The biblical account of the deportation of the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom to Assyria is undoubtedly an exaggeration of the scale of the tragedy. For instance, the book of Kings and the books of the prophets are full of statements such as the following: “So the people of Israel were taken from their homeland into exile in Assyria, and they are still there” (2 Kings 17:23). Such statements have always been understood as implying that the Israelites were resettled in Assyria in their totality. This has given rise to a myth regarding the loss of the ten northern tribes, whose traces are still being sought to this day on the enormous space that stretches from Mesopotamia to the Japanese islands. It is not difficult to understand why the keepers of the tradition (the authors of the Bible) acted as they did: for didactic reasons and to edify future generations, they allowed themselves to overtly exaggerate the scale of the tragedy, presenting it as punishment for idolatry and for failure to obey the Lord’s commandments. The biblical text very clearly defines the reason for the expulsion and its scale: “They forsook all the commands of the Lord their God and made for themselves two idols cast in the shape of calves, and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the starry hosts, and they worshiped Baal. They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire. They practiced divination and sorcery and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the Lord, provoking him to anger. So the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them from his presence. Only the tribe of Judah was left” (2 Kings 17:16-18). The exaggeration of the scale of the punishment was intended to serve as a firm warning against idolatry and violating the divine commandments in the future. If from the point of view of religion and morality this exaggeration was justified, from the point of view of history its result was to mythologize the subsequent fate of the northern tribes.
The Assyrian sources that we have at our disposal give an incomparably more modest picture of the deportation of the Israelites to Assyria. For instance, Sargon II talks of only 27,290 people taken from the region of Samaria. If we add to this number the 13,500 inhabitants who had been driven out earlier from Galilee and Gilead by Tiglath-Pileser III (from the regions which belonged to the tribes of Naphtali, Zebulun, Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben), then the total number of those deported would be not more than 41,000. However, the population of the Israelite kingdom in the 8th century was at least half a million people. Consequently, we may talk of the deportation of not more than one tenth of the population of the Northern Kingdom. Even if we take as our basis the rather more modest figures given by the archaeologists Finkelstein and Silberman, who suppose that the population of the Israelite kingdom at this time was 350,000 at most, the number of those deported would still not exceed one eighth of the total population. There is no reason at all to suspect the Assyrians of artificially lowering the real figures for those taken prisoner and deported. In this respect the Assyrians had the reputation of being the most boastful conquerors of the ancient Near East (a distinction which they shared with the Egyptians). Unlike the more truthful Babylonians, who sometimes admitted their own failures, the Assyrians and the Egyptians never mentioned their defeats and always strongly exaggerated both the scale of their victories and the number of prisoners and trophies that they took. There are several figures given by the Bible which could help us form an overall view of the size of the population of the Northern Kingdom. According to the calculation made by Moses and Eleazar before the conquest of Canaan, i.e. in the 12th century BCE, the northern tribes alone (together with the tribe of Benjamin, but without the Levites) numbered 503,000 (Numbers 26:1-51). Of course, as was then accepted practice, only adult men were counted. A new census conducted during the reign of King David, i.e. in the 10th century BCE, showed that on the territory which later became the Northern Kingdom lived 800,000 men (2 Kings 24:9). Admittedly, this number included not just members of the northern tribes, but also all non-Israelite males. Finally, in the second half of the 8th century, shortly before the fall of Samaria, the Israelite king Menahem “exacted fifty shekels of silver from every wealthy person” in order to pay the tribute of 1000 talents of silver to the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (2 Kings 15:20). Knowing that 50 shekels of silver amounts to one mina, and one talent of silver contains 60 minas, it is not difficult for us to calculate that during Menahem’s reign the population of the Northern Kingdom numbered at least 60,000 wealthy people. We may suppose that by ‘wealthy people’ the Bible meant simply relatively well-off people who could be subjected to an additional tax in order to pay the tribute to the Assyrians. Given that at that time each of these people had a large family of at least 6-7 persons, it transpires that the Israelite kingdom comprised at least 400,000 who belonged to the class of the wealthy. Of course, there were also large numbers of poor people, who were unable to pay additional taxes. Thus, independently of the archaeological data – which in themselves can be extremely controversial – we may confidently affirm that on the eve of the fall of Samaria the kingdom of Israel had a population of at least half a million. So those who were deported to Assyria were in fact only a small part of the total number of inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom.
