Fall of Samaria after three years of siege

The kingdom of Israel, separated from Judah since the death of Solomon, had its capital at Samaria. Its last king, Osée, stopped paying the Assyrian tribute and sought the support of Egypt. Salmanasar V imprisoned him and came to besiege Samaria; the city held for three years and fell in the year of the Assyrian king's death. Sargon II, his successor, claims its capture in the annals engraved at Khorsabad and attributes to himself the deportation of its inhabitants.

The deportees were settled far away, at Halah, on the Habor, river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes; in the opposite direction, Assyria transplanted to Samaria populations from Babylon, Kouta, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaïm. It is from this mixing that the Samaritan community would later emerge, whose relations with Jerusalem would long remain difficult. The kingdom of the North, for its part, ceased to exist: tradition calls "ten lost tribes" those who never returned, and has sought them for twenty-five centuries, from Ethiopia to India.

⚠ It must be stated clearly: Assyria did not strike the Israelites as worshippers of their God, but as rebellious vassals, and it treated all the kingdoms it subjugated in the same way. This event is therefore not a religious persecution. It opens the catalogue because it opens the series of exiles, which Jewish Memory reads as a single History.