Hoshea was the last ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, for in his day (722 BC), the Assyrians invaded the land, deported many of the citizens, and repopulated Israel with Gentile peoples from lands Assyria had conquered. The kingdom of Israel became Samaria, named after the capital city, and it was a nation whose citizens were not pure Jews but a comingling of many ethnic strains.
God had given His people so many blessings, and now those blessings would fall into the hands of Assyria and Babylon. The Jews had a living Lord, but they replaced Him with dead idols. Their wealthy land was confiscated by enemy nations, the people were taken captive, and eventually Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed (586 BC). God in His mercy preserved a faithful remnant so a light would remain shining and He could fulfill the promises He had made to His people.
Israel lost its leader (17:1–5). Hoshea had assassinated Pekah and seized the throne of Israel (15:29–31). Tiglath-pileser had died and Shalmaneser V was now king of Assyria, and Hoshea gave homage to him and brought him tribute. However, Hoshea secretly made a treaty with Egypt to enlist them to fight for Israel and help them break the Assyrian yoke. Ever since Abraham fled to Egypt to escape a famine and only got himself and his wife into trouble (Gen. 12:10ff.), various Jewish leaders have vainly looked to Egypt for help. (See Gen. 26:2; Num. 14:1–4; Deut. 17:16; Isa. 30:1–2; 31:1.) So it is with believers today who turn to the world for help instead of waiting on the Lord and trusting Him. When Shalmaneser discovered the plot, he took Hoshea prisoner and left the throne of Israel empty.
In 725, Shalmaneser began to besiege Samaria, but then he died (or was killed) and his leading general, Sargon II, took over. The siege lasted three years, and in 722, the city capitulated. Assyria had already taken the tribes east of the Jordan (1 Chron. 5:24–26), so now they possessed everything but Judah, and that would fall to Babylon.
Israel lost its land (v. 6; 18:9–12). As we have seen, Assyria’s policy was to relocate conquered peoples and replace them with prisoners from other nations. It was clearly stated in God’s covenant with His people that their disobedience would bring defeat in war (Deut. 28:25, 49–50, 52), oppression, and slavery (Deut. 28:29, 33, 48, 68), and captivity (Deut. 28:36, 43, 63–68), and all of this happened to both Israel and Judah. The land belonged to the Lord (Lev. 25:2, 23, 38), and the people were His “tenants.” Not only was the land His, but so were the people (Lev. 25:55). They would possess the land and enjoy its blessings as long as they kept the terms of the covenant, but repeated disobedience would bring discipline within the land and ultimately discipline outside the land. That’s exactly what happened. Because of the people’s sins during the period of the judges, seven different nations invaded the land, took the crops, and enslaved the people right in their own land. After the division of the nation, Israel was taken captive by Assyria and Judah by Babylon. God kept the terms of His covenant.
Israel disobeyed its law (vv. 7–17). These verses read like a legal court case against the northern kingdom of Israel. The law was a gift from God, an agreement that guaranteed His provision and protection if the people did His will. But they forgot how God had delivered them from Egypt and set them free. They ignored the law of Moses that commanded them not to worship false gods but to destroy the heathen idols, temples, and shrines (Deut. 7, 13). Israel began with secret worship of idols (v. 9), but this eventually became public, and Jehovah was acknowledged as one god among many. The Lord sent prophets who admonished and warned the people, but the people paid little attention.
As their ancestors had done so many times, the Jewish people stiffened their necks and hardened their hearts and refused to obey the Lord (Deut. 9:6, 13; 10:12–22; Neh. 9:16, 17, 29; Ps. 106). Since we become like the god we worship (Ps. 115:8), the people became “vanity” (emptiness, nothingness) because they worshipped vain idols (v. 15). In fact, they turned to idols and made a golden calf while Moses was communing with God on Mount Sinai (Ex. 32). After the division of the kingdom, King Jeroboam made two golden calves for the people to worship (1 Kings 12:25ff.). As is often the case, it is the children who suffer for the sins of the parents, for the Jewish fathers began to offer their sons and daughters on the fiery altars of the heathen gods.
