Replaced and Devoured

The exile of Israel by Shalmaneser of Assyria had unintended consequences. The Assyrians, like many warring nations, practiced an exile technique known as Population Exchange. The intent of this was to remove the power from the nation conquered and disperse them so thoroughly into the greater national culture to the point that their nationalistic/tribalistic tendencies could be broken completely. So when Israel was scattered all throughout the Assyrian Empire, Shalmaneser was making them Assyrians. 

The second part of the Population Exchange was to fill the cities of Samaria with new people from other areas he had conquered. So the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim and settled them in place of the Israelites. They possessed the cities and houses, farming the land as if it were their own. God orchestrated this to fulfill His word through Moses, who foresaw this and told them, ‘The LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth; and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, which you or your fathers have not known. Among these nations you shall find no rest, and there shall be no resting place for the sole of your feet; but the LORD will give you a trembling heart, failing of eyes, and despair of soul.’

Joshua had warned the people as well when they entered the Land of Promise and agreed to the blessings and curses on Mt Ebal and Mt Gerizim. The LORD sent prophets and judges to warn and deliver them. He sent enemies against them to place them in bondage until they called out to the LORD again for salvation. And now they were forcibly removed from their land and replaced, to wander among the nations until the LORD would bring them back. 

Then something happened that the king of Assyria could not foresee. The Land of Israel belongs to the LORD. The peoples brought into that land did not know the LORD and continued to live according to their own cultures and worshiped their own gods according to their usual customs. So the LORD sent lions among them to kill some of them for their wicked practices. They sent envoys to Sargon II, who had taken over at the death of Shalmaneser, to seek help concerning the lions. They correctly deduced that the lions were sent to kill the new inhabitants because they did not know the customs of the God whose land they lived on. So the king of Assyria sent one priest who knew the LORD to live among them and teach them the ways of the LORD.

This unnamed priest returned to Israel by himself and lived at Bethel. He spent his life teaching the foreign peoples living in the promised land about the God whose land they lived in. And those peoples added the worship of the LORD to their customs, but did not discard the worship of gods they knew from their own lands. They feared the LORD, but also worshiped Nergal, Nibhaz, Tartak, Adrammalech and Anammelech. They burned incense and their own children to these demon gods and then made sacrifices to the LORD. They even chose priests for themselves to intercede for them to the LORD. A whole new system of false religion was created by these nations, one that worshiped a pantheon of gods and threw the LORD right in with them as if He was a false god too.

These people brought in by the king of Assyria were the beginning of what would become known as the Samaritans. They intermarried amongst each other. They mixed their false worship in with the worship of the LORD. The gave some fear and respect to the True God while also following other false gods. And when Israel was allowed to return much later, these would also intermarry with the exiles who returned, who had also intermarried where they lived with men and women of other peoples, and threw their cultures and practices into the mixing pot of Samaria until they were no longer the people God had chose for Himself, indistinguishable from the rest of the nations. Even in the days of Jesus, the Samaritans were rejected by the Jews as worse than the rest of the gentiles because of these things that happened during the Assyrian Exile. 

Why did those things happen? Calamity came because they rejected the LORD their God which had brought them out of Egypt. Hundreds of years had passed with their continual disobedience and rejection of the LORD until the LORD fulfilled His warnings against them. Blessings for obedience, calamity and curses for disobedience. And with that final rejection, the LORD kicked them out of the land to wander among the nations, yet He preserved a remnant to one day return to know and worship Him. Judgment had come to Israel, and now Judah was doing the same things on an even worse scale. Their own end would come quickly from another source, one God would bring against them for their own sin and rejection of the LORD.