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Catholic Commentary
Repopulation of Samaria and the Problem of the God of the Land
24The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, from Cuthah, from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria and lived in its cities.25So it was, at the beginning of their dwelling there, that they didn’t fear Yahweh. Therefore Yahweh sent lions among them, which killed some of them.26Therefore they spoke to the king of Assyria, saying, “The nations which you have carried away and placed in the cities of Samaria don’t know the law of the god of the land. Therefore he has sent lions among them; and behold, they kill them, because they don’t know the law of the god of the land.”27Then the king of Assyria commanded, saying, “Carry there one of the priests whom you brought from there; and let him ”28So one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came and lived in Bethel, and taught them how they should fear Yahweh.
2 Kings 17:24–28 describes how Assyria repopulated Samaria with foreign settlers who initially disregarded Yahweh and suffered lion attacks, prompting the king to send a captured Israelite priest to teach them religious practices. The passage illustrates how the settlers developed a corrupted, syncretistic form of worship that treated Yahweh merely as a territorial deity rather than entering genuine covenant relationship with Israel's God.
Borrowed religion—the fear of God adopted for self-protection rather than love—produces syncretism, not faith.
Verse 28 — Teaching How to "Fear Yahweh" The returned priest "taught them how they should fear Yahweh." The Hebrew yir'at Yahweh (fear of the LORD) is one of the richest theological terms in the Old Testament — in Proverbs and Psalms it denotes the beginning of wisdom and the posture of genuine covenant relationship. But here the context strips it of authentic content: it is fear as technique, as religious appeasement. The Deuteronomistic narrator will go on (vv. 29–41) to show that the settlers worshipped both Yahweh and their own gods — the very definition of syncretism. The resulting religion is neither Israel's faith nor honest paganism; it is a spiritual hybrid that the New Testament will recall in Jesus' charged encounter with the Samaritan woman (Jn 4:22: "You worship what you do not know").
Typological and Spiritual Senses In the typological sense, this passage anticipates the Samaritans of the New Testament — a people holding a partial, distorted knowledge of God, recipients of Jesus' most extended theological conversation in the Gospels. The scene at the well in John 4 is the redemptive reversal of 2 Kings 17: where this passage ends with a priest sent to pacify a territorial deity, John 4 ends with the woman who ran to her city proclaiming the Messiah. The "living water" Jesus offers is the antithesis of the borrowed, instrumental religion established at Bethel.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage from several angles that secular or merely historical-critical readings cannot reach.
The Nature of True Worship. The Catechism teaches that the first commandment "requires us to nourish and protect our faith with prudence and vigilance, and to reject everything that is opposed to it" (CCC 2088). The settlers' pragmatic "fear" of Yahweh — adopted for self-protection, not for love of truth — exemplifies what the tradition calls vain observance: a religious practice emptied of its proper object. St. Augustine, in De Doctrina Christiana, distinguished between using God (uti) and enjoying God (frui); the colonists of Samaria are the paradigm case of using God — invoking divine observance as a tool for terrestrial security rather than orienting the whole self toward God as the supreme good.
Syncretism as a Theological Category. The Church's Magisterium has consistently warned against syncretism — the blending of the Christian faith with incompatible religious frameworks. Dominus Iesus (CDF, 2000) reaffirms that "the Church's tradition… reserves the designation of inspired texts to the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments," and that the uniqueness of Christ cannot be relativized by treating all religious paths as equally valid routes to God. The Samaritan settlement is a prefiguring of the syncretic temptation that the Church confronts in every age and culture.
The Land as Sacramental Space. The Church Fathers, particularly Origen in his Homilies on Joshua, understood the Promised Land typologically as the soul of the believer. When the soul is "repopulated" with foreign desires and half-formed allegiances rather than ordered by genuine covenant love, the lions — the disordering consequences of sin — inevitably follow.
