The fall of Samaria: 722, 720, or both?
2 Kings 17 says Shalmaneser V besieged Samaria for three years and took it. Sargon II's own annals say HE took it and deported 27,290 people. Both kings cannot be the conqueror. Or can they?
The fall of Samaria is one of the few Israelite events where the biblical account, an Assyrian royal annal, and an independent Babylonian chronicle all describe the same campaign. They do not match. 2 Kings 17 hands the conquest to Shalmaneser V. Sargon II's Khorsabad annals claim it for himself and report 27,290 deportees. The Babylonian Chronicle notes only that Shalmaneser V 'broke' the city. Three different sources, three different framings, and a roughly two-year gap between 722 and 720 BCE in which the situation seems to flip more than once. The standard chronology of the Northern Kingdom's end rides on how those gaps are filled.
What the text is doing
The biblical version is short and consistent. 2 Kings 17:3-6 tells it once: Hoshea pays tribute to Shalmaneser, then conspires with So king of Egypt, and Shalmaneser comes up against him, imprisons him, besieges Samaria for three years, and 'in the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried the Israelites away to Assyria.' 2 Kings 18:9-12 retells it in Hezekiah's regnal frame, dating the start of the siege to Hezekiah's fourth year and the fall to his sixth, and again names 'the king of Assyria' as the conqueror without specifying which one. The chapter never names Sargon II at all.
The Assyrian side is a different shape. Shalmaneser V reigned only five years (727-722 BCE) and left almost no surviving royal inscriptions. Sargon II, who succeeded him, produced extensive annals at the new capital Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad) and at Nimrud. Several of these inscriptions claim Samaria as his own conquest. The Khorsabad Display Inscription, the Khorsabad Annals, the Nimrud Prism, and the Great Summary Inscription all describe taking Samaria and deporting 27,290 people. The Babylonian Chronicle, by contrast, dates the action to Shalmaneser's reign with a brief, ambiguous verb that has been read both as 'broke' (the city) and as 'broke' (the throne, meaning Shalmaneser died).
The negative datum cuts the other way too. Sargon's inscriptions describe a campaign in his second year (720 BCE) into the west to put down a revolt led by Yau-bidi of Hamath. The revolt swept up Arpad, Damascus, Simirra, and 'Samerina.' Sargon claims to have crushed it, deporting populations and installing governors. If Samaria fell in 722 BCE, why is it in revolt in 720 BCE? And if it fell in 720 BCE under Sargon, what was Shalmaneser's three-year siege about?
The witnesses
Five textual witnesses bear on the question, and the disagreement is best seen by laying them next to each other. The biblical account in Kings names Shalmaneser as the king who comes up and besieges, but uses 'king of Assyria' for the conqueror. The Eponym Chronicle and Babylonian Chronicle Series A both date a Samaria-related action to Shalmaneser's reign in language that is unhelpfully terse. Sargon's Khorsabad inscriptions take credit for the same city. His Annals Year 2 attaches the conquest to the western campaign of 720 BCE, not to his accession year.
Five witnesses on the same city. The Bible names Shalmaneser as the besieger; the Khorsabad inscriptions name Sargon as the conqueror; the Babylonian Chronicle is brief; the Eponym Chronicle is silent on the city itself.
Three positions
The disagreement among Assyriologists and biblical historians falls into three recurring positions. None of them denies that Samaria fell to Assyria around 722-720 BCE. The disagreement is over how many actions to count, who to credit each one to, and how to read the Babylonian Chronicle's terse verb.
Three readings of the same dossier. Each has to account for the Khorsabad inscriptions, the biblical attribution to Shalmaneser, and the 720 BCE Yau-bidi revolt.
- Hayim Tadmor, 'The Campaigns of Sargon II of Assur: A Chronological-Historical Study' (JCS 12, 1958)
- Edward Lipinski, 'The Assyrian Campaign against Damascus in 733-732 BC' (1971)
- Bob Becking, The Fall of Samaria: An Historical and Archaeological Study (Brill, 1992)
- Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings (Anchor Bible, 1988)
- Nadav Naaman, 'The Historical Background to the Conquest of Samaria (720 BC)' (Biblica 71, 1990)
- Bustenay Oded, 'The Settlements of the Israelite and Judean Exiles in Mesopotamia' (1995)
- • Both kings' inscriptions describe distinct actions: Shalmaneser's siege (in the Eponym Chronicle and Babylonian Chronicle) and Sargon's conquest (in the Khorsabad Annals Year 2) are not in the same year
- • The 720 BCE Yau-bidi revolt explicitly includes 'Samerina' as a rebel city. A city that had just been crushed in 722 BCE would not normally appear among the coalition unless it had been re-organized and then revolted again
- • The 27,290 number ties tightly to Sargon's Year 2 framing across multiple inscriptions, not to an accession-year claim
- • The biblical 2 Kgs 17:24 names Hamath among the cities whose population was imported to Samaria. Sargon crushed Hamath in 720 BCE alongside Samaria, which fits a single re-population event after the Yau-bidi revolt
- • The Babylonian Chronicle's verb hepu ('break, ravage') for Shalmaneser at Samaria reads naturally as a real military action, distinct from Sargon's later one
- • Archaeologically, Tel Samaria shows one destruction layer at the end of Stratum VI, not two. A two-event hypothesis has to fit two captures into one stratigraphic horizon
- • The biblical account knows only one fall, attributed to 'the king of Assyria' at the end of a three-year siege. It does not narrate a second capture two years later
- • Sargon's silence about a prior conquest is awkward. If Shalmaneser had taken the city, Sargon's claim to have 'besieged and conquered Samerina' reads as appropriation
The campaign in time
The years around Samaria's fall, drawing on the Eponym Chronicle, Sargon's Khorsabad inscriptions, the Babylonian Chronicle, and 2 Kings.
