Apparently Hoshea, king of Israel, pretended when the Assyrians entered his country that he remained friendly.  Shalmaneser, however, was well informed, and made Hoshea a prisoner.  Samaria closed its gates against him although their king had been dispatched to Assyria.

The Biblical account of the campaign is as follows:  “Against him (Hoshea) came up Shalmaneser king of Assyria; and Hoshea became his servant, and gave him presents.  And the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea:  for he had sent messengers to So king of Egypt,[519] and brought no present to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year; therefore the king of Assyria shut him up and bound him in prison.

“Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years."[520]

Shalmaneser died before Samaria was captured, and may have been assassinated.  The next Assyrian monarch, Sargon II (722-705 B.C.), was not related to either of his two predecessors.  He is referred to by Isaiah,[521] and is the Arkeanos of Ptolemy.  He was the Assyrian monarch who deported the “Lost Ten Tribes”.

“In the ninth year of Hoshea” (and the first of Sargon) “the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes."[522] In all, according to Sargon’s record, “27,290 people dwelling in the midst of it (Samaria) I carried off”.

They (the Israelites) left all the commandments of the Lord their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshipped all the host of heaven (the stars), and served Baal.  And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger.  Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight:  there was none left but the tribe of Judah only.  And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, 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....  And the men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth, and the men of Cuth (Cuthah) made Nergal, and the men of Hamath made Ashima, and the Avites made Nibhaz and Tartak, and the Sepharites burnt their children in fire to Adram-melech and Anam-melech, the gods of Sepharvaim.

A number of the new settlers were slain by lions, and the king of Assyria ordered that a Samaritan priest should be sent to “teach them the manner of the God of the land”.  This man was evidently an orthodox Hebrew, for he taught them “how they should fear the Lord....  So they feared the Lord”, but also “served their own gods ... their graven images".[523]