Incidentally, the biblical sources themselves sometimes ‘let the cat out of the bag’ by de facto admitting a more modest scale for the deportation of the Israelites. For instance, the Judahite king Hezekiah, who ruled after the fall of the Northern Kingdom, “wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh, inviting them to come to the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem and celebrate the Passover to the Lord, the God of Israel” (2 Chronicles 30:1). If both these tribes had been deported in their entirety to remote Assyria, what reason did the king of Judah have for inviting them to a celebration in Jerusalem? It transpires that not only the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh were in their accustomed places, but other northern tribes as well. “The couriers went from town to town in Ephraim and Manasseh, as far as Zebulun, but the people scorned and ridiculed them. Nevertheless, some men from Asher, Manasseh and Zebulun humbled themselves and went to Jerusalem” (2 Chronicles 30:10-11). Subsequently, even the biblical text adds that “although most of the many people who came from Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun had not purified themselves, yet they ate the Passover, contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, ‘May the Lord, who is good, pardon everyone who sets his heart on seeking God—the Lord, the God of his fathers—even if he is not clean according to the rules of the sanctuary” (2 Chronicles 30:18-19). This is direct evidence of the fact that there can be no question of the northern tribes having been moved to Assyria in their entirety. There is no doubt that it was only a small part of the Israelites who were deported as Assyrian prisoners, while most remained where they were or departed to live temporarily or permanently in neighboring Judah. After the fall of Samaria the Bible often mentions “the people of Israel and Judah who lived in the towns of Judah”, and “all Judah and Israel who were there with the people of Jerusalem” (2 Chronicles 31:6; 35:18). As had happened on a number of occasions in the past following invasions, many inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom found temporary refuge in the mountain ranges of northern Palestine and the Judean Hills of the Southern Kingdom. The Bible tells us of nothing of one very important event for knowledge of which we are indebted to Assyrian sources. Around 720 BCE, i.e. one and a half to two years after the fall of Samaria, its inhabitants again rose up against the Assyrians. That year there were many Syrian, Phoenician, and Philistine cities which took action against Assyrian rule; Samaria joined them in the hope of liberation. If all its Israelite inhabitants had been deported, who was it then that rose up against the Assyrians? The new settlers from Syria and Mesopotamia had only just begun to turn up and, not having yet had time to make themselves properly at home in their new location, were not yet ready to offer resistance.
Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that although the deportation of the inhabitants of Samaria did not significantly change the demographic situation in central Palestine, from the political, economic, and cultural points of view it was a true catastrophe for the Northern Kingdom. The Assyrians had carried away with them the richest, economically active, and most cultural part of society. Israel was now headless; its body was in Palestine, while its head had been carried off to Assyria. The royal family and courtiers had been carried off into captivity, along with soldiers and their commanders, priests and prophets belonging to all cults, skillful craftsmen and rich landowners, scribes and civil servants – in short, all who represented authority, power, wealth, and knowledge in the Northern Kingdom. At the same time, the peasant farmers who formed the majority of the country’s population remained where they were. The Assyrians destroyed the large cities ringed by walls, but did not touch smaller settlements and towns that had no surrounding walls. Of all the Israelite tribes the ‘house of Joseph’ – or rather the tribes of Ephraim and the western half of Manasseh, who were historically the leaders of the northern group of Hebrew tribes – suffered most. It should not be forgotten that Israel was a federation of northern tribes whose backbone was the Canaanite-Amorite majority in northern and central Palestine. The nerve center and brain of this heterogeneous association was the ‘house of Joseph’, whose dominant position in both the alliance of Israelite tribes and Palestine itself was a matter not simply of its numerical size, but also of the special role it had played in the history of Canaan and Hyksos Egypt. The blow delivered by the Assyrians was so strong that the entire association was destroyed and the northern tribes reduced to a state of permanent political disintegration. Even after the collapse of the Assyrian empire the northern tribes were unable to unite or to restore their statehood. From now on, the role of leader of both groups of Hebrew tribes passed to the southern tribe of Judah.
