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HOSHEA came to the throne of Samaria in connection with the Palestinian campaign of Tiglathpileser II., which took place in 734 B.C., and seems to have remained a vassal of Assyria until Tiglath-pileser's death. Whether any overt act of rebellion or any secret conspiracy on his part followed that event, we do not know. It is not at all unlikely; and such a fact would give the best explanation of the statement (2 Kings xvii. 3), Against him came up Shalmaneser, king of Assyria." This was Shalmaneser IV., Tiglath-pileser's successor, of whom we learn from Josephus that he made an expedition to Phoenicia. His reign was a short one (B.C. 727-724), and only the scantiest notices of it have as yet been furnished by the contemporary monuments. 2 Kings xvii. 3, and the following verses, tell us all we know about Hoshea's relations with him. It would appear that Hoshea submitted to him without a struggle, acknowledged him as his suzerain, and began to pay him a yearly tribute. This submission was not permanent, however, and was doubtless insincere from the first. Underhand negotiations with Egypt led Hoshea to a fatal confidence in his ability to resist the might of Assyria, and he raised the standard of independence by omitting to send the tribute when it fell due in a certain year. The consequence was that Shalmaneser "shut him up and bound him in prison." Where this occurred we are not told, but the absence of any statement that the king of Assyria marched into Palestine before seizing Hoshea favours the view that the latter

had been summoned to Nineveh to give an account of his remissness, and was there imprisoned. We cannot be perfectly sure of this, it is true, and it seems strange that when Hoshea had been emboldened to refuse the tribute, he should not have been courageous, and indeed discreet, enough to stand his ground in Samaria, or take refuge elsewhere. The extreme brevity of the statement in Kings leaves room for various conjectures. A negative confirmation of its trustworthiness appears, however, in the fact that the cuneiform inscriptions which relate to the fall of Samaria (see below) make no allusion to Hoshea, and, at all events, we must suppose that wherever he was seized, his place of imprisonment was in Assyrian territory.

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But harmony was not restored by the incarceration of Hoshea. It is probable that his chief men, leaders of the army and rulers of the people, had shared in his desire for freedom from Assyria, and were now enraged at his captivity. cordingly, "the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and beseiged it three years." (2 Kings xvii. 5.) The long resistance of which the city was capable, even without the leadership of its king, is evidence of the powerful nature of its defences, and suggests the possibility of a different issue if Egypt had responded to Hoshea's appeal with active assistance. As it was, the city at length fell, and the northern kingdom of Israel was at an end.

Just here, however, the Assyrian inscriptions inform us of an important fact, which could not have been inferred from the Biblical account. 2 Kings xvii. 6, begins as follows: "In the ninth year of

Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria." It is put beyond a doubt, by the cuneiform records, that this "King of Assyria" was not the same with the one who began the siege; it was not Shalmaneser IV., but Sargon II., into whose hands Samaria fell. It is quite probable that the writer of Kings was not aware of this. Sargon is mentioned only once in the Bible (Is xx. 1), but he was a mighty warrior, and his name was known in western Asia, far and wide. His reign extended from B. c. 722 to 705, and in the year of his ascending the throne, he himself tells us, he captured the eity of Samaria.

The refractory spirit of the people was now to be crushed. The severest treatment was determined upon for the prostrate nation. We are further told in 2 King xvii. 6, that the king of Assyria "carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes." What Tiglath-pileser had done to the east-Jordan land and to Galilee a dozen years before, now became the lot of the ten tribes as a whole. To complete the conquest and prevent any dream of recovery, we learn from v. 24 that "the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria, instead of the children of Israel.

These statements receive abundant general confirmation from the records of Sargon's reign. In one place we read: "The city of Samaria I besieged, I captured. 27,280 of its inhabitants I carried away." Another inscription adds: "In their place I settled the men of countries I had conquered." The number which Sargon here gives may seem small, but we are to remember that the long seige must have told heavily upon the

| garrison, and that the object of such deportations, was not to depopulate but to weaken. In regard to v. 24, we learn from another passage of Sargon's records that in his first full regnal year (B. C., 721) he transported captives from Babylonia to "the land Chatti," a term which included Syria and Palestine, and other passages still tell us that in his seventh year (B. C. 715) he colonized people from various subject territories in "the land of the house of Omri," i.e., Northern Israel, and, specifically, "in Samaria."

There are two matters of detail upon which more precise confirmation would be welcome. Sargon's inscriptions do not mention the places to which the Israelites were deported, nor do they specify the Babylonian and other cities, whose names appear in v.24. Indeed, the inscription which refers to the year B. C. 715 (see above) gives quite a different list. This, how- * ever, only shows that the colonization of 715 is not the one which the writer of Kings had particularly in mind. The captives brought in 721 from Babylonia were doubtless from various cities, among which it is entirely probable that two such important ones as Sepharvaim and Cuthah would be represented. About Ava we know nothing further, but the annals of Sargon inform us that he captured Hamath in his second regnal year, and took as his share of the booty 200 chariots and 600 horsemen. This points to the captivity of a large number of other persons, who would be deposited, according to custom, in some conquered country. It would be strange if none of them had been brought to Samaria and the mention of Hamath in v. 24 is precisely what we should expect. There is, therefore, on this point, no trace of disagreement between the Hebrew and the Assyrian documents.

F. BROWN.