for example—the question remains as to how these were transformed into a
story of the exile of an entire people, indeed of ten entire tribes.
It is widely accepted that the biblical authors used existing chronicles that
included data and information about the histories of Israel and Judah in
assembling their accounts. Thus, the biblical narrative covering the Assyrian
campaigns and the deportations that followed them begins with the campaign
of Tiglath-pileser III. In 2 Kings 15 : 29 , we read that Tiglath-pileser ultimately
“came and seized Iyyon, Abel-beth-maacha, Janoah, Kedesh, Hazor, Gilead,
Galilee, the entire region of Naphtali, and deported the people to Assyria.”^71
Thus, the Israelite kingdom became reduced both territorially and demo-
graphically. According to the biblical narrative, the Assyrian punishment did
not impress Israel’s subsequent rulers. Nor did the horrible fate of the Damas-
cenes, who saw their king executed and their kingdom destroyed, and who
were deported by the Assyrians during the days of King Hoshea ( 732 – 724
or 722 ), who apparently plotted with the Egyptians against them. Several
decades after the first deportation, King Shalmaneser, who reinforced the
arrangements his predecessor had made with the Israelites, “discovered
that Hoshea was being disloyal to him, sending envoys to the king of
Egypt at So, and withholding the annual tribute which he had been paying”
( 2 Kings 17 : 3 ). At this point, the biblical narrative skips one Assyrian king and,
without mentioning Sargon by name, tells us that the king of Assyria
seized King Hoshea and imprisoned him: “He overran the whole country
and, reaching Samaria, besieged it three years. In the Ninth year of Hoshea
he captured Samaria and deported its people to Assyria, and placed them
in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of Medes”
( 2 Kings 17 : 6 ).
Here recall Sargon’s boastful, even chilling, summary of these same
events; the biblical narrative seems to be echoing it quite accurately. The only
substantive difference between the two accounts is that the biblical source
provides the actual locations to which the Israelites were deported. These
locations are not concocted; scholars have identified almost all of them as
real places in the Assyrian Empire, either in Assyria proper or in the cities of
Medes, that is, on Assyria’s eastern borders.^72
But while the named places were actual locations, it is not clear that these
were the locations where the deported Israelites were actually settled. This is
not a question with which the biblical authors, primarily interested in telling
the story of Israel’s exile and its promised return, were much concerned. While
subsequent interpreters would make this their primary concern, at the time of
biblical composition the location of the tribes seemed almost incidental.
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