Forced deportation
Assyrian deportation of Israel
← View on the mapWhy it happened
Israel's vassal king Hoshea withheld tribute and appealed to Egypt for support, so Assyria besieged his capital; Neo-Assyrian imperial policy then dissolved the rebellious kingdom through mass deportation.12
The migration
The conquest came in stages.2 Tiglath-pileser III had already stripped Galilee and Gilead about 733–732 BCE, deporting their inhabitants.2 When Hoshea rebelled, Shalmaneser V besieged Samaria for several years, and after its fall about 722–720 BCE Sargon II claimed the conquest and the reduction of the land to the province of Samerina.2 Assyrian inscriptions record the deportation of some 27,290 — Sargon's own text says 27,280 — of Samaria's people.23 The deportees were resettled in Halah, on the Habor (Khabur) river in Gozan, and in 'the cities of the Medes'; their later histories cannot be reconstructed as one uniformly assimilated group.21 Assyria repopulated the region with deportees from Babylonia, Elam and Syria.2 Finkelstein and Silberman reckon only about a fifth — roughly 40,000 — of the northern population was removed across both phases.44 Many others fled south to Judah, where Jerusalem expanded about fivefold.5 The northern kingdom never revived.6
Sources
- BHebrew Bible. 2000. II Kings (Melakhim II), ch. 17. Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), King James Version link
- AYounger KL. 1998. The Deportations of the Israelites. Journal of Biblical Literature 117 201–227. doi:10.2307/3266980
- BElayi J. 2017. Sargon II, King of Assyria. SBL Press
- BFinkelstein I, Silberman NA. 2001. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. Free Press
- AFinkelstein I. 2015. Migration of Israelites into Judah after 720 BCE: An Answer and an Update. Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 127 188–206. doi:10.1515/zaw-2015-0011
- BHasegawa S, Levin C, Radner K. 2018. The Last Days of the Kingdom of Israel. De Gruyter