JOHN178 - These Man-Eating Lions are a Ruining Our Resettlement and Replacement Policies! What Are We Going to Do?
John 4:4
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Music by Jeff Foote
1 SPEAKER_00: Hey my friends, it's Matt.
This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast.
And right now we're working on trying to get a sense of who the
Samaritans are.
Because in John 4, we got a conversation between Jesus and a
Samaritan woman.
And the conversation is kind of famous and it's kind of a big
deal.
But from time to time on this program, those of you who've
been around for a while, you know the deal here.
We do little road trips into other parts of history or other
parts of the Bible.
So we just kind of we linger, we hit pause on a verse in the book
of the Bible we're working through, which right now is
John.
We're in John 4.
And we go on this little road trip and we just go and explore
and we figure out the whole thing.
And we try what we're trying to do when we do that is we're
trying to get up to speed, usually, with the original
audience.
So John was writing to an original audience, a group of
people who knew a bunch of stuff.
And John was one of them.
So you had a pretty good sense of like what you know and what
you don't know.
And you can tell when you read through the Bible when a
biblical author knows who he's writing to and he knows they
know.
He'll just mention something that maybe to everybody else
would be obscure, but my audience knows.
You can also tell when a biblical author is writing to an
audience who wouldn't know this particular thing, because
they'll go into details and they'll explain it a little bit
more.
Well, at this point in John, it would seem that John expects his
audience to know about the ancient blood feud between the
Samaritans and the Jews.
Now, in fairness, John goes on in the course of recounting the
conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman here in John
chapter 4.
A lot of little hints and context clues and details come
up as the story unfolds.
So you could probably figure out the gist, even as you read
along.
John did a masterful job of writing to include people from
outside his core audience with the same historic understandings
as he went along.
But for you and me, we got a double disadvantage.
John is writing 2000 years ago, and he was writing to people who
live in the Middle East.
And most of you, I know there are some exceptions, I see over
there, but most of you probably live a long ways away from the
Middle East and from Jerusalem.
So we have to do a little bit of work from time to time to catch
up on what's going on.
That's what we've been doing lately.
We're trying to figure out the backstory on the Samaritan
thing.
Who are they, and what's the problem between them and the
Jews?
And that takes us back to 2 Kings 17 and specifically to 722
BC, which is one of those four or five dates in the Old
Testament that is supposed to pop.
Really, it's one of the two huge ones: 586 BC and 722 BC are two
very calamitous years.
586 is when the southern kingdom of Judah got wiped out by
Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians.
722 is when the northern kingdom got wiped out by Shalmanesser
and maybe also Sargon II of the Assyrians.
Well, as I told you yesterday, the Assyrians were mean.
And when they wiped you out, they didn't leave much behind
other than a smear.
You were really, really gone.
And they would sort of genetically salt over the top of
your fields, so to speak, by relocating other people groups,
maybe people groups they wanted to reward from around their
empire, and they just move them right into your place.
And you know how people are with the marriage and blood and kids
and things like that.
It might seem at first when that kind of a resettlement policy
occurs, like whatever, we'll just move back in there in a
couple years.
It won't matter.
That's not how things are.
Roots go down very quickly.
Marriage and children and human love causes policies like this
that the Assyrians have undertaking, a resettlement
policy, a repopulation policy, to really only need a few years
to catch on and put down deep roots that are not easily
uprooted later on.
So this is a known practice in the ancient world.
It's a pretty big deal.
And yesterday we left off with the question of okay, the the
northern kingdom of Israel, they didn't have any good kings.
They get wiped out by Shalmanesser and the Assyrians
in 722.
They get taken away into who knows whereville.
But then that leaves us with the question of, well, who ended up
in Samaria after most of the descendants of Abraham who got
shipped out of there got taken away?
Who ends up in the land?
Well, we get our answer a page later in 2 Kings 17, where we
were yesterday, and that answer goes thusly.
The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Kutha, Ava,
Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and settled them in the towns of
Samaria to replace the Israelites.
Did you catch that phrase?
This is a known, intentional, meaningful action.
Why did this resettlement occur?
To replace the Israelites.
We are purging these people from the land, and this is how we're
gonna do it by military force and by repopulation.
They took over Samaria and lived in its towns.
Okay, so where are these folks who are being resettled in
conquered Israel?
Where are they coming from?
Well, I can tell you this much: they are not from close by.
