Hence it is concluded by the advocates of this view that the cities of Samaria were not partially, but whol- ly, evacuated of their inhabitants in B.C. 720, and that they remained in this desolated state until, in tlie words of 2 Kings xvii, 24, " the king of Assyria brought men from Babvlon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava (Ivah, 2 Kings xviii, 34), and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel : and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof." Thus the new Samaritans — for such we would now call them — were Assyrians by birth or subjugation, were utterly strangers in the cities of Samaria, and were exclusively the inhabitants of those cities. An incidental question, however, arises : Who was the king of Assyria that ef- fected this colonization ? At first sight, one woidd sup- pose Shalmaneser; for the narrative is scarcely broken, and the repeopling seems to be a natural sequence of the depopulation. Such would appear to have been Josephus's view ; for he says of Shalmaneser, " When he had removed the people out of their land, he brought other nations out of Cuthah, a place so called (for there is still in Persia a river of that name), into Samaria and the country of the Israelites" {Ant, ix., 14, 1 and 3; x, 9, 7) ; but he must have been led to this interpretation simply by the juxtaposition of the two transactions in the Hebrew text. Tlie Samaritans themselves (in Ezra iv, 2, 10) attributed their colonization, not to Shalma- neser, but to " Esar-haddon. king of Assur," or to " the great and noble Asuapper," either the king himself or one of his generals. It was probably on his invasion of Judah, in the reign of Manasseh, about B.C. G77, that
Esar-haddon discovered the impolicy of leaving a tract upon the very frontiers of that kingdom thus desolate, and determined to garrison it with foreigners. The fact, too, that some of these foreigners came from Bab- ylon would seem to direct us to P^sar-haddon, rather than to his grandfather Shalmaneser: it was only re- cently that Babylon had come into the hands of the Assyrian king. There is another reason why this date should be jjreferred: it coincides with the termination of the sixty-five years of Isaiah's prophecy, delivered B.C. 742, within which "Ephraim should be broken that it should not be a people" (Isa. vii, 8). This was not effectually accomplished until the very land itself was occupied by strangers. So long as this had not taken place, there might be hope of return ; after it had taken place, no hope. Josephus {Ant. x, 9, 7) expressly notices this difference in the cases of the ten and of the two tribes. The land of the former became the posses- sion of foreigners, the land of the latter not so.
These strangers, who are thus assumed to have been placed in " the cities of Samaria" by Esar-haddon, were, of course, idolaters, and worshipped a strange medley of divinities. Each of the five nations,'says Josephus, who is confirmed by the words of Scripture, had its own god. No place was found for the worship of Him who had once called the land his own, and whose it was still, God's displeasure was kindled, and they were infested by beasts of prey, which had probably increased to a great extent before their entrance upon it. "The Lord sent lions among them, which slew some of them." On their explaining their miserable condition to the king of Assyria, he despatched one of the captive priests to teach them "how they should fear the Lord." The priest came accordingly ; and henceforth, in the lan- guage of the sacred historian, they "feared the Lord, and served their graven images, both tlieir children antl their children's children : as did their fathers, so do they unto this day" (2 Kings xvii, 41). This last sentence was probably inserted by Ezra. It serves two purposes : 1st, to qualify the pretensions of the Samaritans of Ez- ra's time to be pure worshippers of God — they were no more exclusiveh' his servants than was the Roman em- peror, who desired to place a statue of Christ in the Pantheon, entitled to be called a Christian; and, 2dly, to show how entirely the Samaritans of later days dif- fered from their ancestors in respect to idolatry. Jose- phus's account of the distress of the Samaritans, and of the remedy for it, is very similar, with the exception that, with him, they are afflicted with pestilence.
Such, according to one view of the history, was the origin of the post-captivity, or new Samaritans — men not of Jewish extraction, but from the farther East. "The Cuthaeans had formerly l)elonged to the inner parts of Persia and Media, but were then called ' Sa- maritans,' taking the name of the country to which they were removed," says Josephus {Ant. x, 9, 7). Again, he says {Ant. ix, 14, 3) they are called, "in He- brew, 'Cuthaeans,' but in Greek, 'Samaritans.'" Our Lord expressly terms them oXXoysi'tTc (Luke xvii, 18); and Josephus's whole account of them shows that he be- lieved them to have been /leroiKoi nWoeBi'u^, though, as he tells us in two places (.4 7if. ix, 14, 3 ; xi, 8, 6), they sometimes gave a different account of their origin.