The Limits of Secondhand Religion. St. John Henry Newman, writing on the development of doctrine, emphasized that living faith requires personal assent, not merely inherited form. The priest sent to Bethel imparts the form of Yahwism without the transformative covenant substance — a warning that catechesis without authentic conversion produces a Christianity of custom rather than of the heart.
Contemporary Catholics face a version of the Samaritan temptation with striking regularity. In a pluralist culture, the pressure is constant to treat faith as one layer of identity among many — a regional or ethnic inheritance, a cultural comfort, a set of practices adopted pragmatically rather than a total response to the living God. The settlers of Samaria are not atheists; they are people who "also feared Yahweh" (v. 33) while serving their own gods. This is the profile of the Catholic who attends Mass at Christmas and Easter, baptizes children out of family tradition, and invokes God's protection in times of crisis — without ever confronting the covenant claim that Yahweh makes on the whole of life.
The return of the priest to Bethel — a compromised site, with a pragmatic mandate — is a caution for religious educators and catechists: instruction in the mechanics of religion is not the same as formation in the fear of the Lord. The concrete challenge for today's Catholic is to examine whether their practice of faith is a genuine response to divine love, or a territorial appeasement — seeking God's protection while reserving the heart for other allegiances. Lectio Divina, the Sacrament of Reconciliation regularly received, and deliberate engagement with Scripture and the Catechism are concrete means of moving from secondhand religion to living covenant faith.
Commentary
Verse 24 — The Repopulation of Samaria The Assyrian policy of mass deportation and resettlement was a calculated strategy for erasing national identity and preventing rebellion. The five population groups named — Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim — represent a deliberately heterogeneous mix of subjugated peoples from across the Assyrian empire, each carrying their own gods, cultic practices, and social customs (cf. vv. 29–31). The verb "possessed" (wayyirshu, יִּירְשׁוּ) is pointed: it is the same root used of Israel "possessing" the Promised Land under Joshua. The narrator, writing from a Deuteronomistic perspective, intends the bitter irony — the inheritance promised to Israel is now occupied by pagans, because Israel forfeited it through covenant infidelity.
Verse 25 — Divine Judgment by Lions The settlers "didn't fear Yahweh" — and the narrator presents the ensuing lion attacks as direct divine causation. This is not superstition; it reflects the Deuteronomistic theology of the land as a sacred space under Yahweh's lordship (cf. Lev 18:25–28, which warns that the land itself "vomits out" its inhabitants when defiled). Lions appear in the Hebrew Bible as instruments of divine punishment for covenant violation (1 Kgs 13:24; 20:36) and serve here as a tangible, irrefutable sign that Samaria belongs to no mere regional spirit, but to the living God of Israel. The land itself, so to speak, refuses the godless.
Verse 26 — The Theology of the "God of the Land" The pagan settlers' interpretation is theologically significant precisely because it is inadequate. They understand Yahweh as a territorial deity (a "god of the land"), a conception common throughout ancient Near Eastern religion, where divine power was geographically bounded. This is a profound misreading of Israel's God, whose covenant with Israel was never based on geography but on his sovereign self-disclosure. The settlers reduce Yahweh to the level of Baal or Marduk — a local power to be placated. The tragedy is that they are not entirely wrong in their analysis (the land does belong to Yahweh) but utterly wrong in their theology (Yahweh is not merely a local god). This mirrors the Deuteronomist's concern that knowing about God's law is not the same as entering into covenant relationship with him.
Verse 27 — The King's Pragmatic Command Sargon II (or his successor) orders a repatriated Israelite priest to return and instruct the settlers. The command is entirely pragmatic — it is crisis management, not conversion. The priest is sent as one would send a specialist technician: to explain the local religious protocols. There is no royal interest in truth, only in pacifying the divine threat. The choice of Bethel as the priest's residence is damning: Bethel was the site of Jeroboam I's golden calves (1 Kgs 12:28–29), the paradigm of apostate worship in the northern kingdom. The Deuteronomistic historian subtly signals that what is about to be taught is a compromised, corrupted form of Yahwism from the start.