Places of the Bible

Samaria

A capital bought for two talents of silver, and the last thing recorded about it is a list of who was moved in.

Omri buys the hill from a man called Shemer and builds a city on it and names it after the seller. It becomes the capital of the northern kingdom for two centuries, and every king of Israel after him rules from it. Ahab builds a house of ivory there and an altar for Baal in a house he builds for Baal in Samaria, which the account records in the same sentence as his marriage.

Where it appears1 Kings 16 · 2 Kings 6 to 7 · 2 Kings 17

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The movements, in the order the text gives them.

The Account of Samaria

01
1 Kings 16:23-24
He bought the hill Samaria of Shemer
A capital begins as a property transaction, and the city keeps the name of the man who sold the ground.
The king builds the capital, but the man who sells him the hill supplies its name. Shemer is not given a dynasty, a battle, or a speech. He gets something rather durable: Samaria. The Book of 1 Kings preserves the previous owner's identity even as Omri turns his property into a royal city. Power changes hands; the name remembers whose ground it was.
The purchase sits between two very different kinds of notice. Before it comes the defeat of Omri's rival Tibni, after a divided struggle for the throne. After it comes the judgment that Omri did worse than his predecessors. The building of a capital is therefore recorded as an accomplishment without becoming a certificate of faithfulness. A hill can be developed while a kingdom's worship deteriorates. The chapter keeps both facts in view.
The two talents make this an actual transaction, not merely a claim that the king took possession. Nothing here establishes whether the price was generous or grudging. That restraint matters when the same book reaches Ahab and Naboth in chapter 21. Omri acquires a named owner's hill by purchase; his son takes a named owner's vineyard after murder. The landowners do not disappear into the royal achievements.
Verse by verse
1. 16:23
  The six years in Tirzah belong within the twelve-year reign stated here; they are not six additional years after it.
2. 16:24
  A talent is a unit of weight. The price is a weight of silver, not two coins, and this verse supplies no reliable conversion into modern purchasing power.
3. 16:24
  Samaria here names the city built on the purchased hill. Later passages can use the same name for a wider territory, as the plural cities of Samaria in 2 Kings 17:24 makes clear.
Worth knowing
The Hebrew names sound closer than their English forms suggest: Shemer and Shomeron, rendered Samaria. Verse 24 explicitly connects the city's name with the hill's previous owner. This is not a modern guess based on a similar sound; the naming explanation belongs to the biblical account itself.
1 Kings 16:23-24
King James Version · 2 verses
16:23In the thirty and first year of Asa king of Judah began Omri to reign over Israel, twelve years: six years reigned he in Tirzah.
16:24And he bought the hill Samaria of Shemer for two talents of silver, and built on the hill, and called the name of the city which he built, after the name of Shemer, owner of the hill, Samaria.
02
1 Kings 16:29-33
He reared up an altar for Baal
The account lists the marriage, the temple and the grove in one breath, and says he did more to provoke than all the kings before him.
The comparison has already been used for Omri: worse than all that were before him. Now his son receives it again. The Book of 1 Kings is not merely changing the name on the throne; it is recording an escalation. The phrase as if it had been a light thing does not minimize Jeroboam's sins. It makes Ahab's additions more appalling within the book's own judgment.
Those additions have an address. Baal has an altar inside a house built for him in Samaria. This is not a passing fascination that remains behind palace doors. The capital now contains a place where the king's chosen worship can be practiced. The hill bought in the earlier verses has acquired a religious establishment.
Jezebel's family connection is stated plainly, but the verbs keep returning to Ahab. He went, served, worshipped, reared up, built, and made. The passage does not permit the king to vanish behind his wife's name. Nor does it merge everything into one indistinct kind of false worship: Jeroboam's precedent, Baal's temple, and the grove are separately identified. The chapter is specific about what changed, who did it, and how the LORD regarded it. Royal construction is being entered into a very different set of accounts.
Verse by verse
1. 16:29
  Asa's regnal year synchronizes events in Judah with Ahab's accession in Israel. The two kingdoms have overlapping reigns, not one consecutive line of kings.
2. 16:31
  The text identifies Jezebel as the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Zidonians. It also explicitly names Ahab as the one who serves and worships Baal.
3. 16:33
  The Hebrew behind grove is the singular asherah, associated with Asherah worship. Here it is something Ahab makes, not an innocent reference to a patch of woodland.
Worth knowing
The later dismantling of Baal's temple in 2 Kings 10:26-29 preserves this distinction between forms of worship. Jehu destroys the Baal establishment, but the next qualification says that Jeroboam's golden calves remain. Removing Ahab's addition does not, in that account, amount to abandoning the older offense.
1 Kings 16:29-33
King James Version · 5 verses
16:29And in the thirty and eighth year of Asa king of Judah began Ahab the son of Omri to reign over Israel: and Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty and two years.
16:30And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD above all that were before him.
16:31And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshipped him.
16:32And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria.
16:33And Ahab made a grove; and Ahab did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.
03
2 Kings 6:24-31
An ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver
The siege reaches the point where two women make an agreement about their children. The king tears his clothes and the people see sackcloth underneath.
The first measure of the siege is a price; the next is a mother's testimony. An ass's head costs eighty pieces of silver. Before that number can become a distant curiosity, the appeal from the wall brings the famine into a household. The woman is not simply asking the king for a meal. She reports that one child has been boiled and eaten, while the other woman has hidden the child promised for the next day. The horror is in the complaint itself.
