israel. Already there have been mass slaughter at the hand of Syria in both the north and south. One of the kings of Judah made the mistake of seeking Assyria’s protection from Syria, thus bringing Israel and Judah to Assyria’s attention. While the Assyrian emperor did as asked and took Syria down, it eventually left all three kingdoms as tributaries of Assyria.
During one of the frequent Assyrian raids into this region, Shalmaneser humbled Hoshea and demanded annual tribute. This was about 732 BC. The Lord allowed this because, while Hoshea was better than his predecessors, he still transgressed the Covenant. And at this point, such transgression had been going on for so long that Jehovah had had enough.
Sometime around his sixth year on the throne, King Hoshea sent the tribute to Egypt, instead, trying to cultivate the protection of Pharaoh So (currently unidentified to us today). Naturally, Shalmaneser came with his troops to demonstrate his displeasure at not receiving the annual tribute. The Pharaoh of Egypt was hardly ready to back up his promises, and left Israel to its fate. The Assyrian troops laid siege to Samaria. The siege lasted three years before the walls were breached and the people were taken captive. We peg this at 722 BC.
Israel had already suffered significant population losses. The folks in the city were exiled, carried off to an area near the Khabur River, northeast of Nineveh. However, Assyria left a skeleton crew of peasants and low ranking nobles to keep some of the agriculture alive until the new occupants of the land could be moved in. It took several decades.
There are two primary moral failures cited as the cause of Israel’s demise. First is that they were ungrateful to the Master who delivered them from slavery and gave them their new identity as His own family. They completely forgot what the Passover meant. The second general mistake was to restore to the land all the degrading practices of those pagan nations they replaced. What was the point of cleansing the land during the Conquest?
No part of the kingdom escaped this corruption. This was the moral equivalent of cuckolding God. Over and over again, He sent prophets to warn them. They ignored a God who could speak to them and perform miracles, preferring the licentious behavior associated with chasing deities that didn’t exist.
But Judah was also dinged in this passage. They had come very close to being completely taken over by the sins of Ahab and Jezebel through intermarriage.
At no time did Israel repent of Jeroboam’s shrines. The northern kingdom completely lost track of the Covenant. Since none of the priests and Levites would serve in these shrines, Jeroboam had raised up his own loyal priesthood. It became necessary to edit the Books of Moses to ensure they matched the reality of things in the two shrines, changing the story so that the two shrines were God’s chosen places of worship. It condemned the southern kingdom for promoting lies. This new corpus of corrupted writings became their scripture.
When Esarhaddon took the throne as Emperor of Assyria, he brought in a bunch of exiles from some other place he conquered. There were still just a few surviving crop growers in the land, but the cities were empty and occupied by wild animals. So the imported people complained to Assyria that the local gods must be really angry, having missed their offerings for such a long time. They appealed for priests of the local gods. For Assyria, that meant the corrupted priests serving those two shrines.
A batch of these charlatans were sent back and reorganized the shrine services. This gave rise to a new organized ritual now referred to as Samaritan religion. The people were mostly foreigners, with just about 5% left from the original inhabitants of the Israel. It became the Kingdom of Samaria.
Meanwhile, all the people continued their own pagan traditions, since the corrupted Samaritan scriptures did not condemn pagan idolatry the way the Books of Moses do.
“It became necessary to edit the Books of Moses to ensure they matched the reality of things in the two shrines,”
I must’ve missed something in an earlier study post. Was there textual trickery afoot?
You’ll find that the Samaritan Penteteuch is different from the one we have in our Bible. Mostly it’s stuff that is cut out, but there was one particular change so that the Samaritan version says God told them to build a temple somewhere other than Jerusalem.