The Assyrians were so afraid of possible resistance by the Israelites that they settled them in three regions that were far apart from one another. The place of settlement of the first group was the city of Gozan, which was situated on the eponymous tributary of the River Habor. By an irony of fate, the Israelites’ place of exile here was situated not far from Haran, the ancestral motherland of Abraham and the southern Hebrew tribes. Today the district of ancient Gozan lies on the border between Turkey and Syria, near to the modern cities of Ceylanpınar in Turkey and Ras al-Ayn in Syria. Some historians identify Gozan in the Bible with the ruins of Tell Halaf, one of the most ancient cities in the world, which is situated on the banks of the River Habor. Gozan, like Haran was probably initially the place of settlement of the semi-nomadic Amorite tribes. Later, they were pushed out by the Aramean tribes, who perhaps also intermarried with them. Ethnically, both these peoples were related branches of the same Western Semites, so they were quite quick to assimilate with one another. In any case, by the time the Israelites appeared there, this region was already fully Arameanized.
Another district to which the inhabitants of Samaria were sent was Halah. Unlike provincial Gozan, Halah was situated in the very heart of Assyria, not far from the country’s capital, Nineveh. The precise location of biblical Halah has never been identified to any degree of certainty; some people suppose that this was the ancient Assyrian city of Hallahhu, which lay to the north-east of Nineveh. If the Israelites who ended up in Gozan were surrounded by Arameans, those who were settled in Halah lived among Assyrians. Halah’s favorable position – from the point of view of geography – helped this group of Israelites rapidly become drawn into the economic and social life of Assyrian society.
Finally, another, third, group of inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom was settled in the very easternmost part of Assyria, in the cities of Media, i.e. in north-west Iran. From the point of view of geography, ethnicity, and culture, these people were in the least favorable position. This region was situated furthest from their motherland and was mainly populated by Medes – an Iranian-speaking people who were very different from the Israelites (as from all Semites) in both language and culture. With respect to social, economic, and cultural factors, this district was considered the least developed in the Assyrian empire. Evidently, the Israelites were sent there not just as punishment for their resistance, but also to civilize the local population.
What subsequently happened to the Israelites who were sent to Assyria? Neither the biblical nor Assyrian sources tell us anything about this. Admittedly, there are Assyrian documents which mention the names of court dignitaries and generals whose Israelite origin is beyond dispute. It is also known that parts of the Assyrian army – e.g. detachments of chariots – were formed entirely of Israelites. However, we have no information about the fate of the tens of thousands of Israelites who were taken to Assyria. It is probable that most of them were gradually assimilated by the surrounding population. This process would have proceeded quickest in the region of Gozan, where the Israelites were surrounded by Arameans, who were, like them, Western Semites and shared common roots with them. The intermingling process occurred more slowly in Halah, where the Samarians lived side by side with Assyrians, i.e. Eastern Semites, who were much more different from them than the Arameans. At the same time, Halah’s proximity to Nineveh and the country’s main centers accelerated the Israelites’ integration into Assyrian society and consequently their assimilation by it. The Israelites who found it most difficult to merge with the local population were those who had been taken to the Median cities in north-west Iran. It is very tempting to suppose that it was this group of Israelites who laid the foundations of the beginning of the Jewish community in Persia. However, at that time Judaism – or, to be more exact, Yahwism – was not yet the formalized monotheistic teaching which it subsequently became, closing off and protecting the Jewish communities from assimilation. In fact, this was probably only the old, semi-pagan form of the cult of Yahweh, which was very different from Moses’ consistent monotheism. Furthermore, by no means all inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom were followers of even this form of Yahwism; many continued to worship various Canaanite cults such as Baal and Asherah and were consequently receptive not just to local pagan cults, but also to local culture and traditions, which in turn made their assimilation inevitable. The Assyrian captivity of the Israelites did not end as swiftly as the Babylonian exile of the Judahites; the former inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom did not have a wall-like monotheistic faith to keep them separate from the local pagan population. So in time all three groups of Israelites mostly merged with the peoples who surrounded them. Possibly, some part of them managed at a later date, still under the rule of the Assyrians, to find their way back, openly or covertly, to their motherland.