The king initially answers as a provider with nothing to provide. Neither threshing floor nor winepress can supply the help she requests. Then he hears a case no ordinary royal judgment can repair. The chapter does not furnish speeches explaining the women's inner lives. It gives the terms of their arrangement and the fate of the first son. That is enough.
His torn clothing reveals sackcloth already against his skin. The public sees mourning that was previously concealed; the text does not say he has just put it on. Yet the next public act is an oath against Elisha's life. The prophet's head becomes the proposed answer to a city's hunger. The sequence keeps the king's distress and his threat together, without pretending that the first makes the second just.
Verse by verse
1. 6:24
  The Syrian bands mentioned in 6:23 are followed here by Benhadad gathering his whole army. The end of those raids is not a statement that no later Syrian campaign occurred.
2. 6:25
  Dove's dung has been understood literally and as a name for plant food. The identification is disputed; the verse clearly emphasizes desperate scarcity and an extraordinary price.
3. 6:30
  Sackcloth is discovered beneath the king's torn outer clothing. The verse reports its presence but does not itself settle the sincerity or adequacy of his repentance.
4. 6:31
  The threatened prophet is Elisha, son of Shaphat, not Elijah. The oath targets his life; the passage has not identified him as the one who imposed the siege.
Worth knowing
Deuteronomy 28:53-57 describes siege hunger turning parents against their own children and breaking the most intimate household bonds. The Samaria passage gives a concrete case resembling that covenant warning. Its position in the Book of 2 Kings therefore connects military catastrophe with language already established in Israel's law.
2 Kings 6:24-31
King James Version · 8 verses
6:24And it came to pass after this, that Ben-hadad king of Syria gathered all his host, and went up, and besieged Samaria.
6:25And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver.
6:26And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my lord, O king.
6:27And he said, If the LORD do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress?
6:28And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow.
6:29So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son.
6:30And it came to pass, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he rent his clothes; and he passed by upon the wall, and the people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth within upon his flesh.
6:31Then he said, God do so and more also to me, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat shall stand on him this day.
04
2 Kings 7:3-9
We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings
Four lepers reason their way out of a siege, find the camp abandoned, and stop looting long enough to decide silence would be wrong.
Their decision begins with arithmetic, not a declaration of heroic faith. Staying means death; entering the city also means death; surrendering to the Syrians leaves at least the possibility of survival. The four men do not announce that the enemy has fled. They go because the enemy might spare them. The empty camp is a discovery, not the premise of their plan.
The repeated twilight quietly joins two movements: the men rise to go, and the army rises to flee. Between them stands the explanation that the Lord caused the Syrians to hear a great host. The claim about hired Hittite and Egyptian kings belongs to the frightened army, not to the account's description of actual reinforcements. Nor does the text say that four pairs of footsteps were amplified into chariots. That attractive detail is not supplied.
Then comes the thoroughly unsmoothed response: food, drink, valuables, a hiding place, and another trip. The men recognize the wrongness of silence only after they have begun securing their own advantage. Their fear of consequences is stated alongside that recognition. The Book of 2 Kings does not have to turn them into spotless heroes to make their decision matter. Four men at the gate can carry the news the palace does not possess.
Verse by verse
1. 7:3
  The biblical category translated leprous should not automatically be equated with a single modern diagnosis. Their position at the gate matters to the contrast between exclusion and access to the news.
2. 7:6
  The hired foreign armies are the Syrians' explanation of the sound. The verse attributes the sound to the Lord, not to an actual rescue force hired by Israel.
3. 7:8
  Two visits to tents and two acts of hiding the proceeds precede the decision to report. The account does not portray immediate, entirely selfless sharing.
4. 7:9
  Good tidings here means news of the abandoned camp and available provisions. The men identify withholding it as wrong and also express fear of the consequences of delay.
Worth knowing
The four men are never named, and this passage records no healing of their condition. Leviticus 13:45-46 supplies the legal background for exclusion associated with uncleanness. The deliverance described here is therefore not another version of Naaman's cleansing in 2 Kings 5: men still identified as leprous become bearers of news.
2 Kings 7:3-9
King James Version · 7 verses
7:3And there were four leprous men at the entering in of the gate: and they said one to another, Why sit we here until we die?
7:4If we say, We will enter into the city, then the famine is in the city, and we shall die there: and if we sit still here, we die also. Now therefore come, and let us fall unto the host of the Syrians: if they save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die.
7:5And they rose up in the twilight, to go unto the camp of the Syrians: and when they were come to the uttermost part of the camp of Syria, behold, there was no man there.
7:6For the Lord had made the host of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great host: and they said one to another, Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us.
7:7Wherefore they arose and fled in the twilight, and left their tents, and their horses, and their asses, even the camp as it was, and fled for their life.
