Sargon, who on his monuments is described as “Destroyer of the city of Samaria and of all Beth Omri,” took away with him in 721 B.C. all the more important and a great host of minor captives, to Assyria. Still a certain proportion of the Israelites would seem to have been left behind, as we find Hezekiah, in 717 B.C., sending messengers through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, inviting Israelites to the Passover, which might not be eaten by strangers, and some actually attended it (2 Chron. xxx. 18). Worshippers from Shechem and Samaria are also noticed as coming to Jerusalem after its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar (Jer. xli. 5); thus, though foreign colonists from Cutha, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim were sent into Samaria, there is reason to suppose that many of the original Israelite population were left. The Talmudic doctors invariably call the Samaritans Cuthim. Cutha is a district as yet unknown, but it may be noticed that the Biblical account represents the men of Cutha as serving Nergal, who is known from Cuneiform inscriptions to have been a “lion-god,” worshipped by inhabitants of Cutha, and therefore an appropriate deity to appease when a plague of lions was devastating the land. It is not impossible that the Jews seized upon the close similarity of the name Cuthim with the title Kûsânîya, or “true people,” by which one Samaritan sect distinguished themselves from a second, the Lifânîyeh. The first sect believed in the future life, in future reward and punishment; the latter confined the promises of the law to temporal matters; the latter were named from a word meaning “to make light,” because, like the pupils of the Jewish Hillel, they made the law less stringent, whereas the stronger sect, the Kûsânîya, made its burden heavier, following the example of the school of Shammai. The foreign colonists, from Cutha, found themselves, as they simply supposed, unable to appease the deity of their new country without special instructions in the peculiarities of his rite. They petitioned therefore for a priest, and an Israelite priest returned and dwelt at Bethel. It is perhaps only natural to suppose that the place here intended in the Bible is Gerizim, which was held by the Samaritans to be the site of Jacob’s vision. It follows from this account that at least one priestly family returned to Samaria, and the Samaritans claimed a descent for their priesthood from Phinehas the grandson of Aaron. Another curious allegation, brought forward by Josephus and also to be found in the Targums, is that the Samaritans claimed to be Sidonians; this is however plainly contradictory to the view that they were Cuthim, and only serves to show the small reliance that can be placed on the later Jewish accounts.