Israel angered its Lord (vv. 18–33). The anger of the Lord is His holy wrath; it must not be compared to a child’s temper tantrum. The Lord was longsuffering toward His people and made ample provision to bring them back to Himself, but they refused. God’s wrath is anger motivated by love, which is anguish. It’s the anguish of a father who wants the best for his children, but they prefer to go their own way. These verses inform us that the division of the kingdom into Judah and Israel was an act of God as He sought to protect David’s dynasty from the idolatry in Israel. However, King Jereboam’s false, manmade religion infected Judah, and it was only by the grace of God that a faithful remnant remained.
The phrase “to fear the Lord” means “to worship the Lord according to the law of Moses” (vv. 25, 28, 32, 34). The mixture of religions among the various peoples resulted in what we today would call “pluralism.” At first, the Jews didn’t worship God at all, and He disciplined them for their unfaithfulness (v. 25). The Jewish people worshipped Jehovah plus the gods of the other nations. God will not share worship with false gods, so it’s no wonder He became angry. All the people in the land should have repented, turned from their false gods, and turned to the Lord; but instead, the Lord’s people accepted the false gods of other nations.
The king of Assyria believed that each god was associated with the land from which the people came, and therefore the new residents didn’t know how to worship the Lord of Israel. They could never learn from the Israelites left behind because they had been worshipping the golden calves since the days of King Jeroboam. The king of Assyria ordered one of the Jewish priests to be sent to Israel to teach the people how to worship “the god of the land.” But this priest went to Bethel, the site of one of the shrines dedicated to the golden calf! How much he knew about the true Jewish faith and what he taught aren’t revealed to us, but the situation doesn’t appear to be encouraging.
Many people today would applaud this “world congress of religions,” but the Lord abhors it. In a democracy, we learn to accept pluralism, but this doesn’t mean we approve of it or believe that all religions are equal. In the United States, all religions are equal before the law and may be freely practiced, but Christians still believe that “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4: nkjv). Jesus rejected the Samaritan religion because “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:19–24). The Jewish people who were left in the land appointed their own priests and ignored the standards established by God through Moses (v. 32). The people set up their own religious ceremonies and integrated with this new system some of the beliefs of their new neighbors. There was something for everybody, and it didn’t matter what you believed or how you worshipped, just as long as you were religious (vv. 29–33). Does this sound familiar?
Israel did not learn her lesson (vv. 34–41). It’s often been said that the one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. In spite of the way the Lord had warned them and chastened them, the people continued to worship the Lord along with the other gods, and they did it their own way. They ignored their history as the people of God delivered from Egyptian bondage. They forgot God’s laws and covenants, especially God’s commandments concerning idolatry (Ex. 20:1–6). Like many professed Christians today, the people of Israel worshipped the Lord where and how they pleased, but they also paid respect to the false gods of the other nations.
What finally happened to these ten disobedient tribes? We hear about “the ten lost tribes of Israel,” but the Bible never uses that phrase. Many people in the ten tribes assimilated with the peoples brought into the land by the Assyrians, and this produced the Samaritan people. But there’s no evidence in Scripture that the ten tribes of Israel are “lost.” Long before the Assyrians captured the northern kingdom, dedicated people from the ten tribes moved to Judah and remained faithful to the Lord (1 Kings 12:16–20; 2 Chron. 11:5–16; 19:4–10). Godly King Hezekiah invited true believers to come to Judah and worship God according to the Scriptures, and many of them came (2 Chron. 30:1–14, 25–27). Josiah’s reforms had a tremendous effect on the Jewish people (2 Chron. 34:1–7, 33; 35:17–19).
Though Jesus spoke about “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5–6), the New Testament knows nothing about any “lost tribes of Israel.” (See Matt. 4:12–16 and Luke 2:36–38.) Paul spoke about “our twelve tribes” (Acts 26:7), and James wrote his epistle “to the twelve tribes scattered abroad” (James 1:1). If we take Revelation 7:1–8 literally, then in the last days the Lord will find people from the tribes of Israel.
The main message from this tragic chapter is that false worship leads to corrupt practices, and corrupt practices result in divine condemnation and judgment. Disobedient and compromising leaders—both kings and priests—failed to teach the people the Word of God, and as each new generation came along, the nation drifted further from the Lord. There came a day when God’s anger was displayed against His people, and that was the end of the political entity known as Israel, the northern kingdom.