for three years. When it finally fell in 740, many of the leading inhabitants were deported into exile and settled in Mesopotamia and Media. Whether credit for the ultimate capture of the city goes to Shalmaneser V or to his successor Sargon II is still not a settled question.—2 Ki. 17:1-6, 22, 23; 18:9-12; see SARGON.

With the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians the Bible’s detailed history of the city ends. Thereafter, mention of the city is often, though not always (2 Ki. 23:18; Acts 8:5), made in way of a reminder of what becomes of those who rebel against Jehovah. (2 Ki. 18:34; 21:13; Isa. 10:9-11; 36:19) After the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent assassination of Gedaliah, the Bible relates, eighty men from Shechem, Shiloh and Samaria came down toward Mizpah and encountered Ishmael the assassin, who slaughtered many of these men, sparing some of them who promised to show him where they had treasures of wheat, barley and oil hidden.—Jer. 41:1-9.

Secular records relate some of Samaria’s history from and after the days of Alexander the Great. In Roman times its splendor was due to the building program of Herod the Great, who renamed the city Sebaste (a feminine Greek form for the Latin name Augustus), in honor of Augustus, the first emperor. Today the modern Arabic name Sebastiyeh preserves the name Herod gave it. It is therefore not surprising that excavations at this site have uncovered the remains of a number of different periods in its history, few of which are from the days of Israel’s kings.

2. The territory of the ten-tribe northern kingdom of Israel. The name of its capital city, Samaria, was sometimes applied to this entire area. As, for example, when Ahab was called “the king of Samaria,” it was not with the restricted meaning of being king of the city only, but in the broader sense as king of the ten tribes. (1 Ki. 21:1) So too “the cities of Samaria” referred to those scattered throughout the ten tribes, not to towns clustered around the capital. (2 Ki. 23:19; this same expression recorded at 1 Kings 13:32 as if used before the city Samaria was built, if not prophetic, may have been introduced by the compiler of the Kings account.) The famine “in Samaria” in the days of Ahab was extensive throughout the whole kingdom of Samaria and, in fact, even took in Phoenicia, extending at least from the torrent valley of Cherith E of the Jordan to Zarephath on the Mediterranean. (1 Ki. 17:1-12; 18:2, 5, 6) Similarly, the restoration promise regarding “the mountains of Samaria” must have embraced the whole of the realm of Samaria.—Jer. 31:5.

Tiglath-pileser III seems to have been the first to uproot Israelites from Samaria’s territory, some prominent Reubenites, Gadites and Manassites from E of the Jordan being among those moved to Assyria. (1 Chron. 5:6, 26) When the northern kingdom finally fell, more were taken into exile. (2 Ki. 17:6) But this time the king of Assyria (apparently, Sargon II) replaced these Israelites with people from other parts of his realm, a transplanting policy continued by Esar-haddon and Asenappar (Ashurbanipal).—2 Ki. 17:24; Ezra 4:2, 10.

Lions began to multiply in the land, probably because the land, or a large part of it, had lain waste for a time. (Compare Exodus 23:29.) The settlers doubtless felt, superstitiously, that it was because they did not understand how to worship the god of the land. Therefore the king of Assyria sent back a calf-worshiping priest from exile. He taught them about Jehovah, but in the same manner as Jeroboam had done, so that they learned something about Jehovah but actually continued to worship their own false gods.—2 Ki. 17:24-41.

3. The Roman district through which Jesus occasionally traveled and into which the apostles later brought the message of Christianity. Its boundaries are not definitely known today, but, generally, it lay between Galilee in the N and Judea in the S, and extended from the Jordan W to the coastal plains of the Mediterranean. For the most part the district embraced the territories once belonging to the tribe of Ephraim and half the tribe of Manasseh (W of the Jordan).

From time to time, on his way to and from Jerusalem, Jesus passed through Samaria, situated as it was between the districts of Judea and Galilee. (Luke 17:11; John 4:3-6) But for the most part he refrained from preaching in this territory, even telling the twelve whom he sent out to avoid Samaritan cities and, instead, to “go continually to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” that is, the Jews.—Matt. 10:5, 6.

However, this restriction covered only a limited time, for just before his ascension to heaven Jesus told his disciples they should carry the good news, not only to Samaria, but to the most distant part of the earth. (Acts 1:8, 9) So it was that when persecution broke out in Jerusalem the disciples, Philip in particular, took up the ministry in Samaria. Peter and John followed Philip there, resulting in further expansion of Christianity.—Acts 8:1-17, 25; 9:31; 15:3.

SAMARITAN

(Sa·marʹi·tan).

The term “Samaritans” first appeared in Scripture after the conquest of the ten-tribe kingdom of Samaria in 740 B.C.E.; it was applied to those who lived in the northern kingdom before that conquest as distinct from the foreigners later brought in from other parts of the Assyrian Empire. (2 Ki. 17:29) It appears that Sargon II of Assyria did not remove all the Israelite inhabitants, for the account at 2 Chronicles 34:6-9 (compare 2 Kings 23:19, 20) implies that during King Josiah’s reign there were Israelites still in the land. “Samaritans” in time came to mean the descendants of those left in Samaria and those brought in by Sargon. Therefore some were undoubtedly the products of mixed marriages. Then at a still later period the name carried more of a religious, rather than a racial or political connotation, a Samaritan meaning one who belonged to the religious sect that flourished in the vicinity of ancient Shechem and Samaria, and which held to certain tenets distinctly different from Judaism.—John 4:9.

The development of the Samaritan religion was due to a number of factors, not the least of which stemmed from Jeroboam’s efforts at alienating the ten tribes from Jehovah’s worship as centered at Jerusalem. For about two hundred and fifty years the God-ordained Levitical priests had been replaced by a man-appointed priesthood, which, in turn, led the kingdom of Israel in the practice of demoralizing idolatry.—1 Ki. 12:28-33; 2 Ki. 17:7-17; 2 Chron. 11:13-15; 13:8, 9.

Then came the fall of the northern kingdom. The pagan immigrants brought in from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim were worshipers of many deities—Succoth-benoth, Nergal, Ashima, Nibhaz Tartak, Adrammelech and Anammelech. Although they learned something about Jehovah, through instruction by a priest of the ‘Jeroboam priesthood,’ yet, as Samaria had done with the golden calves, they continued to worship their false gods, generation after generation. (2 Ki. 17:24-41) Josiah’s extensive efforts to rid these northern communities of their idol worship, nearly a hundred years after Samaria fell, had no more lasting effect than similar reforms made by him in the southern kingdom of Judah.—2 Ki. 23:4-20; 2 Chron. 34:6, 7.

DEVELOPMENTS AFTER JEWS RETURNED FROM EXILE

In 537 B.C.E. a remnant of the twelve tribes returned from Babylonian exile prepared to rebuild Jehovah’s temple in Jerusalem. (Ezra 1:3; 2:1, 70) It was then that the “Samaritans,” who were already in the land when the Israelites arrived and who were described as “adversaries of Judah and Benjamin,” approached Zerubbabel and the older men, saying, “Let us build along with you; for, just like you, we search for your God and to him we are sacrificing since the days of Esar-haddon the king of Assyria,