Despite considerable scholarly efforts for many years, the last two decades of the Kingdom of Israel are still beneath the veil of history. What was the status of the Kingdom after its annexation by Assyria in 732 BCE? Who conquered Samaria, the capital of the Kingdom? When did it happen? One of the primary reasons for this situation lies in the discrepancies found in the historical sources, namely the Hebrew Bible and the Assyrian texts.

Since biblical studies and Assyriology are two distinct disciplines, the gaps in the sources are not easy to bridge. Moreover, recent great progress in the archaeological research in the Southern Levant provides now crucial new data, independent of these textual sources.

This volume, a collection of papers by leading scholars from different fields of research, aims to bring together, for the first time, all the available data and to discuss these conundrums from various perspectives in order to reach a better and deeper understanding of this crucial period, which possibly triggered in the following decades the birth of "new Israel" in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and eventually led to the formation of the Hebrew Bible and its underlying theology.

• Table of Contents 6
• The Last Days of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Introducing the Proceedings of a Multi-Disciplinary Conference 10
• Part I: Setting the Scene 26
• How to Encounter an Historical Problem? “722–720 BCE” as a Case Study 26
• Part II: Approaching the Fall of Samaria from Contemporary Assyrian and Egyptian Sources 44
• Contextualizing the Last Days of the Kingdom of Israel: What Can Assyrian Official Inscriptions Tell Us? 44
• Samaria, Hamath, and Assyria’s Conquests in the Levant in the Late 720s BCE. The Testimony of Sargon II’s Inscriptions 64
• Why Israel? Reflections on Shalmaneser V’s and Sargon II’s Grand Strategy for the Levant 96
• The “Lost Tribes of Israel” in the Context of the Resettlement Programme of the Assyrian Empire 110
• The End of the Kingdom of Israel: A View from the Nile Valley 134
• Part III: Views from Archaeology 156
• The Annals of Sargon II and the Archaeology of Samaria: Rhetorical Claims, Empirical Evidence 156
• Megiddo and Jezreel Reflected in the Dying Embers of the Northern Kingdom of Israel 198
• Part IV: Working with the Book of Kings: the Text 220
• Between Two Differing Editions: Some Notable Text-Critical Variants in 2 Kings 17 220