Biblion Bible Commentary
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They Feared Yahweh and Served Their Gods
2 Kings 17:24-41
24 The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, from Cuthah, from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and lived in its cities. · WEB
Foreign settlers move into the emptied north, learn Yahweh's law from a deported priest, and add him to the collection — the exact sin that emptied it.
The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, from Cuthah, from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria 2 Kings 17:24.
The second half of the deportation policy: with Israel scattered east, populations from five other conquered places are moved in. It breaks any remaining claim to the land and produces a province with no common history, which is the point.
So it was, at the beginning of their dwelling there, that they didn't fear Yahweh. Therefore Yahweh sent lions among them 2 Kings 17:25.
The settlers read the lion attacks in the standard terms of their world: every territory has a god, and this one is offended because nobody knows his procedures. Their report to the emperor is entirely sincere — they don't know the law of the god of the land 2 Kings 17:26 — and their diagnosis is half right in a way they cannot see. The land does belong to a God with a law, and ignorance of him is genuinely dangerous. What they have wrong is the category: they think they have a local problem to manage.
"Carry there one of the priests whom you brought from there; and let him go and dwell there, and let him teach them the law of the god of the land" 2 Kings 17:27.
So an Assyrian emperor orders religious instruction for a province, and a deported Israelite priest is sent back to Bethel — of all places, the calf shrine — to teach people how to fear Yahweh 2 Kings 17:28. It is one of the strangest sentences in the Old Testament: the law of Moses taught in the north by imperial decree, in the town that had been the headquarters of its corruption, after everyone who should have been taught it was gone.
However every nation made gods of their own, and put them in the houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made 2 Kings 17:29.
The instruction is received and filed alongside everything else. The list of imported gods is given by name, ending with the Sepharvites who burned their children in the fire 2 Kings 17:31 — the practice that had just cost the previous tenants the country, arriving with the new ones.
They feared Yahweh, and also served their own gods 2 Kings 17:33.
The verse is repeated three times in the closing paragraph, and it is the chapter's verdict. This is not a rejection of Israel's God. It is his inclusion — respectfully, seriously, with priests appointed and sacrifices offered — in a portfolio. And it is precisely, exactly the thing that destroyed the kingdom whose empty houses these people are living in. The land changed occupants and the sin stayed.
"You shall not fear other gods... but you shall fear Yahweh, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt with great power and with an outstretched arm" 2 Kings 17:35–36.
The covenant terms are quoted back at length, and the incompatibility is the whole content: not that Yahweh must be first, but that he cannot be one of several. Elijah had put the same thing as a question on Carmel 1 Kings 18:21, and it is being answered here in the negative by a population that has never heard of him.
They do as their fathers did to this day 2 Kings 17:41.
The chapter ends in the present tense of the writer, generations later, with the arrangement still running. The mixed worship of this province becomes the long quarrel between Jews and Samaritans, and a woman at a well will raise it with a tired traveler seven centuries on John 4:20 — where the answer given is not which mountain, but spirit and truth John 4:23–24.
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