The people of Safarvaim, which I've heard is associated with
ancient Sippar, is near modern-day Baghdad, so that's
Babylon.
Kutha is near modern-day Babylon, maybe I don't know, 50
miles apart from the previous town, and then of course Babylon
itself.
So these people are complete foreigners, total outsiders,
different values, different god, they're ethnically a different
group.
This is a completely different thing, and this is intentional,
once again, on the part of the Assyrians.
But then the other two groups of people that Shalmaneser or
probably Sargon II early in his reign is who carried this stuff
out, the repopulation stuff.
The other two groups, Ava or Ava and Hamath, are from Syria.
So that's, I don't know, 250-ish miles north of Israel, and they
would have a completely different set of gods.
These people groups existed in a completely different orbit.
Now, here's something I don't know, and I don't know if
anybody knows it, it's hard to speak to.
But these groups may have already been resettled from
somewhere else.
So there's a real kind of grab the ant farm by both hands and
just vigorously shake kind of thing going on here.
Now, when we think about great shakeups in the ancient world,
of course, we think first of Alexander the Great, who
intentionally had a marriage and have kids program.
He intentionally tried to change the genetic and linguistic
composition of all of Persia and historic Babylon.
He wasn't alive for very long.
I mean, he accomplished all of that in like 15 years.
The Assyrians were carrying out these policies for much longer.
We just don't know as much about how it shook up the ant farm of
the world because these groups are more obscure and more older,
and the documentation is much better a few hundred years
later, at the time of Alexander the Great, who was a big deal in
the mid to late 300s.
So, way back here, in the mists of history, you've got a
conquest that occurs.
Assyria defeats Israel and takes their capital city of Samaria.
They, according to 2 King 17, 6, captured Samaria and deported
the Israelites to Assyria.
The king settled them in Halah in Gozan and on the Habor River
and in the towns of the Medes.
And then, once they were all scattered and those tribes from
the northern kingdom weren't together anymore, they couldn't
conspire anymore, they couldn't mount a comeback anymore.
He then brings in a bunch of other groups who probably
wouldn't work together real well or have any shared past
grievances and puts them right back in Samaria.
We got a couple more minutes.
There's something really interesting that happens next.
So that's the shakeup and the beginning of what the new
Samaritans are, but they're not really Samaritans yet.
Here's where it gets interesting.
2 Kings 17.
When they, that is, the people who got moved into Samaria,
first lived there, they did not worship the Lord.
So he sent lions among them and they killed some of the people.
It was reported to the king of Assyria: hey, the people you
deported and resettled in the towns of Samaria don't know what
the god of that country requires.
He sent lions among them, which are killing them off because
people don't know what he requires.
So this kind of sets up where we're going to go tomorrow.
I did a video one time a little short on the plague of lions in
the Bible.
I think this is one of those things that people just totally
forget is in there.
I forgot this was in there.
I suppose there's a natural explanation for this.
Like you get rid of a whole bunch of the people and you move
in some, you know, a smaller amount of people.
Maybe the land was fallow for a little while while everybody's
getting moved out and moved back in.
And maybe the lions just came back into town.
And then they became like the lions of Sabo, and they just
started, you know, eating people and stuff.
But the text doesn't treat it like there's a natural
explanation.
It points to the hand of God, which is a really interesting
theme prophetically that we'll get into more tomorrow.
So it sets up this whole problem.
Immediately, the assumption of the Assyrians is that gods are
local, that gods live in certain areas, in certain mountains, in
certain savannas, in certain marshes, near certain temples.
And the people you can swap out, but those old gods, they stay
there.
And the old god of the Israelites, he's mad because
he's not getting what he demands.
And gods demand things.
So we gotta find somebody in these deported people from
somewhere who knows something about the God who still must
live in Israel and what it is that he wants so that we can
sate his appetite and make him happy and he can stop it with
all these lions.
Or our depopulation and repopulation program isn't gonna
work out because everybody we just spent a bunch of money to
move here is gonna get eaten.
And we can't have that.
Well, tomorrow we'll see how the king of Assyria took the request
very seriously, but his solution isn't great.
It demonstrates an ignorance of the things of God and the Bible.
And the king of Assyria, probably Sargon II's decision
that we're gonna read about tomorrow, really contributes to
how this blood feud between the Samaritans and the Jews evolves.
Okie dokie.
That's plenty for now.
I'm Matt.
This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast.
Let's do this again soon.