Hoshea, King of Israel

Life and work

Hoshea son of Elah came to power the way several of his predecessors had: he conspired against Pekah son of Remaliah, struck him down, and reigned in his place (2 Kings 15:30). He ruled nine years from Samaria over what was left of Israel, by then already stripped of Galilee and Gilead by Assyrian campaigns.

2 Kings gives him the same qualified verdict it gave Joram son of Ahab a century earlier — he did evil in God's sight, "yet not as the kings of Israel who were before him" (2 Kings 17:2). It is the last such verdict the northern kingdom receives.

Shalmaneser V of Assyria came against him and he became an Assyrian vassal, paying annual tribute. Then he stopped. The text says he had sent messengers to "So king of Egypt" and brought no tribute up as he had done year by year, and that the king of Assyria found conspiracy in him and shut him in prison (2 Kings 17:3-4).

Assyria besieged Samaria for three years and took it in the ninth year of his reign. The population was deported to Halah, to the Habor river in Gozan, and to the cities of the Medes, and foreign settlers were brought in to replace them (2 Kings 17:5-6, 24). 2 Kings then breaks off the narrative for a long chapter explaining why the kingdom fell — the one sustained theological post-mortem in the historical books.

Scripture never says what became of him. He is last seen in prison, before the siege he is imprisoned for is even over.

Dating

Neither his birth nor his death is recorded — Scripture leaves him in an Assyrian prison and says nothing more. 2 Kings gives him nine years (17:1) and dates the fall of Samaria to his ninth (17:6; 18:10), so the reign has to span nine years: an earlier version of this entry read 732-722, which is ten, and has been corrected. Where those nine years sit absolutely depends on the reconstruction — schemes in print put the accession anywhere from 733 to 731 and the end of the reign from 724 to 722 — and the northern kingdom's regnal figures are notoriously hard to reconcile in this period.

Questions and debates

Who actually captured Samaria is genuinely unsettled. 2 Kings says only "the king of Assyria" took it. Shalmaneser V died around 722 BC, at almost exactly the moment the city fell, and his successor Sargon II claims the conquest and the deportation of 27,290 people — the figure most copies of that inscription give — in his own royal inscriptions. Scholars variously credit Shalmaneser, credit Sargon, or reconstruct two separate captures a few years apart; the Babylonian Chronicle's brief note is read both ways.

"So king of Egypt" has never been securely identified, and no identification commands consensus — but the proposals are not four equal options. Osorkon IV of Tanis, of the Twenty-second Dynasty, is the most widely favoured, following Kenneth Kitchen, who read So as a shortening of (O)so(rkon). A substantial minority read So not as a personal name at all but as the city of Sais, which makes the king in view Tefnakht I of the Twenty-fourth Dynasty; those two are largely the same proposal, though Tefnakht has also been argued for on separate linguistic grounds. An older view, going back to Rudolf Kittel in 1922 and revived since, identifies him with Piye of the Nubian Twenty-fifth Dynasty. A fourth reading — that So was not a king at all but the Egyptian commander the Assyrians called Sib'e — has been abandoned, because cuneiformists now read that name as Re'e.

Extra-biblical evidence

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 15:30 — Kills Pekah and takes the throne
• 2 Kings 17:1-6 — His reign, the appeal to Egypt, and the fall of Samaria
• 2 Kings 18:9-12 — The siege dated against Hezekiah's reign in Judah

Further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Hoshea

Reflect

This was not the worst king Israel had — 2 Kings says so outright — but he inherited the consequences of everyone who came before him. Where are you carrying something you did not start?