The Last Days of the Kingdom of Israel

Shuichi Hasegawa, Christoph Levin, Karen Radner, Shuichi Hasegawa, Christoph Levin, Karen Radner

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9783110566604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

Despite considerable scholarly efforts for many years, the last two decades of the Kingdom of Israel are still beneath the veil of history. What was the status of the Kingdom after its annexation by Assyria in 732 BCE? Who conquered Samaria, the capital of the Kingdom? When did it happen? One of the primary reasons for this situation lies in the discrepancies found in the historical sources, namely the Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian texts.

Since biblical studies and Assyriology are two distinct disciplines, the gaps in the sources are not easy to bridge. Moreover, recent great progress in the archaeological research in the Southern Levant provides now crucial new data, independent of these textual sources.

This volume, a collection of papers by leading scholars from different fields of research, aims to bring together, for the first time, all the available data and to discuss these conundrums from various perspectives in order to reach a better and deeper understanding of this crucial period, which possibly triggered in the following decades the birth of "new Israel" in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and eventually led to the formation of the Hebrew Bible and its underlying theology.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• The Last Days of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Introducing the Proceedings of a Multi-Disciplinary Conference
• Part I: Setting the Scene
• How to Encounter an Historical Problem? “722–720 BCE” as a Case Study
• Part II: Approaching the Fall of Samaria from Contemporary Assyrian and Egyptian Sources
• Contextualizing the Last Days of the Kingdom of Israel: What Can Assyrian Official Inscriptions Tell Us?
• Samaria, Hamath, and Assyria’s Conquests in the Levant in the Late 720s BCE. The Testimony of Sargon II’s Inscriptions
• Why Israel? Reflections on Shalmaneser V’s and Sargon II’s Grand Strategy for the Levant
• The “Lost Tribes of Israel” in the Context of the Resettlement Programme of the Assyrian Empire
• The End of the Kingdom of Israel: A View from the Nile Valley
• Part III: Views from Archaeology
• The Annals of Sargon II and the Archaeology of Samaria: Rhetorical Claims, Empirical Evidence
• Megiddo and Jezreel Reflected in the Dying Embers of the Northern Kingdom of Israel
• Part IV: Working with the Book of Kings: the Text
• Between Two Differing Editions: Some Notable Text-Critical Variants in 2 Kings 17
• The Fall of Samaria: an Analysis of the Biblical Sources
• In Search of the Original Biblical Record of the Assyrian Conquest of Samaria
• Part V: Working with the Book of Kings: the Chronological Framework
• 2 Kings 15–18: a Chronological Conundrum?
• The Last Days of Israel: Chronological Considerations
• Part VI: Working with the Book of Kings: the Narrative
• Wicked Usurpers and the Doom of Samaria. Further Views on the Angle of 2 Kings 15–17
• Hoshea ben Elah, the Last King of Israel: Narrative and History in 2 Kings 17:1–6
• Did Hoshea of Israel Continue the Foreign Policy of His Predecessors?
• Part VII: Reflections in the Prophets
• The Book of Hosea and the Last Days of the Northern Kingdom. The Methodological Problem
• Isaiah and the Fall of the Kingdom of Israel
• Indices
• 1. General index
• 2. Words
• 3. Texts