2 Kings 17:1-5 meaning

2 Kings 17:1-5 narrates the final reign of Israel's last king and the Assyrian siege that ends the northern kingdom—the doom the northern kingdom has been moving toward for two hundred years. From Jeroboam son of Nebat (1 Kings 12:25-33), through Ahab and Jezebel (1 Kings 16:30-33), through Jehu's incomplete reform (2 Kings 10:28-31), through the temporary recovery under Jeroboam II (2 Kings 14:23-27), and through the rapid collapse of the final decades when kings rose and fell by assassination, the kingdom that broke off from the house of David at the end of 1 Kings 11 has been heading toward the verdict that arrives in 2 Kings 17.

The first five verses of the chapter give the political mechanics of how that verdict was executed. The rest of the chapter will explain why it had to be. The opening verse establishes the king and the dating: In the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah, Hoshea the son of Elah became king over Israel in Samaria, and reigned nine years (v. 1).

This information pins the reign of Ahaz of Judah in the late 730s and 720s BC. Hoshea son of Elah came to the throne by assassination, the way most of the last northern kings did. The earlier passage in 2 Kings 15:30 records that “Hoshea the son of Elah made a conspiracy against Pekah the son of Remaliah, and struck him and put him to death and became king in his place.” Hoshea is the nineteenth king of the northern kingdom counted from Jeroboam, and he will be the last. He reigns nine years before the Assyrian army ends the kingdom around him.

Samaria, the capital city of Israel, was built by Omri (1 Kings 16:24) on a hill he purchased from a man named Shemer. Omri fortified it. Ahab adorned it (see map). The prophets denounced what was done inside it (Hosea 7:1, Amos 3:9). By the time of Hoshea's reign, Samaria had been the royal city of the northern kingdom for roughly a century and a half, and its end was about to come at the gates Omri had built.

The verdict pronounced on Hoshea adds a note of exception to the standard formula for the northern rulers that the king did evil in God’s sight: He did evil in the sight of the LORD, only not as the kings of Israel who were before him (v. 2).

The first half repeats the typical verdict of the king’s reign, that he did evil in the sight of the LORD. The formula begins with Jeroboam at the start of the kingdom (1 Kings 14:9 in effect; explicitly 1 Kings 15:34 of his son Nadab) and runs uninterrupted to this final verse about Hoshea. Jehu is a partial exception, in that God said he did right by eliminating Ahab (2 Kings 10:30). But the text swiftly adds, “But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the LORD, the God of Israel, with all his heart; he did not depart from the sins of Jeroboam, which he made Israel sin” (2 Kings 10:31).

Hoshea continued the trend of being a covenant-breaker by the measure God applies to the kings of Samaria/Israel. However, it seems that the qualifier only not as the kings of Israel who were before him infers that Hoshea's evil was a lesser evil than that of his predecessors. The text does not explain the comparison.

The qualifier could be due to several factors. Hoshea’s reign was on the shorter end—but there were seven shorter, so it does not seem that the time frame to do evil is the primary focus. A more probable speculation is that his reign was largely consumed by Assyrian pressure, so the scope of religious mischief he could employ was constrained by circumstance. This includes the fact that the king of Assyria imprisoned Hoshea for part of his reign, as we will see in verse 4.

Also, Jewish tradition holds that Hoshea allowed northern Israelites to travel to Jerusalem for the feasts rather than blocking them as Jeroboam had done—this could be a reason for the qualifier. The text itself does not name the reason. It states the comparison and moves on. Even a king of lesser evil was not enough to reverse the doom approaching the realm of Israel. God’s standard is as He chooses; He is not beholden to human comparisons. The fact that Hoshea did evil in the sight of the LORD is telling enough, despite it being of a differing extreme or kind as his forbearers, and it would be reasonable to infer that Hoshea was unrepentant of whatever evil he did.

The political action of the chapter then opens: Shalmaneser king of Assyria came up against him, and Hoshea became his servant and paid him tribute (v. 3).