7:8And when these lepers came to the uttermost part of the camp, they went into one tent, and did eat and drink, and carried thence silver, and gold, and raiment, and went and hid it; and came again, and entered into another tent, and carried thence also, and went and hid it.
7:9Then they said one to another, We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace: if we tarry till the morning light, some mischief will come upon us: now therefore come, that we may go and tell the king’s household.
05
2 Kings 17:6-23
Until the LORD removed Israel out of his sight
The fall is written as a reckoning rather than a battle. The chapter lists the warnings, the prophets sent, and what was done anyway.
Samaria falls in one verse; explaining the fall takes the rest of this passage. The military and diplomatic circumstances have already been given: Hoshea withheld tribute, approached Egypt, and faced Assyria's siege. The Book of 2 Kings now changes the scale of its explanation. A broken arrangement with Assyria explains the immediate crisis; a broken covenant with the LORD explains the judgment in which the book places it.
The first remembered event is not the founding of Samaria but the departure from Egypt. The people carried away had once been brought out. Between those movements lies a long sequence of refusals: other gods feared, forbidden sanctuaries built, warnings rejected, necks hardened. The accusations cover both royal precedent and the people's participation. From the watchtower to the fortified city, the landscape itself bears the evidence. The list finally reaches sons and daughters passed through fire. The book does not allow an account of changing religious practices to conceal what happened to children.
Equally important is the repeated presence of the prophetic word. Israel does not fall here because no warning reached it. The prophets speak, and the people refuse to hear. Removed from his sight becomes the passage's repeated conclusion, in verses 18, 20, and 23, answering the evil done in his sight in verse 17. Judah remains, but the next sentence immediately denies Judah any comfortable claim to innocence: it too has disobeyed. The surviving kingdom is not standing outside the argument. Samaria's fall is recorded with named destinations and an enduring consequence, but the explanation is not a celebration of Assyrian greatness. It is an account of a people losing the land after refusing the word.
Verse by verse
1. 17:6
  The capture is dated to Hoshea's ninth year, after the three-year siege mentioned in 17:5. The verse names deportation destinations rather than describing every inhabitant's individual fate.
2. 17:9
  From the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city spans small outposts and fortified settlements. The expression emphasizes the breadth of the practice, not a single shrine in the capital.
3. 17:13
  Both Israel and Judah are named as recipients of prophetic warnings. The appeal refers back to commandments already given, not to an obligation invented after the disaster.
4. 17:17
  Sold themselves echoes the accusation against Ahab in 1 Kings 21:20. Here the language describes the people collectively, extending responsibility beyond one king.
5. 17:18-19
  Judah is the remaining kingdom in the argument, but verse 19 explicitly includes its disobedience. The survival statement is not a declaration that Judah has kept the covenant.
6. 17:23
  Unto this day marks the continuing situation from the account's standpoint, not a statement that nothing more will ever be said of Samaria. Acts 8:14 later reports that Samaria has received the word of God.
Worth knowing
In 17:15, followed vanity and became vain reproduces a Hebrew wordplay: hebel is followed by a related verb, wayyehbalu. The worshippers become like the emptiness they pursue. Jeremiah 2:5 uses the same linked expressions, giving this line a close verbal parallel rather than merely a broadly similar warning against idols.
2 Kings 17:6-23
King James Version · 18 verses
17:6In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.
17:7For so it was, that the children of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, which had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods,
17:8And walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel, which they had made.
17:9And the children of Israel did secretly those things that were not right against the LORD their God, and they built them high places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city.
17:10And they set them up images and groves in every high hill, and under every green tree:
17:11And there they burnt incense in all the high places, as did the heathen whom the LORD carried away before them; and wrought wicked things to provoke the LORD to anger:
17:12For they served idols, whereof the LORD had said unto them, Ye shall not do this thing.
17:13Yet the LORD testified against Israel, and against Judah, by all the prophets, and by all the seers, saying, Turn ye from your evil ways, and keep my commandments and my statutes, according to all the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you by my servants the prophets.
17:14Notwithstanding they would not hear, but hardened their necks, like to the neck of their fathers, that did not believe in the LORD their God.
17:15And they rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified against them; and they followed vanity, and became vain, and went after the heathen that were round about them, concerning whom the LORD had charged them, that they should not do like them.
17:16And they left all the commandments of the LORD their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal.
17:17And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.
17:18Therefore the LORD was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight: there was none left but the tribe of Judah only.
17:19Also Judah kept not the commandments of the LORD their God, but walked in the statutes of Israel which they made.
17:20And the LORD rejected all the seed of Israel, and afflicted them, and delivered them into the hand of spoilers, until he had cast them out of his sight.
17:21For he rent Israel from the house of David; and they made Jeroboam the son of Nebat king: and Jeroboam drave Israel from following the LORD, and made them sin a great sin.
17:22For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them;
17:23Until the LORD removed Israel out of his sight, as he had said by all his servants the prophets. So was Israel carried away out of their own land to Assyria unto this day.

