Biblion Bible Commentary
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Samaria Taken
2 Kings 17:1-6
1 In the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah, Hoshea the son of Elah began to reign in Samaria over Israel for nine years. · WEB
Two hundred years of the northern kingdom end in six verses — a failed appeal to Egypt, a three-year siege, and a road east.
He did that which was evil in Yahweh's sight, yet not as the kings of Israel who were before him 2 Kings 17:2.
The last king of Israel gets a comparatively mild verdict, which is the bleakest way this book could have opened the chapter. Hoshea is not the worst of them. The kingdom does not fall because its final king was uniquely wicked; it falls because the account has run out, and the man holding the throne when the bill arrives is a middling example of the type.
The king of Assyria discovered a conspiracy in Hoshea; for he had sent messengers to So king of Egypt, and offered no tribute 2 Kings 17:4.
The last political act of the northern kingdom is a secret appeal to Egypt and a withheld payment. It is the strategy Israel and Judah both reach for whenever Assyria presses — play the southern empire against the northern one — and the prophets of this period name it as the substitute for trusting God Hosea 7:11 Isaiah 30:1–3. Egypt sends nothing. Hoshea is arrested and imprisoned before the siege even begins, so the capital holds out for three years without a king.
Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years 2 Kings 17:5.
Three years is a long defense, and the book gives it half a verse. Samaria — Omri's ridge, bought for two talents of silver and fortified by four dynasties, holds longer than anyone expects and falls anyway.
In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away to Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes 2 Kings 17:6.
The destinations are named precisely — a river valley in upper Mesopotamia and towns in the Median hills, hundreds of miles apart. That is the Assyrian method working as designed: scatter a population thinly across the empire so it cannot reassemble, and it ceases to be a people. Ten tribes go out of the land here and do not come back as a nation.
The restraint of the reporting is the point. Two centuries of history — Jeroboam's calves, Ahab and Jezebel, Carmel, Jehu's chariot, Elisha's whole ministry, nineteen kings and nine dynasties — end in six verses with no lament, no scene at the wall, no last words. The book has been arguing that this was coming since the golden calves were set up, and when it arrives it is reported like a customs entry.
And then the narrative stops. What follows is the longest sustained explanation in the work, because the writer knows exactly what his readers are going to ask, and the fact of the fall is not the answer. The next seventeen verses are.
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