What each position has to account for
The dual-deportation reading has to fit two captures into one archaeological destruction layer at Samaria and to explain why the biblical account knows only one fall. The single-conquest-under-Shalmaneser reading has to explain why Sargon's Year 2 inscriptions describe Samaria as actively in revolt and how the 27,290 deportation got attached so specifically to 720 BCE. The hybrid reading has to argue for a distinction between 'conquest' and 'organization' that the cuneiform texts do not always draw cleanly, and has to defend a two-phase action over a four-year window.
The choice depends partly on what weight one gives to the Babylonian Chronicle's brief verb. Read as 'he ravaged the city,' it makes Shalmaneser the conqueror and Sargon's claim a later appropriation. Read as 'his reign was broken' or as ambiguous, it lets Sargon's Year 2 framing carry more weight and pushes the conquest itself toward 720 BCE. The verb is the same in either reading. The interpretation is contested.
What no position disputes is the broad shape of the event. Samaria fell to Assyria. The Northern Kingdom ended. A large portion of the population was deported to Mesopotamia and the Median highlands. A new population was settled in Samaria's place. Foreign administrators ran the territory as an Assyrian province for the next century. The mixed population that resulted is what 2 Kings 17:24-41 calls 'the Samaritans,' the same group whose later descendants appear in Ezra-Nehemiah and the Gospels. The fall of Samaria is the most consequential single event in the political history of the divided kingdom, and the question of which king to credit it to is the smallest part of what 2 Kings 17 is reporting.
Sources
- 2 Kings 17:1-23; 18:9-12 (MT; LXX; Targum Jonathan)
- Sargon II, Khorsabad Display Inscription, lines 23-26 (Fuchs 1994; ANET 284-285)
- Sargon II, Khorsabad Annals, Years 1-2 (Fuchs 1994 Ann.10-17)
- Sargon II, Nimrud Prism IV.25-49 (Gadd 1954, Iraq 16)
- Sargon II, Great Summary Inscription (Khorsabad)
- Sargon II, Cyprus Stele and Najafabad Stele (parallel summary inscriptions)
- Babylonian Chronicle Series A (ABC 1) i.27-31 (BM 92502; Grayson 1975)
- Eponym Chronicle entries for the reigns of Shalmaneser V and Sargon II (Millard 1994)
- Tiglath-pileser III, Summary Inscription 4.15-19 (Tadmor 1994)
- Samaria excavation reports (Crowfoot, Kenyon, Sukenik, Avigad; Stratum VI destruction layer)
- Hayim Tadmor, 'The Campaigns of Sargon II of Assur: A Chronological-Historical Study' (Journal of Cuneiform Studies 12, 1958)
- Edward Lipinski, 'The Assyrian Campaign against Damascus in 733-732 BC' (Annali dell'Istituto Orientale di Napoli, 1971)
- Bob Becking, The Fall of Samaria: An Historical and Archaeological Study (SHANE 2; Brill, 1992)
- Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings (Anchor Bible; Doubleday, 1988)
- Nadav Naaman, 'The Historical Background to the Conquest of Samaria (720 BC)' (Biblica 71, 1990)
- K. Lawson Younger Jr., 'The Fall of Samaria in Light of Recent Research' (Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61, 1999)
- K. Lawson Younger Jr., A Political History of the Arameans (SBL Press, 2016)
- Sung Jin Park, 'A New Historical Reconstruction of the Fall of Samaria' (Biblica 93, 2012)
- John Hayes and Jeffrey Kuan, 'The Final Years of Samaria (730-720 BC)' (Biblica 72, 1991)
- Eckart Frahm (ed.), A Companion to Assyria (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017)
- Andreas Fuchs, Die Inschriften Sargons II. aus Khorsabad (Cuvillier, 1994)
- A. K. Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (Texts from Cuneiform Sources 5; Augustin, 1975)
- Alan Millard, The Eponyms of the Assyrian Empire 910-612 BC (SAAS 2; Helsinki, 1994)
- Bustenay Oded, 'The Settlements of the Israelite and Judean Exiles in Mesopotamia' (Studia Phoenicia 13, 1995)
- Ron Tappy, The Archaeology of Israelite Samaria, vol. 2 (Eisenbrauns, 2001)
- Karen Radner, Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2015)
- Marvin A. Sweeney, I and II Kings (Old Testament Library; Westminster John Knox, 2007)
- Edwin Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, 3rd ed. (Zondervan, 1983)