Samaria Falls, and the Book Explains Why

Hoshea took the throne by murdering Pekah (15:30), and Tiglath-pileser's own annals claim credit for installing him. The date here clashes with 15:30, which puts his coup in Jotham's twentieth year; the synchronisms of these last northern reigns are among the hardest in Kings to reconcile.

The qualifier is unusual in a book that normally ranks each northern king with Jeroboam. Why Hoshea is judged less harshly is never said; one old Jewish tradition holds that he removed the guards Jeroboam had posted to stop pilgrims going up to Jerusalem.

Shalmaneser V reigned only five years, from 727 to 722 BC, the son of Tiglath-pileser III. “Presents” here is the Hebrew minchah, the ordinary word for an offering or gift, used in Kings as a polite name for tribute owed by a vassal.

“So king of Egypt” has never been matched securely with a pharaoh. Some read So as a place, Sais in the Delta, and others as Osorkon IV of Tanis. Either way Egypt in these years was divided and in no position to rescue anyone, which Isaiah 30:7 says bluntly.

A three year siege of a hilltop city shows how well Omri chose the site of Samaria (1 Kings 16:24). By Hebrew counting, which includes part years at both ends, “three years” may mean parts of 724 to 722 BC rather than thirty six full months.

Sargon II, Shalmaneser's successor, boasts in his inscriptions of taking Samaria and deporting 27,290 people. Halah, the Habor river and Gozan lie in upper Mesopotamia; the cities of the Medes are far to the east in what is now Iran, deliberately scattering the exiles.

The indictment opens with “For so it was”, turning a military report into a theological explanation. Israel is charged first with having “feared other gods”, the same verb the chapter will use again and again until its last verse.

Two sources of false statutes are named: the displaced Canaanites and Israel's own kings. The second points back to Jeroboam's calendar and shrines (1 Kings 12:28–33), laws made by a king rather than received from the LORD.

“Secretly” translates a rare Hebrew verb, chapha, used only here, that may mean to cover over or to do things under disguise. From the watchtower to the fenced city is a merism: from the smallest outpost in the fields to the largest walled town, everywhere.

The images are the standing stones, matstsevot, and the groves are Asherim, wooden poles or trees sacred to the goddess Asherah. Deuteronomy 12:2–3 ordered exactly these pulled down on every high hill and under every green tree.

Burning incense “as did the heathen” is a precise charge: the nations were carried away for these very practices, and Israel has copied the people whose removal gave it the land. The verb “carried away” is the same one used of Israel's exile in verse 6.

The word for idols is gillulim, a contemptuous term that probably plays on gel, dung. Ezekiel uses it nearly forty times. The quoted prohibition is short and absolute, as if no further argument were needed.

Prophets and seers are listed side by side, recalling 1 Samuel 9:9, where the book explains that a prophet was formerly called a seer. Judah is named in the warning here, six verses before its own failure is stated.

The stiff neck is an ox refusing the yoke, first used of Israel at the golden calf (Exodus 32:9). “Like to the neck of their fathers” ties this generation to the wilderness one, the fathers who would not believe at Kadesh (Deuteronomy 1:32).

Statutes, covenant and testimonies are three terms from Deuteronomy for the one law. The phrase about vanity is lifted from Jeremiah 2:5, where the same Hebrew words appear; either Jeremiah echoes Kings or both draw on a common prophetic idiom.

“Even two calves” counts Jeroboam's images at Dan and Bethel as a single sin of Israel, not the private error of one king. Worship of the host of heaven, sun, moon and stars, is new in the list and becomes Manasseh's hallmark in Judah (21:3).

“Sold themselves” is the phrase used of Ahab (1 Kings 21:20, 25), a slave's word: the people handed themselves over to evil as property changes hands. Divination and enchantments were among the practices Deuteronomy 18:10 banned alongside child sacrifice.

“None left but the tribe of Judah only” speaks of the kingdom, not of every person. Benjamin and many Levites belonged to the southern kingdom, and Chronicles records northerners who came to Hezekiah's passover (2 Chronicles 30:11).

The verse reads like a parenthesis inserted by a writer who has already seen Jerusalem fall. Judah walked in “the statutes of Israel”, the same phrase that in verse 8 described Israel's own disobedience, so the south is charged with copying the north.

“All the seed of Israel” may reach beyond the northern kingdom to take in Judah as well, since it follows directly on verse 19. The “spoilers” are plunderers: Aram, Assyria and the raiders of the preceding chapters, used here as the LORD's instruments.