There exists an opinion that some of the Israelites returned to Palestine together with the Judahites released by Cyrus after his conquest of Babylon. Yet the biblical sources do not support this version of events. Furthermore, the great distance that then separated these two places of settlement of the Israelites and Judahites and the almost two centuries which had passed since the fall of Samaria make this hypothesis extremely unlikely. If the Israelites had indeed wanted to return to Palestine, they would not have had to wait for permission from the King of Persia or to reach an agreement with the Judahites. They could have done so immediately after Assyria had been completely routed and destroyed, leaving a vacuum of power and authority, i.e. long before the Babylonian captivity of the Judahites themselves. However, no written document contains even the slightest hint of the Israelites returning to the territory which had been the Northern Kingdom. This is probably because there was no longer anyone left to return, since the former exiles had already been absorbed in the surrounding population. This is also exactly what happened with the peoples whom the Assyrians moved into the region of Samaria: they never returned to their former motherlands because they had intermarried with the Israelites who had been left in Samaria and became an integral part of this local population.
The Bible tells us the names of the places from which the new settlers came. Three of these places – Hamath, Avva, and Sepharvaim – were in the western part of central Syria, while two – Babylon and Cuthah – were in central Mesopotamia. The inhabitants of all these cities, like the Israelites, had been expelled from their native lands as punishment for repeatedly rising up against Assyria. The forced migrants mainly consisted of the same ethnic components that made up the population of the Northern Kingdom. For instance, the Syrian cities of Hamath, Sepharvaim, and Avva had initially been populated with Canaanites and had then been conquered by Amorites, and, finally, by Arameans. With the passing of time, all three of these related ethnoses became thoroughly intermingled to form a single West Semitic people speaking Aramean, but in terms of culture had absorbed much of the legacy of the Canaanites and Amorites. Those who came from Babylon and Cuthah differed only slightly from the inhabitants of central Syria: they too were mostly made up of Amorite and Aramean elements. Babylon had initially been founded and settled by Amorites, to whose number also belonged the most famous Babylonian king, Hammurabi II. Subsequently, this part of Mesopotamia was settled by Chaldeans, as was then the name for one of the groups of Aramean tribes who gradually took hold of Babylon, Cuthah, and neighboring cities. Admittedly, instead of the Canaanite element which was present among those who came from central Syria, the migrants from Babylon and Cuthah possessed a mixture of Akkadian (East Semitic) and Sumerian blood. This was perhaps their only slight ethnic difference from the Israelites. As for the Amorite and Canaanite components, there was a surfeit of these in the Northern Kingdom too. Furthermore, the Israelite tribes themselves came from nomadic Amorites, although they were not prepared to admit it and were for a long time the latter’s enemies in the fight to possess Canaan. In short, the new settlers were ethnically very close to the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom; their main difference from the latter was a more pronounced Aramean component and a predominantly Aramean language and culture. But the Arameans were not alien to the Israelites; they were not only the Israelites’ closest neighbors, but also an integral part of the population of the north of the country (the Golan Heights and even upper Galilee). Later, during the period of the Second Temple, the Aramean language (Aramaic) began to prevail throughout almost the whole of Palestine.
Non-biblical sources speak of another group of inhabitants whom the Assyrians deported to Samaria. In one of his inscriptions, executed in the seventh year of the reign of Sargon II, the Assyrian king states as follows: “I crushed the tribes of Tamud, Ibadidi, Marsimanu, and Haiapa, the Arabs who live, far away, in the desert and who know neither overseers nor official(s) and who had not (yet) brought their tribute to any king. I deported their survivors and settled (them) in Samaria.” Sargon was evidently referring to a group of Midian tribes who later became well-known as Arabs. Ethnically, they were nomadic Amorites and differed from the remaining settlers only from the point of view of culture and social characteristics. The fact that the Bible contains no mention of them is indication that their numbers were extremely small.
