Kingdom of Israel

The Kingdom of Israel, also called the Kingdom of Samaria or the Northern Kingdom, was an Israelite state in the southern Levant during the Iron Age. According to the Hebrew Bible, it arose around 930 BCE after the death of Solomon, when the northern tribes rejected his son Rehoboam and made Jeroboam their king, while Judah and Benjamin remained loyal to the house of David in the south. The kingdom controlled Samaria, Galilee and parts of Transjordan, and its capitals included Shiloh, Shechem, Tirzah and finally Samaria, founded by Omri in the ninth century. The House of Omri, and later the dynasty of Jehu, ruled a wealthy state that traded with Phoenicia and Assyria and fought Damascus and Judah. In 720 BCE the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II conquered Samaria, deported twenty-seven thousand Israelites and ended the kingdom, an event remembered as the Assyrian captivity and the loss of the ten northern tribes.