The Hebrew has the LORD tearing Israel from David's house, recalling Ahijah's torn garment in 1 Kings 11:30–31. “Drave Israel from following” uses a verb for driving or thrusting away, as if Jeroboam physically pushed the nation off the road.

“They departed not from them” has been the refrain of nearly every northern king's reign; the book now applies it to the whole people. Nineteen kings in nine dynasties changed hands over two centuries, and the sin never did.

Ahijah had foretold this in Jeroboam's own day, that Israel would be scattered beyond the river (1 Kings 14:15). “Unto this day” shows the account was written while the northern tribes were still in exile, with no return in view.

Assyrian policy was two way deportation: conquered peoples swapped places to break local loyalties. Cuthah was a city in Babylonia; Hamath lay in Syria; Sepharvaim is uncertain. Later Jewish writers called the Samaritans Cuthaeans after the second name on this list.

Lions were common in Israel's thickets, and a depopulated countryside let them multiply, as Exodus 23:29 warned would happen if land were emptied too quickly. The Book of 2 Kings does not stop at the natural cause but names the LORD as sender.

The settlers reason as their own religion taught them, that each land has its god and that god has rules, a “manner”, the Hebrew mishpat. Their complaint is repeated twice in the verse, the second time as if to press the king.

The order begins with the plural “let them go” and continues with the singular “let him teach”, so perhaps a priest was sent with attendants. Assyria solving a theological problem by royal decree shows how the empire treated gods as part of administration.

The priest settles at Bethel, Jeroboam's calf sanctuary, and was very likely one of its former clergy. What he taught is called fearing the LORD, but the teacher himself came out of the very worship verse 16 condemns.

The Samaritans here are simply the inhabitants of Samaria, the only use of the word in the Old Testament. The shrines Israel had built are reused: the new gods move into the old houses, so the landscape Israel made becomes home to the next idolatry.

Succoth-benoth may be a Hebrew distortion of a Babylonian name, perhaps for the goddess Zarpanitu. Nergal was the god of Cuthah and of the underworld, well attested in Mesopotamian texts. Ashima is obscure, possibly echoed in the “sin of Samaria” in Amos 8:14.

Nibhaz and Tartak are otherwise unknown, and some scholars think the names are deliberately mangled. Adrammelech and Anammelech contain melech, king, the same element as Molech. The same name Adrammelech will reappear for a son of Sennacherib who kills his father (19:37).

Priests “of the lowest of them” echoes word for word the charge against Jeroboam, who made priests from the lowest of the people (1 Kings 12:31). The settlers repeat the north's founding sin without knowing its history.

“After the manner of the nations whom they carried away from thence” means the lands the settlers came from: they kept the customs of home. The Hebrew places “feared the LORD” and “served their own gods” in two short clauses side by side, with no conjunction softening either.

The verse flatly contradicts verses 32–33, which said they feared the LORD. The contradiction is the point: fear that sits beside other gods is not what the law calls fear. Naming Jacob “whom he named Israel” reaches back to Genesis 32:28.

Four verbs, fear, bow, serve, sacrifice, move from inner attitude to outward act, and each is forbidden toward other gods. The wording gathers up the second commandment (Exodus 20:5) and Deuteronomy 6:13–14.

The same four actions forbidden in verse 35 are now commanded, in reverse order, toward the LORD alone. “A stretched out arm” is Deuteronomy's standing phrase for the exodus (Deuteronomy 4:34; 5:15), the power that makes the claim exclusive.

“Which he wrote for you” stresses a written law, reminding the reader that Israel was not left to guess. The prohibition on fearing other gods closes this verse and the next, a refrain hammered in three times in four verses.

The verb shift is to forgetting, not only disobeying. Deuteronomy repeatedly warns Israel not to forget the covenant once settled in the land (Deuteronomy 4:23; 6:12); this is what that forgetting looked like.

The promise attached is deliverance from all enemies, precisely what Israel did not receive when Assyria came. The verse makes the chapter's argument in a single line: the enemy prevailed because the condition was not kept.

“Their former manner” uses mishpat again, the word the settlers used for the “manner” of the God of the land in verse 26. They learned his manner and kept their own anyway.

Three generations are counted, fathers, children and grandchildren, bringing the account down to the writer's own time. The graven images, pesilim, are carved figures, the concrete objects behind the gods named in verses 30–31.