From Empire to Exile
The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy
internal fighting between groups which supported Assyrian policies or opposed any capitulation to them racked the northern state … The deaths of Jeroboam and Uzziah … came at the very moment when Assyria regained her power and renewed her push to the west” (Lawrence Boadt, Reading the Old Testament, 1984, p. 312). In the midst of their own domestic and internal difficulties, Israelite leaders had to consider the intrusions of Assyria into their affairs. By the time of Assyria’s TiglathPileser III, Israel’s King Menahem (ca. 752-742 B.C.) had to pay enormous sums of tribute—protection money on a national scale—to induce the Assyrian monarch to leave him and his people in peace (2 Kings 15:19-20). A few years later King Pekah (ca. 740-732 B.C.) rebelled against Assyria, only to be forced to surrender and pay a huge ransom to retain his throne (2 Kings 15:19-20). Pekah’s disloyalty set in motion the first step in the Assyrians’ policy of dealing with unruly peoples— turning the offending kingdom into The Assyrian king Sargon II receives a report from an official, possibly one of a vassal state. his generals. Sargon took more than According to Assyria’s foreign 27,000 Israelites captive into Assyria. policy, those who would rebel a second time would forfeit their political control and be replaced by a vassal king whose loyalty the Assyrian government could count on. The Assyrians would also reduce the amount of territory the vassal would control, with the Assyrian monarch instituting his direct rule over at least some of the original kingdom. A second rebellion would also trigger the deportation of significant numbers of the offending population. Finding themselves among strangers whose language they did not understand (Jeremiah 5:15) and whose land and culture were unfamiliar to them, the deportees would have little hope of successfully revolting against their Assyrian masters. Tiglath-Pileser initiated these steps against the northern kingdom in response to King Pekah’s alliance with Damascus, his second attempt to revolt (ca. 734 B.C). The first deportation of Israelites (ca. 733-732 B.C.), sometimes referred to as the Galilean captivity, took part of the population
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—principally drawn from the tribes of Naphtali, Reuben, Gad and the portion of Manasseh living east of the Jordan River—to northern Syria and northern and northwestern Mesopotamia (2 Kings 15:27-29; 1 Chronicles 5:26). Tiglath-Pileser III also occupied the greater part of Galilee and Gilead and divided Israelite territory itself into four new provinces: Magidu, Duru, Gilead and Samaria. The last straw
Photos: Scott Ashley
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Should a people rebel a third time, the official Assyrian response was firm and final: The nation would cease to exist. The Assyrian army would forcibly remove virtually the entire population into exile. The Assyrians would scatter the deportees throughout their empire and repopulate the vacated territories with people from distant and far-flung regions. Once removed from their homeland, and with their lands now settled by others, the scattered exiles would have less means or motivation to rebel Assyrian soldiers demolish a walled against Assyrian control. city while its people are taken into capA pro-Assyrian but unrelitivity. Scenes like this were repeated able Israelite vassal, King Hoshea throughout the kingdom of Israel. (ca. 732-722 B.C.), set in motion the events that brought the northern kingdom’s dissolution. Hoping to receive critical aid from Egypt, to the south, Hoshea betrayed Assyrian trust around 724 B.C. (2 Kings 18:9-10). Shalmaneser V responded with a siege (ca. 724-722 B.C.) that resulted in the fall of Israel’s capital city, Samaria. At that point the northern kingdom ceased to exist as a political entity. History records a postscript to the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C. Having successfully entered Israel’s Promised Land via its victory over the northern kingdom, the Assyrians would soon return to attack the southern kingdom, Judah. In 701 B.C. the Assyrian army, led by Sennacherib, captured virtually all of Judah’s fortified cities (2 Kings 18:9, 13-14) and deported thousands of Jews. Jerusalem, however, did not fall in this invasion, and the southern kingdom recovered sufficiently to last another 115 years before Babylon’s armies conquered and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C.