Hoshea, the last king of Israel, gambles on Egypt, stops paying tribute, and Assyria comes. Samaria holds out three years and then falls; the ten tribes are marched off and scattered across the empire, and they do not come back. The chapter stops the story to explain, at length and plainly, why — not bad luck, not Assyrian strength, but two centuries of “they would not hear.” Then Assyria ships in other peoples to farm the empty land, and they build a religion to match: they feared the LORD, and served their own gods.
A study in 2 Kings 17 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 9 min read
The King Of Assyria Took Samaria
“Against him came up Shalmaneser king of Assyria; and Hoshea became his servant, and gave him presents. And the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea: for he had sent messengers to So king of Egypt, and brought no present to the king of Assyria … Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years. In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria.”
2 Kings 17:3-6
The last king of the north dies doing what the north always did — playing Egypt against Assyria and losing. The three-year siege ends the kingdom that split from David’s house two hundred years earlier under the first Jeroboam. Its people are deported and dispersed, and unlike Judah later, they are never gathered again. This is where the “ten lost tribes” are lost.
“About two years later, Samaria was invested by the hosts of Assyria under Shalmaneser; and in the siege that followed, multitudes perished miserably of hunger and disease as well as by the sword. The city and nation fell, and the broken remnant of the ten tribes were carried away captive and scattered in the provinces of the Assyrian realm.”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 291
Yet The LORD Testified Against Israel By All The Prophets
“Yet the LORD testified against Israel, and against Judah, by all the prophets, and by all the seers, saying, Turn ye from your evil ways, and keep my commandments and my statutes … Notwithstanding they would not hear, but hardened their necks, like to the neck of their fathers, that did not believe in the LORD their God. And they rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified against them; and they followed vanity, and became vain.”
2 Kings 17:13-15
This is the longest “here is why” passage in Kings. The verdict is not that Israel was overpowered; it is that Israel was warned, for generations, “by all the prophets and by all the seers,” and “would not hear.” Elijah, Elisha, Amos, Hosea — a steady stream of appeals, all refused. The Assyrian army is the sentence, not the crime.
Verse 19 slips in a warning to the reader: “also Judah kept not the commandments of the LORD their God.” The south is watching the north go into exile and doing the same things. The historian wants Judah — and every later reader — to notice.
“The destruction that befell the northern kingdom was a direct judgment from Heaven. The Assyrians were merely the instruments that God used to carry out His purpose.”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 291
Until He Had Cast Them Out Of His Sight
“For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they departed not from them; Until the LORD removed Israel out of his sight, as he had said by all his servants the prophets. So was Israel carried away out of their own land to Assyria unto this day.”
2 Kings 17:22-23
“Removed out of his sight” is covenant language for the end of a relationship. And yet even this is not simple abandonment. The exile scatters Israelites across the largest empire on earth — and among the deported were some who had stayed faithful, and some who humbled themselves under the blow.
God’s stated intent in the judgment is redemptive: what He could no longer do with Israel in the land, He would do by seeding believers through the nations. The captivity that looked like the end of the story is, in the long view, the start of the gospel going out to the Gentiles.
“In the terrible judgments brought upon the ten tribes the Lord had a wise and merciful purpose. That which He could no longer do through them in the land of their fathers He would seek to accomplish by scattering them among the heathen.”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 292
They Feared The LORD, And Served Their Own Gods
“They feared the LORD, and served their own gods, after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from thence. … So these nations feared the LORD, and served their graven images, both their children, and their children’s children: as did their fathers, so do they unto this day.”
2 Kings 17:33-41
Assyria resettles Samaria with foreigners, and when lions start killing them they conclude they have offended the local deity and import a priest to teach them “the manner of the God of the land.” The result is not conversion; it is addition. They keep every god they brought and file the LORD in alongside them.
“They feared the LORD, and served their own gods” is one of the sharpest one-line descriptions of nominal religion in the Bible. It is not atheism; it is God kept as one option among several, invoked for safety, never allowed to be the only one. And the chapter has just spent thirty verses showing that this — not Assyria — is what destroyed the northern kingdom in the first place. The new residents have moved into the empty land and adopted the very sin that emptied it.