Shalmaneser V ruled Assyria from approximately 727 to 722 BC, succeeding his father Tiglath-Pileser III, the king who had already begun stripping the northern kingdom of its territory and population (2 Kings 15:29). When the text says Shalmaneser came up against him, the verb describes a military move by the senior power, or “suzerain” against a vassal whose loyalty has become suspect.

That Hoshea became his servant and paid him tribute infers a suzerain/vassal style treaty. The word translated servant is the standard vocabulary of vassalage in ancient Near Eastern treaties. The word translated tribute refers to the annual payment a subject king owed his overlord, often calculated as a percentage of revenues. In modern terms, Hoshea agreed to be Assyria's client and to fund Assyria's army out of Israel's harvests.

That arrangement, in itself, was not new for the northern kingdom. The prophet Hosea, ministering during these very decades, analogized the pattern, “Ephraim has hired lovers” (Hosea 8:9). Israel's habit, in the prophet's accounting, was to seek security from neighboring powers rather than from the LORD. In his reign, King Menahem had paid Tiglath-Pileser a thousand talents of silver to leave him alone (2 Kings 15:19-20).

The standard procedure in the ancient world was for kings with superior power to extract tribute from lesser powers. The basic “deal” was, “If you pay me, then I will protect you.” It seems that in most cases the weaker power is primarily being protected from the stronger power. So it was more of a protection payment than anything else. At this time, Assyria was the earth’s greatest imperial power, which also means it was the largest bully.

We see evidence of this Suzerain-Vassal structure throughout scripture. For example, the episode involving Abraham’s rescue of his nephew Lot in Genesis is embedded within a Suzerain/Vassal-style dispute. When Genesis 14:5 says the five kings of the Jordan Valley “rebelled” against Chedorlaomer and three other Mesopotamian kings, this means they stopped paying tribute (protection money).

So, Chedorlaomer and the other three kings in his confederacy sent soldiers to enforce their treaty by sacking the cities of the five kings and taking a large store of booty home with them. The idea is, “You can pay some or we will come and take it all.”

Another example can be found in 2 Kings 1:1, which says: "After the death of Ahab, Moab rebelled against Israel." 2 Kings 3:4-5 specifies how the vassal relationship had worked: Mesha, king of Moab, "used to pay the king of Israel 100,000 lambs and the wool of 100,000 rams" as annual tribute.

When Ahab died, Mesha rebelled and stopped paying the tribute/protection payment. Interestingly, the archaeological discovery known as the Mesha Stele records the same historical event from Mesha’s perspective. Hezekiah, a ruler of Judea during the reign of Hoshea in Israel, is also said to have “rebelled against the king of Assyria,” again meaning he stopped paying tribute.

The Hebrew root for the word translated "rebelled" is also used in Numbers 14:9 in the command to Israel not to "rebel against the Lord." This is appropriate because the Lord created a Suzerain/Vassal-style treaty with Israel that was His covenant with them (Exodus 19:7-8). The enforcement provisions, the "blessings and cursings" provision of the treaty, is set forth in Deuteronomy 28:15-68.

The vassal arrangement King Hoshea of Israel entered with King Shalmaneser of Assyria was the same Suzerain-Vassal pattern. The deeper failure underneath that pattern was the failure the text will name in verses 7 through 23: a covenant people seeking protection from gods and kings other than the One who had brought them up out of Egypt.

The tacit admission of Israel is that God is not their protector. They had placed themselves outside of His protection through rebelling against their obligations under the treaty. Unlike human-to-human Suzerain-Vassal treaties, where the strong exploits the weak, in God’s covenant treaty what He demanded was justice, mercy, and a culture of loving one’s neighbor. It was because of Israel and Judah’s violation of this requirement that led God to invoke the enforcement provisions of the treaty .

The verse that follows describes a situation discovered by the superior king. Apparently, Hoshea changed the political calculation and decided he could get a better deal from Egypt: But the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea, who had sent messengers to So king of Egypt and had offered no tribute to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year; so the king of Assyria shut him up and bound him in prison (v. 4).

