BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

The Ten Lost Tribes

Evidence of the Assyrian conquest of Israel

“So Israel was exiled from their own land to Assyria until this day.” This is how the Book of 2 Kings summarizes the Assyrian conquest of Israel (17:23). In what was a culmination of more than a century-long confrontation between Israel and Assyria, King Sargon II captured the capital city of Samaria in 721 BCE and exiled thousands of Israelites to Assyria. A later biblical tradition recorded in 2 Kings 17 then established the myth of the “ten lost tribes” of Israel: “None was left but the tribe of Judah alone” (18).

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In the Winter 2024 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, the eminent biblical archaeologist William G. Dever looks at what archaeology has to say about the Assyrian conquest of Israel in the late eighth century. A former director of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem who also excavated at Gezer between 1966 and 1971, Dever focuses on the material evidence from this prominent Israelite city. First, however, he discusses the biblical account that purports to explain the final demise of the Northern Kingdom of Israel as God’s punishment.

According to 2 Kings 17:7–8, the ten tribes of Israel were lost “because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshipped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had introduced.” For the biblical authors, this meant, explains Dever, that “the true ‘Israel’ was Judah, which survived, while the lands and tribes of the north were irrevocably lost, their peoples exiled to Assyria and abandoned by Yahweh. From these traumatic and divisive events eventually emerged the enduring myth of the ‘ten lost tribes’ of Israel.”

Turning finally to Gezer, which was strategically situated on the border between the northern and southern kingdoms, Dever reports on the main architectural features of the city and explores the evidence of the Assyrian conquest: “In the late eighth century, the city’s new outer wall was breached just east of the gate, and both the four-chamber gate and Palace 8000, along with the nearby four-room house, were violently destroyed. … Inside the double walls of the casemate, we encountered more than 5 feet of burnt destruction debris above the room’s cobbled floor.”

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As is depicted in a now-lost relief from Tiglath-Pileser III’s royal palace in Nimrud (see above), Assyrian soldiers used siege machines to scale the city’s walls. They also likely used a battering ram against the wooden gate and threw up burning wood to weaken the mudbrick superstructure. As they did in other conquered cities, the Assyrians then massacred much of the population and exiled the rest. Deporting conquered people and replacing them with different groups was a long-standing Assyrian tradition. The “ten lost tribes” of Israel were taken to Assyria, from which they never returned, despite the prophets’ hope that “a saving remnant” might return to the land one day.

As expressed by such biblical prophets as Micah (2:12; 5:5–7), Amos (9:15), and even Hosea (14:7), the disobedient people of Israel were expected to eventually return and usher in a new golden age. “But their optimism in this case, while admirable, was misguided. The ‘ten lost tribes’ of Israel disappeared from history, leaving only the two southern tribes of Benjamin and Judah,” concludes Dever.

To further explore the biblical and archaeological evidence for the ten lost tribes, read William G. Dever’s article “How the Ten Tribes of Israel Were Lost,” published in the Winter 2024 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Subscribers: Read the full article “How the Ten Tribes of Israel Were Lost” by William G. Dever in the Winter 2024 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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