Samaria

Samaria (Hebrew Shomron) was the royal city of the northern kingdom of Israel, and its ruins lie beside the modern village of Sebaste. It was the capital from the reign of Omri (885-874 BC) until the Assyrians captured it in 722 BC (1 Kings 16:23-24; 2 Kings 17:1; 18:10). Isaiah named it as the head of the northern kingdom: “The head of Ephraim is Samaria” (Isaiah 7:9).

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Its world

Samaria stood on a high hill that rises well above the surrounding country. It lay near main roads, one leading west toward the coastal plain and another running north. Its years as a capital fall in the archaeological period called Iron II B (925-720 BC), after the united kingdom divided in 931 BC. Its kings fought the kingdom of Aram, ruled from Damascus, both allied with and fought the kingdom of Judah to the south, and in the end fell to Assyria (Isaiah 7:8; 1 Kings 20:1; 22:4; 2 Kings 14:11-12; Ezekiel 16:46; 2 Kings 17:5-6). Jeremiah pictured farmers once more planting vineyards “on the hills of Samaria” (Jeremiah 31:5).

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Omri builds a capital

Before Samaria, the northern kings lived at Shechem, which Jeroboam built up, and then reigned at Tirzah (1 Kings 12:25; 16:8, 23). Omri then bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver, built a city on it, and named it Samaria after Shemer, its former owner (1 Kings 16:24). Omri was buried in Samaria, and his son Ahab reigned there from 874 to 853 BC (1 Kings 16:28-29).

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Ahab, Jezebel and the temple of Baal

Ahab married Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went on to serve Baal (1 Kings 16:31). He built a temple of Baal in Samaria, set up an altar for Baal in it, and made an Asherah pole (1 Kings 16:32-33). In the years of drought that Elijah announced to Ahab, the famine grew severe in Samaria (1 Kings 17:1; 18:1-2).

Ben-hadad king of Aram, with thirty-two allied kings, besieged Samaria and demanded Ahab's silver, gold, wives and children, but the young officers of the district governors marched out and the Arameans fled (1 Kings 20:1-20).

Later, at the gate of Samaria, about four hundred prophets promised Ahab and Jehoshaphat king of Judah victory at Ramoth-gilead, but Micaiah son of Imlah foretold disaster (1 Kings 22:6-23). Ahab was wounded in that battle and died; he was brought back to Samaria and buried there, and his chariot was washed at the pool of Samaria, where dogs licked up his blood, as the LORD had said (1 Kings 22:34-38; 21:19). The record of his reign mentions “the ivory palace” he built (1 Kings 22:39).

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Elisha and the sieges

Ahab's son Ahaziah, king of Israel (853-852 BC), fell through the lattice of his upper room in Samaria and sent to ask Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether he would recover; he died, as Elijah had foretold (1 Kings 22:51; 2 Kings 1:2, 16-17). The prophet Elisha kept a house in Samaria (2 Kings 2:25; 6:32). Sent by an Israelite servant girl's word to “the prophet who is in Samaria,” the Aramean commander Naaman came to Elisha's house and was healed after washing seven times in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:1-14).

Later Ben-hadad besieged Samaria again, until a donkey's head sold for eighty shekels of silver and a quarter cab of dove's dung for five (2 Kings 6:24-25). Elisha foretold that by the same time the next day a seah of fine flour would sell for a shekel at the gate of Samaria (2 Kings 7:1). At twilight four men with leprosy at the city gate found the Aramean camp deserted, for the Lord had made the Arameans hear the sound of a great army, and they had fled, thinking Israel had hired the kings of the Hittites and Egyptians against them (2 Kings 7:3-7). Flour then sold at the price Elisha had named, and the officer who had doubted his word was trampled to death in the gateway (2 Kings 7:16-20).

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Jehu and the later kings

Jehu, king of Israel from 841 to 814 BC, ended Ahab's dynasty: at his written order the leaders of Samaria killed Ahab's seventy sons, and in Jehu's purge he struck down everyone of Ahab's house left in the city (2 Kings 10:1-17). He then gathered the servants of Baal into the temple of Baal, had them killed, burned its sacred pillar, and tore the temple down and made it a latrine (2 Kings 10:18-27). Samaria was the burial place of Israel's kings: Omri, Ahab, Jehu, Jehoahaz and Jehoash were all buried there (1 Kings 16:28; 22:37; 2 Kings 10:35; 13:9; 14:16).

Jehoash (798-782 BC) defeated Amaziah king of Judah, broke down part of Jerusalem's wall, and brought the gold, silver and treasures of the temple and palace back to Samaria, with hostages (2 Kings 14:11-14). His son Jeroboam II reigned in Samaria from 782 to 753 BC and restored Israel's border from Lebo-hamath to the Sea of the Arabah (2 Kings 14:23, 25). Between 752 and 740 BC the throne changed hands three times by murder: Shallum killed Zechariah, Menahem came up from Tirzah to Samaria and killed Shallum, and Pekah killed Pekahiah in the citadel of the palace in Samaria (2 Kings 15:10-25).

When Pul king of Assyria invaded, Menahem paid him a thousand talents of silver, raised from Israel's wealthy men, and in Pekah's reign (740-732 BC) Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria took Gilead, Galilee and all the land of Naphtali and carried their people captive to Assyria (2 Kings 15:19-20, 29). Pekah also joined Rezin king of Aram in a war on Ahaz king of Judah, and Isaiah told Ahaz that their plot would not succeed (Isaiah 7:1-9). When Israel's army brought captives from Judah to Samaria, the prophet Oded rebuked it, and the captives were clothed, fed and returned to Jericho (2 Chronicles 28:8-15).

