A little bit about the Samaritans and their origins.
In 722 BC, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V laid siege to Samaria following the revolt by the Israelite king, Hoshea son of Elah (2 Kings 17:3-6; 18:9-11). Shalmaneser however died shortly after the conquest of the city; it was his successor, Sargon II. who completed the conquest of the region. In his records, Sargon claimed to have exile that he captured the city of Samaria in 720 BC, exiled 27,290 captives, rebuilt the city, and then resettled it with various exiles who were brought to Samaria from various other cities in Mesopotamia in several waves (2 Kings 17:24). Two more additional waves of settlers came during the time of Esarhaddon (reigned 681–669 BC; Ezra 4:2) and in the time of Ashurbanipal (reigned 669-631/627 BC; Ezra 4:10).
The account in 2 Kings presents these new pagan settlers as not acknowledging the law of Yhwh, the God of the land, hence Yhwh sent lions to kill them until an Israelite priest was sent back to teach them about Him. The result was that these peoples worshiped Yhwh alongside their former gods (2 Kings 17:25-29, 41).
While a literal reading of 2 Kings makes it appear as if Samaria was completely depopulated of Israelites and that the people who subsequently came to live there were all foreigners (hence the later legend about the ‘Ten Lost Tribes’), other Old Testament books such as 2 Chronicles, as well as archaeology and genetic studies, makes it clear that the northern Israelites were not all deported. For instance, 2 Kings mentions the wave of foreign settlers brought in by the Assyrians but neglects to mention the remaining Israelites, but 2 Chronicles does the opposite by focusing only on the “remnant of Israel” while completely ignoring these foreign settlers.
2 Chronicles shows that there were still Israelites from the tribe of Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, and Zebulun during the reign of King Hezekiah (reigned c. 715-686 BC), who attempted to unite these tribes closer to Judah politically and religiously (2 Chronicles 30:1-11, 18; 34:9). Jeremiah also tells of people from northern locations like Shechem, Shiloh and Samaria who brought frankincense and grain offerings to the Jerusalem Temple (Jeremiah 41:5).
Add in to that what we know about the area and its population based on archaeology and genetic studies:
- Recent DNA studies have shown that modern-day Samaritans (there are currently around 777 Samaritans, representing four lineages) are not very different from Jews: the two groups share a common ancestry.
- Archaeology shows that while there are sites (mostly strategically-located fortified sites and administrative centers) which show traces of being abandoned and/or destroyed around that time as well as evidence of Assyrian presence here and there, the material culture in other places of the north (rural areas especially) did not significantly change even after the Assyrian conquest: in other words, the population in these areas remained Israelite. While the land was depopulated and while foreigners did come to it (as 2 King says), evidence shows that the foreign settlers brought in by the Assyrians were actually not that many and that there were still Israelites (so much for the ‘Ten Lost Tribes’ story). If anything, it would seem that these foreigners were absorbed by the Israelite remnant rather than the other way around.
- There are traces of northern dialects of Hebrew (aka Israelian Hebrew) in the Old Testament, which were mostly written in the southern (Judahite) dialect by Judahites (and their later descendants who went to Babylon and back). The continuation of this dialect would have been highly unlikely if there were no longer any northern Israelite presence in the land.
- We have evidence that around the 8th-7th century BC, the population increase of Judah doubled: the population in Jerusalem increased more than tenfold, and the number of settlements in the hill country south of Jerusalem swelled from thirty in the 9th-early 8th centuries BC to more than 120 in the late 8th century. In the Shephelah, meanwhile, the number of settlements increased from 21 to 276. So you both have new settlements being built and preexisting settlements becoming bigger and more densely inhabited. It is thought that this sudden population bubble was caused by refugees from the north (again, cf. 2 Chronicles). (This is significant because up until this point, the population growth in Judah was sort of slow.)
- We can also look at the Samaritans themselves. The Samaritan religion is, for as far as we can tell, never polytheistic: they worshiped (and worship) the one same God as the Jews, revered Moses and and observed Torah, just like the Jews. Really, the only point of contention between them and Jews (aside from different interpretations of Torah of course) was the location of the sanctuary. So even if the foreign settlers were polytheists and syncretists, that apparently did not last long: they were soon assimilated by the Yhwh-worshiping Israelites.
In fact, it’s because of this that some people choose to distinguish between the
ethnic ‘Samarians’ of 2 Kings and the
sectarian Samaritans (the ones we know and which exists today). One was a group of foreign settlers (who may have soon lost their unique identities as they went native), the other was probably originally
a religious sect who at some later point, went separate ways with (other) Jews due to certain religious/political issues (i.e. they’re actually more like the Qumran Community or Christianity).
