Sargon II Destroys Samaria and the Kingdom of Israel
Samaria fell to the Assyrians in 722 BC after a siege of about three years, and the northern kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. Israel had been an Assyrian tributary since Tiglath-Pileser III's campaigns in the 730s, which had already stripped it of Galilee and the Transjordan and reduced it to the hill country around its capital. Hoshea, its last king, stopped paying and sent envoys to Egypt for help that did not come — the standard miscalculation of small states on that frontier, and one the prophets denounced at the time. Shalmaneser V began the siege and Sargon II claimed the capture, and which of them took it is one of the standing puzzles of the period, since Sargon seized the throne in the same year and had reason to claim it. Sargon's inscription records deporting 27,290 people. The deportation was Assyrian policy rather than punishment. Populations were moved hundreds of miles and resettled among strangers to break local identity and supply labour, and people from Babylonia, Elam and Syria were settled in Samaria in exchange. That exchange is the origin of the Samaritans, and of a religious division with Judah that was still live in the first century. The deported Israelites were absorbed and disappear from the record, which produced two and a half millennia of speculation about the ten lost tribes. Judah survived by paying, and Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem twenty-one years later without taking it. The Samaritan community still exists, numbering a few hundred, and keeps its own Pentateuch.
- Year: 722 BCE
- Category: Military