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The fall of Samaria

Hoshea, king of Israel from 732 to 722 BC, became the vassal of Shalmaneser king of Assyria, then stopped paying tribute and sent envoys to King So of Egypt (2 Kings 17:1-4). The king of Assyria imprisoned Hoshea and besieged Samaria for three years, from Hoshea's seventh year to his ninth (2 Kings 17:4-5; 18:9-10). The city was captured in 722 BC, and the Israelites were carried away to Assyria and settled in Halah, in Gozan by the Habor River and in the cities of the Medes (2 Kings 17:6; 18:10-11). So began Israel's captivity in Assyria (2 Kings 17:23). 2 Kings explains the fall: Israel had worshiped other gods, set up sacred pillars and Asherah poles, and refused to listen to the prophets the LORD sent to warn them (2 Kings 17:7-18).

The king of Assyria then brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim to live in the towns of Samaria (2 Kings 17:24). When lions killed some of them, one of the exiled priests was sent back to Bethel to teach them, yet the nations settled in Samaria went on serving their own gods alongside the LORD (2 Kings 17:25-41). When Sennacherib's campaign against Judah came in 701 BC, Jerusalem was taunted with Samaria's fate: “Have they delivered Samaria from my hand?” (2 Kings 18:34). Later the LORD warned that He would stretch over Jerusalem “the measuring line used against Samaria” (2 Kings 21:13).

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What the prophets say about Samaria

Amos called the nations to see “the great unrest” in Samaria and warned that “the houses of ivory will also perish” (Amos 3:9, 15). He called the city's wealthy women “cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria” who “oppress the poor and crush the needy,” and condemned those “secure on Mount Samaria” who lay on “beds inlaid with ivory” (Amos 4:1; 6:1, 4). Hosea said the LORD had rejected “your calf, O Samaria,” the work of a craftsman that “will be broken to pieces,” and declared that “Samaria will bear her guilt” (Hosea 8:5-6; 13:16). Micah foretold that Samaria would become “a heap of rubble in the open field, a planting area for a vineyard,” and that the LORD would “pour her stones into the valley” (Micah 1:6). Isaiah warned that “the plunder of Samaria will be carried off by the king of Assyria” (Isaiah 8:4).

Ezekiel pictured Samaria and Jerusalem as two sisters, Oholah and Oholibah, and said that Samaria “did not commit half the sins” Jerusalem had (Ezekiel 23:4; 16:51). He also promised that Samaria and her daughters would be restored (Ezekiel 16:53, 55).

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Outside the Bible: inscriptions and excavations

Ahab's part in the battle of Qarqar is mentioned in the Kurkh Monolith inscription of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (859-824 BC), and the battle works out to 853 BC. His Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III records Jehu bringing or sending him tribute in about 841 BC. A panel captioned for Jehu shows a figure bowing with tribute, and the caption calls him “Jehu, son of Omri,” though Jehu had ended Omri's line; Assyrian royal inscriptions went on calling Israel the “House of Omri” (2 Kings 10:1-17). The Mesha Stele, set up by Mesha king of Moab, says that Omri “oppressed Moab for many days,” and it speaks of Omri's son as well.

For the reign of Shalmaneser V, the Babylonian Chronicle records: “He ravaged Samaria.” Eight Assyrian inscriptions, by contrast, credit the conquest to Sargon II (722-705 BC), who claimed the city's fall for himself: his summary inscription from Khorsabad says he besieged and captured Samaria, adding, “I took as spoil 27,290 people who live there,” and one from Calah counts 27,280. In a 2012 article in the journal Biblica, Sung Jin Park notes that most scholars accept a “two-conquest model”: Shalmaneser V took Samaria and died soon after, and Sargon II subdued the city again in his second year, 720 BC.

The first excavation was the Harvard Expedition of 1908 to 1910, directed in 1909 and 1910 by G. A. Reisner; it alone excavated the royal palace, which it identified as Omri's, on a rock-cut platform 13 feet (4 m) high. From 1931 to 1935 a consortium of five institutions dug again under J. W. Crowfoot, with K. Kenyon among those assisting him. The summit has yielded a great quantity of ivory. North of the palace lay a rich cache of the Samaria Ivories, carvings used to decorate furniture, mixed with later debris; the second expedition's excavators presumed that Ahab's “Ivory House” had stood in this area.

Excavators have found 102 of the Samaria Ostraca, inscribed potsherds, most of them in Reisner's 1910 season, and 63 of them are legible enough to be useful. Study of their Hebrew script suggests a date in the second quarter of the eighth century BC, and at least some likely date to the reign of Jeroboam II. They record deliveries of wine and oil, such as “a jar of aged wine,” and the clan names in one group of them all belong to the tribe of Manasseh.

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Later history

After the conquest the city and the highland around it became the Assyrian province of Samerina, ruled by an Assyrian governor, and the city did not regain importance until the Persian Period, about the middle of the fifth century BC. Later traditions differ on the Samaritans' origin: a non-Samaritan one traces them to the peoples Assyria settled in Samaria (2 Kings 17:24), another to the northern tribes, holding that only a small part of them was deported, and the Samaritans count themselves the true followers of ancient Israel's religion. In Nehemiah's account, Sanballat mocked the Jews rebuilding the wall in front of “the army of Samaria” (Nehemiah 4:1-2). A letter that the Jews of Elephantine sent mentions “Delaiah and Shelemiah, sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria.” In 30 BC the emperor Augustus gave the city to Herod the Great, who renamed it Sebaste in the emperor's honor; its temple of Augustus, with a large forecourt, was built over the Omride palace on the summit.