Hoshea, while apparently still contracted as a vassal of Assyria, sent diplomatic messengers to So king of Egypt. The identity of So—his Egyptian name and reign—is not confirmed through archeology. But the pattern continues throughout Israel’s history in that it engages in persistent flirtation with Egypt. This is dealt with in scripture as failing to trust God. In Deuteronomy 17:16, God specifically pointed out Egypt as a power Israel should never rely upon.

Egypt at this point was a fading power, fragmented under multiple dynasties and incapable of fielding the kind of army that could face Assyria in the open. We can see this from the words of the prophet Isaiah, ministering in Judah during the same window of time. He denounced any thought of reliance on Egypt when Judah's leaders considered the same move:

"'Woe to the rebellious children,' declares the LORD, 'who execute a plan, but not Mine, and make an alliance, but not of My Spirit... who proceed down to Egypt without consulting Me, to take refuge in the safety of Pharaoh and to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt!'" 
(Isaiah 30:1-2)

The picture Isaiah uses elsewhere is incisive: leaning on Egypt is like leaning on “a crushed reed that pierces the hand of the one who leans on it” (Isaiah 36:6). The picture of a reed incapable of holding up any weight but being able to create splinters makes it clear that Egypt is woefully inadequate as a protector. To rely on Egypt for help is to inflict harm upon oneself.

Hoshea, by reaching out to Egypt, was leaning on a reed that could not hold. Hezekiah realized his poor political calculation to rely on Egypt after Assyria had conquered most of Judah. He offered to restore the tribute to Assyria (2 Kings 18:14). Assyria took the payment but did not relent from their effort to conquer.

The tribute amount Hoshea ceased paying was an annual protection fee (year by year.) Hoshea defaulted on the annual payment. In Assyrian vassal treaties, that default triggered the enforcement section of the treaty, which was to invade, sack, and kill and enslave the people of the offending kingdom. Apparently, Hoshea calculated that the combination of diplomacy with Egypt and weakness in Assyria allowed the opportunity to halt the annual protection payments. His calculation was tragically incorrect.

The default gave Shalmaneser a legal pretext to act. Once the Assyrian state found conspiracy in Hoshea to align with Egypt, the cause of the broken promise became more existential to Assyrian dominance. If word got out that one of Assyria’s client states broke away, and perhaps got a better deal from Egypt, this would threaten their entire protection-payment scheme. Or said another way, if Assyria is discovered to be unable to enforce its treaties, it would induce others to default on their payments.

The first stage of the enforcement came quickly—the king of Assyria shut him (Hoshea) up and bound him in prison. Hoshea, the reigning king of Israel, is taken into Assyrian custody and bound in prison before the city of Samaria has even fallen. It could be that Hoshea was summoned to Shalmaneser's presence under diplomatic cover and arrested there, leaving Samaria's other leaders to face the siege. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding Hoshea, the kingdom of Israel was about to face the most powerful army in the ancient Near East with its king in chains.

The action then widens from the single captured king to the whole land. Then the king of Assyria invaded the whole land and went up to Samaria and besieged it three years (v. 5).

The fall of Samaria, also called Israel, is summarized in one verse, but it describes several stages. First, the king of Assyria invaded the whole land. The verb invaded describes the systematic Assyrian campaign style: the army moving across the whole land, taking villages and fortified towns one at a time, stripping the terrain of its supplies, and deporting populations from captured zones. We see the same pattern later when Assyria invades Judea. Assyria first took all the lesser cities in Judea (2 Kings 18:13.) Then they took the major city of Lachish (2 Kings 18:14). Finally, they set their sights on Jerusalem, but God intervened and defeated them (2 Kings 19:35-36).

(As an interesting aside, the siege of Lachish is memorialized on a frieze found in Nineveh and now displayed in the British Museum).