Why it matters

The city’s two most memorable chapters are about hunger and about the end. Besieged by Syria, it starves until an ass’s head sells for eighty pieces of silver and two women agree to eat their sons, and the deliverance comes through four lepers at the gate who find an empty camp and say we do not well, this day is a day of good tidings and we hold our peace. And then 2 Kings 17, which is not a battle but an audit: what Israel did, for how long, after how many prophets, and who the king of Assyria brought in to live in the cities instead.

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Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.

1 Kings 14:21-16:28
Blood upon Every Throne
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1 Kings 16:29-17:24
The Ravens and the Widow's Barrel
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2 Kings 6:1-7:20
They That Be with Us Are More
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2 Kings 17
Samaria Carried Away
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2 Kings 17:1-41
Until the LORD Removed Israel
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Every release whose passage falls inside these chapters, playing here.

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Samaria

The Account of Samaria

He bought the hill Samaria of Shemer

Verse by verse

1 Kings 16:23-24

He reared up an altar for Baal

Verse by verse

1 Kings 16:29-33

An ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver

Verse by verse

2 Kings 6:24-31

We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings

Verse by verse

2 Kings 7:3-9

Until the LORD removed Israel out of his sight

Verse by verse

2 Kings 17:6-23

Why it matters

The music

Blood upon Every Throne

The Ravens and the Widow's Barrel

They That Be with Us Are More

Samaria Carried Away

Until the LORD Removed Israel

The videos

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