Examining The Scripture LVIII: The Northern Kingdom Falls

It is quite simple why God allows the Northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) to fall and go into captivity in 722 B.C., Israel is exiled to Assyria because of their horrendous sin in 2 Kings 17:7-23. Their punishment was great considering that Assyria was an exceptionally brutal regime. In their brutality they were even known to have tortured people by dismembering, impaling or flaying and skinning them alive as is documented in some stone tablets (pictured below). I personally believe it is why the Southern Kingdom (Judah) is spared (relatively speaking) and falls later under Babylonian oppression which was also bad but not nearly as bad as Assyrian subjegation.

The exile is punishment for a habitually disobedient nation towards a God who had brought them out of Egypt (ESV-Study Bible 678-679). They worship the gods and followed the practices of the nations they had driven out and also the gods the kings of Israel had introduced. They maintained the “high places”, set up sacred stones, Asherah poles, worshipped idols. Here we see one of the long term effects of not completely destroying and driving out the inhabitants of Canaan right after Joshua's death in Judges 1 as noted in Examining The Scripture XXXVII: Sowing Seeds Of Destruction. Way down the road those "rogue" seeds that should've been destroyed or driven out have come back to haunt Israel so badly it has caused the demise of the Northern Kingdom and is already doing its damage on the Southern Kingdom. All their evils provoked God to anger and unleashed His wrath. God even went to the extent of warning them through prophets (which He really didn’t have to do). They did not listen and were “stiff-necked” rejecting the decrees and covenants God had made with their fathers (ancestors)…even after the warnings He had given them. Worthless idols, not unlike today, we just don’t call them idols. We call the obsessions, loves, hobbies, passions. Sadly, the postmodern world has taken what were basically good words and inverted or twisted their meanings so that they either mean something they shouldn’t or mean nothing. The way they are being used makes the words worthless.

I have to assume the reference in verse 17 that: “the sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire is a reference to Molech. This is obviously forbidden in Leviticus Leviticus 18:21. This to me is a especially heathen and horrendous practice for an Israelite (any human actually) to perform. Nowhere in the Bible or written history does it say these children were dead or unconscious at the time of sacrifice. I have had commentaries and people tell me that Isaiah 57:5 and Jeremiah 19:5 says that they were dead first but that is not how it reads. As a human these are sin that you want people punished for, its sick. The Lord “rejected all the people of Israel (North); he afflicted them and gave them into the hands of plunderers, until he thrust them from his presence.” So the people of Israel were taken from their homeland into exile in Assyria and they would reaped what they had sown in terms of their evil ways.