The Assyrians settled the inhabitants of Mesopotamian and Syrian cities not only in Samaria itself, but also throughout the region of the tribe of Ephraim and partly in the region of Manasseh, which is why the term ‘Samaria’ came to signify not just the capital of what had been the Northern Kingdom, but also the territory of these two tribes, territory which became a separate Assyrian province called ‘Samerina’. The new settlers brought with them the pagan cults which they had followed in their motherlands. The divinities they worshipped were, for the most part, versions of the same Canaanite and Amorite gods found in the territory of the Israelite tribes. Admittedly, some pagan faiths were characteristic only of Mesopotamia – for instance, the cult of Nergal, the god of death, the center of whose worship was the Mesopotamian city of Cuthah. It was not long before the newcomers, under the influence of the Israelites who remained in Samaria, began following the cult of Yahweh too. This process accelerated when the Assyrians permitted Israelite priests to return to the religious center at Bethel. The keepers of the tradition attribute this to the fact that the new settlers “did not worship the Lord; so he sent lions among them and they killed some of the people. It was reported to the king of Assyria: ‘The people you deported and resettled in the towns of Samaria do not know what the god of that country requires. He has sent lions among them, which are killing them off, because the people do not know what he requires.’ Then the king of Assyria gave this order: ‘Have one of the priests you took captive from Samaria go back to live there and teach the people what the god of the land requires.’ So one of the priests who had been exiled from Samaria came to live in Bethel and taught them how to worship the Lord” (2 Kings 17: 25-28).
Regardless of the causes or grounds used as justification for returning the Israelite priests, this biblical episode confirms a very important fact: the center for worship of Yahweh in Bethel was reactivated and the new settlers began professing a belief in Yahweh while simultaneously worshipping their own deities. The Bible describes this polytheism as follows: “Even while these people were worshiping the Lord, they were serving their idols” (2 Kings 17:41). Subsequently, the Aaronites from the Southern Kingdom on a number of occasions exploited the polytheism of the inhabitants of Samaria, the distinctive character of the northern Yahwism, and the fact that the Israelites had intermarried with the new settlers in order to refute the latter’s right to be considered heirs to the ‘house of Joseph’ and so themselves to lay claim to leadership of the descendants of the Hebrew tribes. For the most part, this criticism was unjust and lacking in objectivity. In reality, during the period of the First Temple, polytheism was universal and was characteristic not just of the Samaritans and inhabitants of what had been the Northern Kingdom, but of Judah too. Most worshippers of Yahweh in the northern and Southern Kingdoms were polytheists in just the same way as the Samaritans and worshipped two or more gods at the same time. The situation in the Southern Kingdom was no better than in the Northern. While attributing the fall of Samaria to the idolatry of its inhabitants, the Bible nevertheless tells us that “even Judah did not keep the commands of the Lord their God. They followed the practices Israel had introduced” (2 Kings 17:19). As for the Aaronites’ much later accusations of ethnic impurity directed against the Samaritans, they seem hardly serious, to put it mildly, when seen in the light of the Judahites’ comprehensive intermarriage with the Canaanites, Jebusites, Perizzites, Kenites, and Kenazzites in southern Canaan. The main reason for the Judahites’ hostility towards the Samarians was the traditional rivalry between Judah and Ephraim for hegemony over the descendants of the Hebrew tribes.
After the fall of the Northern Kingdom the ‘house of Joseph’ had its continuation in the Samaritans, the descendants of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh who had intermarried with settlers from cities in Syria and Mesopotamia. However, the alliance of the northern tribes ceased to exist, never to be revived, and the Southern Kingdom began fighting to annex the northern lands and population. Admittedly, for as long as Assyria existed and the lands of the northern tribes were five Assyrian provinces, only religious influence on these territories was possible. But following the defeat of Assyria, the Judahite king Josiah for a short time established his military and political authority in the region. Josiah destroyed all the pagan sacred places and tried to spread his religious reforms to the territory of the northern tribes. However, the arrival of the Egyptians and then of the Babylonians put an end to Judah’s rule, and the lands of the northern tribes became part of the Neo-Babylonian empire.