The Assyrian state was the most efficient military machine of its age. Its records describe campaigns by counting the cities reduced, the heads taken, and the captives marched away. The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (an earlier Shalmaneser, ninth century BC) was already in existence at the time of this event. That obelisk depicts Israelite King Jehu bowing in tribute. By the time of Shalmaneser V in this verse, the Assyrian state's appetite for territory and people had only grown.

After capturing the whole land, the Assyrian army then gathered to conquer the fortified capital city of Samaria. The Assyrian forces went up to Samaria and besieged it for three years. That it took Assyria three years to bring down the capital might indicate that Assyria’s power had weakened, or that Samaria was particularly well-fortified. What we can say for certain is that Hoshea made a poor political calculation.

Samaria had been built on a defensible hill (1 Kings 16:24) and had withstood previous sieges. The Aramean king Ben-hadad had besieged it during Ahab's reign and been turned back by the LORD's intervention through unnamed prophets (1 Kings 20:1-21). Samaria had endured starvation under a later Aramean siege, only to be relieved miraculously when the LORD caused the Aramean army to flee (2 Kings 6:24 - 7:20). Based on geography, Samaria was a difficult city to take. The earlier sieges had ended in deliverance. This one would not.

The three-year length of the siege is reported plainly. There had been prior sieges. But the Israelites are on their own, here; God has given them into the hands of their enemies. In an earlier siege account, the writer narrates prophets speaking, the LORD acting, and the Aramean army fleeing in panic at sounds that turned out to be from the LORD (2 Kings 7:6).

In this siege there is no prophet who comes to Hoshea. There is no LORD-given word of deliverance. There is no army that flees in the night. The three years pass in narrative silence, and the next verse (which lies just outside this section) records that “the king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried Israel away into exile to Assyria” (2 Kings 17:6).

This fulfills covenant warnings of Deuteronomy 28, the “cursings” for disobedience. In particular, this fits with the covenant remedy that: "You shall be torn from the land where you are entering to possess it... the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth" (Deuteronomy 28:63-64). This long-dormant treaty provision is being fully invoked.

The proximate cause for the end is Hoshea's broken treaty with Assyria and his Egyptian alliance. The instrument of the kingdom’s end is the Assyrian army under its king Shalmaneser. Another proximate cause of the kingdom’s end is the assassination-driven instability that had marked the northern kingdom for decades.

But the writer of the book of Kings does not focus on any of those proximate factors as the real explanation for the kingdom’s fall. Verses 7 through 23, which follow this section, will spell out the real explanation: the northern kingdom fell because “the sons of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them up from the land of Egypt” (2 Kings 17:7). The Assyrian army is the visible cause. The covenant breach with Israel’s treaty with God is the underlying cause.

The chapter is structured so the reader cannot escape the deeper conclusion. Hoshea is not the worst king the north produced. He is not Ahab, who married Jezebel and built a temple to Baal in Samaria (1 Kings 16:31-32). He is not Manasseh, who would come a generation later in Judah and fill Jerusalem with bloodshed (2 Kings 21:16).

The text actually grants him a comparative concession. And yet his comparatively lesser evil did not avert the judgment. Although Hoshea was somewhat better than (or, at least, not as bad as) his predecessors, he was still on the wrong side of the LORD's covenant. That means judgment will be invoked; the Lord’s word never returns void (Isaiah 55:11). The Lord is merciful, and slow to anger (Psalm 103:8). But He is also righteous, and in time will invoke judgment (2 Peter 3:9).

The cumulative weight of two centuries of covenant disobedience cannot be undone by a moderately less wicked final monarch. The judgment that had been deferred again and again under Elijah, Elisha, and the rolling list of prophets the LORD had sent to the north (2 Kings 17:13) was finally executed.

The story also frames a sharp contrast with the southern kingdom of Judah, which the chapter has tied to the dating of the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah (v. 1). Ahaz, by every account in 2 Kings 16, was a far worse king than Hoshea was. He sacrificed his own son in fire (2 Kings 16:3), copied a foreign altar he had seen in Damascus (2 Kings 16:10-16), and dismantled portions of the temple to pay tribute to the same Assyrian state Hoshea was now resisting (2 Kings 16:17-18).

