When Samaria Fell.

A man who is a traitor to his country will, in all likelihood, prove traitorous to his avowed friends.

Hoshea, son of Elah, of Samaria, was such a man. Tilgath-Pileser, the Assyrian conqueror of Damascus assisted Hoshea to assassinate King Pekah, and appointed the assassin to rule in Pekah's stead, in the year 734 B. C. E., merely as a matter of expediency. It was an easier method of re-annexing the rebellious Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrian Empire without cost of life or treasure, and he stooped to it.

But when Tiglath-Pileser died and Shalmaneser IV succeeded him on the throne in Nineveh, Hoshea gave ear to the siren voice of Egypt, and rebelled.

It is related that Hoshea sent an embassy to King So, more correctly, Pharaoh Sabako, of Egypt, when that energetic Ethiopian prince became master over the whole of the ancient Nile country.

The new Pharaoh had ambitions northward. It was he who organized a coalition of Assyrian provinces in the Mediterranean country, with an eye to Nineveh. The traitor, Hoshea, proved the miserable stuff he was made of by joining actively in Sabako's ambitious schemes.

In answer to Sabako, Shalmaneser rushed his veteran troops toward Egypt. The Kingdom of Israel was the first rebellious province he had to deal with. Hoshea was prepared when, in 728, Samaria was besieged. Samaria held out bravely enough for two years, waiting all the time for help from Egypt. But Sabako's promised armies and funds never came.

Shalmaneser died during this siege; but his successor, the great Sargon, came on with re-enforcements and finally, in 721, captured and reduced Samaria, before Hoshea's Egyptian ally had been heard from.

That was the end of the Kingdom of Israel, founded by Jeroboam ben
Nebat, in the year 937, B. C. E., when he rebelled from Rehoboam, King
Solomon's son. The Kingdom of Israel had lasted just 218 years.

Sargon sent away 27,290 captives, the youth and pride of Israel and Samaria, and had them scattered widely apart, in all his provinces. The conqueror, himself, proceeded southward to meet and defeat Sabako, at Raphia, on the great Nile-delta-highway along the Mediterranean coast.

While the records do not show that these events made any impression upon the leaders of thought, such as Isaiah, in Jerusalem, they brought Micah his first opportunity to prohesy.

Living in Moresheth, on the highroad from Gaza to Jerusalem, Micah, who up to this time knew only of the corruption of the classes and the oppression of the masses of Judah, now had first-hand information of the political situation, as well.

Sargon's armies captured and passed through Gaza on their march to Raphia. By way of Gaza, Micah learned that Samaria had not been razed to the ground. There was, therefore, hope for the city and for Israel. Micah's hope, however, was not political. He, unlike Isaiah in Jerusalem, was not concerned with politics. His concern was with the social wrongs and economic outrages of which, as he had now learned, both Israel and Judah were victims.

There was this distinction, however, Israel had already collected the wages of its sins, had paid the price and had been chastised by the rod of Assyria. Judah might be recalled to its better self and escape a similar calamity.

So, before the dust of Sargon's victorious armies, passing through Gaza, had settled in the roads, Micah went again to Jerusalem and launched forth earnestly and with vigor upon his prophetic mission.

In his very first public utterance he drew a deadly parallel between
Israel and Judah:

"Hear, ye peoples, all of you;
Hearken, O earth, and all that therein is:
And let the Lord God be witness against you,
The Lord from His holy temple.

For, behold, the Lord cometh forth out of His place.
And will come down, and tread upon the high places the earth.
And the mountains shall be molten under Him,
And the valleys shall be cleft,
As wax before the fire,
As waters that are poured down a steep place.

For the transgression of Jacob is all this,
And for the sins of the house of Israel.
What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria?
And what are the high places of Judah?
Are they not Jerusalem?"

Fearlessly, with bold strokes, and in vivid pictures, he described the terrible conditions as he knew them:

"Hear, I pray you, ye chiefs of Jacob,
And ye judges of the house of Israel!
You surely ought to know what is just!
Yet, you hate good and love evil;
You who devour the flesh of my people,
Flay their skin from off of them,
And break their bones!"

It was possible for Judah to be saved, if the governing classes, the judiciary, the great landowners and the wealthy merchants dealt justly and righteously with the common people, the poor, the peasant and the wage earner:

"For this will I lament and wail;
I will go stripped and naked;
I will make a wailing like the jackals,
And a lamentation like the ostriches."

Micah did more than merely preach and wail. Down in the Shefelah he set himself to help his fellow-peasants and to correct the injustices practiced upon them, wherever he could.

But the western foothills were not the whole of Judah; and the origin and source of the demoralizing wickedness lay not in the farm sections, but in the capital; and as to the capital, "her wounds are incurable." The cause of the downfall of Samaria and Israel

"Is come even to Judah;
It reacheth unto the gate of my people,
Even unto Jerusalem."

Therefore Micah, less hopeful than Isaiah, who was biding his time for a change of heart in the rulers and chiefs of the country, said of the coming of the day of reckoning:

"Then shall they cry unto the Lord, but He will not answer them:
Yea, He will hide His face from them at that time,
According as they have wrought evil in their doings."