Nine hundred and forty-seven years after the Exodus from Egypt, the northern kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, discovered that Hoshea, the last king of Israel, had been secretly negotiating with Egypt for military support. The Assyrian response was total war.
Shalmaneser besieged Samaria for three years. When it finally fell in the ninth year of Hoshea's reign, the punishment was not mere conquest. It was erasure. The Assyrians demolished the government of Israel entirely, took Hoshea alive, and deported the entire population into Media and Persia. Ten tribes, gone. Eight hundred years after Joshua led them into the land, two hundred and forty years after they split from the House of David under Jeroboam, they vanished from their homeland.
Josephus is blunt about the cause: they transgressed the laws, ignored the prophets who warned them, and refused to stop. The rot began with the original rebellion against Rehoboam, grandson of David, when the northern tribes chose Jeroboam as king. His sins set the template. Every king after him followed it.
Into the emptied land, the Assyrians transplanted foreigners from Cuthah, a region in Persia with a river of the same name. These five nations each brought their own gods, and a plague struck them immediately. When they consulted an oracle and learned they needed to worship the God of the land, they sent to the Assyrian king for Israelite priests. The priests taught them the Torah and proper worship. The plague stopped. These settlers became the Kutim (כותים)—known in Greek as the Samaritans. Josephus notes their opportunism with acid precision: when the Jews prospered, the Samaritans claimed kinship through Joseph. When the Jews suffered, the Samaritans denied any connection at all.