The King of Assyria was Sargon II (722-705). He followed the Assyrian practice of deporting conquered people to the other lands he had conquered. Likewise, when Israel was deported from their land Sargon imported other conquered people into the land of Israel to live with the few Israelites who had not been deported. This was a military strategy that followed the familiar maxim “divide and conqueror.” The idea being a mixed people group with different culture, different language and different religion will be unable to organize a unified rebellion against the empire.

Eventually the Gentile people that Assyria imported into Israel intermarried with the Israelite people who were left in the land. The descendants of these Gentile/Israel marriages lived in this land called Samaria, or the former kingdom of Israel. This Gentile/Jewish mixed people are known as Samaritans in the New Testament.

When the imported Gentiles first lived in the land of northern Israel they did not worship the Lord, nor did they know how to worship the Lord according to his regulations given to Moses. As a result the land was overrun with wild animals including lions that attacked the people who worked in the fields and travel on the roads.

To remedy this situation Sargon had one of the captive priests that had been taken from Samaria sent back to teach the new immigrants how to worship the God of the land of Israel. This was a lose/lose situation since this priest himself had been taken captive from a nation that had been destroyed by the Lord for not worshipping or living righteously in the Lord’s land. It is fairly certain this priest did not do much to help the situation since his information was faulty to begin with. It seems the immigrants also thought this priest was useless since they ignored him and simply instituted the worship of the pagan god that they had brought from their destroyed homeland from where they had been captured and deported by Assyria.

So, the land of Israel became a land of varied worship to numerous gods including the deviant Samaritan worship that began with Jeroboam’s two golden calves in Bethel and Dan set up after the death of Solomon. This is the religious heritage of the Samaritans of the days of the New Testament.

"The question is, can we say, simply, honestly, not because we feel that as evangelicals we ought to, but because it is a plain matter of fact, that we have known God, and that because we have known God, the unpleasantness we have had or the pleasantness we have not had, through being Christians does not matter to us?" - J.I. Packer