* Sargon does not mention where he deported the Israelites
to, but we learn this from the Second Book of Kings (xvii.
6; xviii. 11). There has been much controversy as to whether
Samaria was taken by Shalmanoser, as the Hebrew chronicler
seems to believe (2 Kings xvii. 3-6; xviii. 9, 10), or by
Sargon, as the Assyrian scribes assure us. At first, several
scholars suggested a solution of the difficulty by arguing
that Shalmaneser and Sargon were one and the same person;
afterwards the theory took shape that Samaria was really
captured in the reign of Shalmaneser, but by Sargon, who was
in command of the besieging army at the time, and who
transferred this achievement, of which he was naturally
proud, to the beginning of his own reign. The simplest
course seems to be to accept for the present the testimony
of contemporary documents, and place the fall of Samaria at
the beginning of the reign of Sargon, being the time
indicated by Sargon in his inscriptions.
Sargon made the whole territory into a province; an Assyrian governor was installed in the palace of the kings of Israel, and soon the altars of the strange gods smoked triumphantly by the side of the altars of Jahveh (722 B.C.).*
* Kings xvii. 24-41, a passage to which I shall have
occasion to refer farther on in the present volume. The
following is a list of the kings of Israel, after the
division of the tribes:—
[In this table father and son are shown by a perpendicular
line. The king’s name in italics signifies that he died a
violent death.—Tr.]
Thus fell Samaria, and with Samaria the kingdom of Israel, and with Israel the last of the states which had aspired, with some prospect of success, to rule over Syria. They had risen one after another during the four centuries in which the absence of the stranger had left them masters of their own fate—the Hittites in the North, the Hebrews and the Philistines in the South, and the Aramæans and Damascus in the centre; each one of these races had enjoyed its years of glory and ambition in the course of which it had seemed to prevail over its rivals. Then those whose territory lay at the extremities began to feel the disadvantages of their isolated position, and after one or two victories gave up all hope of ever establishing a supremacy over the whole country. The Hittite sphere of influence never at any time extended much further southwards than the sources of the Orontes, while that of the Hebrews in their palmiest days cannot have gone beyond the vicinity of Hamath. And even progress thus far had cost both Hebrews and Hittites a struggle so exhausting that they could not long maintain it. No sooner did they relax their efforts, than those portions of Coele-Syria which they had annexed to their original territory, being too remote from the seat of power to feel its full attraction, gradually detached themselves and resumed their independence, their temporary suzerains being too much exhausted by the intensity of their own exertions to retain hold over them. Damascus, which lay almost in the centre, at an equal distance from the Euphrates and the “river of Egypt,” could have desired no better position for grouping the rest of Syria round her.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a sketch by Flandin.