“Then the king of Assyria invaded all the land. He came to Samaria and for three years he besieged it. In the ninth year of King Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria. He carried the Israelites away to Assyria. He placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.”
King Shalmaneser V of Assyria attacked Israel. He besieged Samaria for 3 years. Finally it was captured in 721 BCE. However, by this time, there was a new king of Assyria, King Sargon II (722-705 BCE). He took the Israelites out of Samaria and reestablished them in Medes, which was a northern part of Persia that had rich agricultural fields. They were probably brought there for farming purposes. They may have been migrant field workers or slave field workers. The Medes people may have been the forefathers of the present day Kurds in northern Iraq and Turkey, which is approximately where Medes was. The Habor and the Gozan are in central Asia in the Mesopotamian area.
Eugene Finnegan Bible Project 