And yet Judah did not fall in this generation. The reason was not Judah's superior righteousness. The reason was that the LORD had promised David that his lamp would not be extinguished (1 Kings 11:36, 2 Samuel 7:16), and the LORD was keeping His word. It is also the case that Judah had at least some good kings. They also had Jerusalem, the temple and the ark, all of which symbolized Yahweh, the God of Israel. But eventually Judah was judged as well. 1 and 2 Chronicles was written after Judah’s exile to Babylon to explain that the exile was an invocation of the enforcement provisions of Israel’s covenant/treaty with God. This is aptly summarized in 1 Chronicles:

"So all Israel was enrolled by genealogies; and behold, they are written in the Book of the Kings of Israel. And Judah was carried away into exile to Babylon for their unfaithfulness."
(1 Chronicles 9:1)

Also, Hoshea's pivot to Egypt demonstrates a moral failure the prophets denounced repeatedly: looking for security in alliances with the nations rather than in the LORD. Isaiah names it as Judah's temptation (Isaiah 30:1-3; 31:1-3). Hosea names it as the north's temptation (Hosea 7:11; 12:1). The pattern keeps recurring because the rulers have their eyes on human cause/effect rather than turning to the Lord and trusting Him.

When the pressure of a Shalmaneser bears down on a small kingdom, the easiest response is to find a larger king and seek shelter under his protection. The harder response is to repent and return to following the provisions of their covenant with God. Hoshea chose the easier response, and the easier response did not save him.

The section closes the door, and the rest of the chapter walks the reader through what the closed door means. The crushed reed of Egypt did not protect Hoshea. The diplomacy that pivoted between foreign powers did not save the kingdom. The cumulative reign of nineteen kings, none of whom followed the LORD fully, ended with the fall and captivity of all Samaria.

The covenant the LORD had made with Israel through Moses included both blessing and curse (Deuteronomy 28; 30:19), and in 722 BC, three years after Shalmaneser's siege began, the curse clauses were enforced. The promise to Abraham was not erased—through the southern kingdom of Judah it would still find fulfillment—but the northern kingdom of Israel, as a political entity, ended here.

The main point found in this passage is that the LORD is the One who "removes kings and establishes kings" (Daniel 2:21). Shalmaneser of Assyria did not know he was fulfilling the will of a God he did not worship or recognize. God gave to each person the capacity to make choices. But Shalmaneser’s choice to topple Samaria was also acting as the instrument of a judgment about which the LORD had warned for centuries. The same chapter that records his army at the gates of Samaria will record (in 2 Kings 17:23) that "Israel was carried away into exile from their own land to Assyria until this day."

Human choices are based on political calculations. But underneath all that lies the LORD's covenant claim on His people. This, with a mere five verses, begins to bring to a close the larger story of what happens when a covenant people perpetually refuses to honor their covenant agreements for two centuries

The judgment falls. The kingdom ends. And the larger plan of the LORD continues. The line of David, through whom will come the King of true and lasting allegiance, Jesus Christ, remains intact (Matthew 1:6-16; Luke 1:32-33). And the covenant promises of God are still intact as well. This includes the promise of Deuteronomy 32:35-37, where God assures that after Israel is judged for disobedience that it will be restored. We see a corollary promise in Romans 11:26, which asserts that “all Israel will be saved.”

Thus, though the human kingdom ends, the promise of a future messianic kingdom remains. As we see in the promised new earth, the twelve gates of the New Jerusalem will bear the names of the twelve tribes of Israel (Revelation 21:12). We see earlier in Revelation that twelve tribes will be represented in the 144,000 missionaries that will testify to the messianic kingdom (Revelation 7:4-8).

Further, Jesus promised the twelve disciples that they would sit on twelve thrones judging the tribes of Israel (Matthew 19:28). Thus, human agency never revokes God’s sovereignty. His promises stand forever (Romans 11:29).