Samarian Scribes in King Hezekiah’s Court

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In the late eighth century BCE, a series of Assyrian military campaigns devastated the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Large numbers of refugees fled south to Judah, including royal scribes who escaped with stories and traditions from the north that would later be recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Trace the evidence of these northern refugees and the critical role they may have played in Jerusalem’s royal court.

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Footnotes

1. William G. Dever, “How the Ten Tribes of Israel Were Lost,” BAR, Winter 2024.

Endnotes

1. Magen Broshi, “The Expansion of Jerusalem in the Reigns of Hezekiah and Manasseh,” Israel Exploration Journal 24 (1974), pp. 21–26. For an update to this idea, see Aaron Burke, “An Anthropological Model for the Investigation of the Archaeology of Refugees in Iron Age Judah and Its Environs,” in Brad E. Kelle, Frank Ritchel Ames, and Jacob L. Wright, eds., Interpreting Exile: Interdisciplinary Studies of Displacement and Deportation in Biblical and Modern Contexts (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 41–56. The implications for the formation of biblical literature are further developed in my book, Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2024).

2. Israel Finkelstein, “Migration of Israelites into Judah after 720 BCE: An Answer and an Update,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 127.2 (2015), pp. 188–206.

3. Gary A. Rendsburg and William M. Schniedewind, “The Siloam Tunnel Inscription: Historical and Linguistic Perspectives,” Israel Exploration Journal 60 (2010), pp. 188–203.