Apharsites

The Apharsites are named once, in the same Ezra letter that catalogues the foreign peoples resettled in Samaria. They sit in the middle of a longer list of deportee groups that joined a formal complaint to Artaxerxes against the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

In the Letter Against Jerusalem

The complaint is composed in the Persian period under Artaxerxes, drafted in Aramaic by officials in Samaria: "And in the days of Artaxerxes: Bishlam, Mithredath, Tabeel, and the rest of his fellow slaves, wrote to Artaxerxes king of Persia; and the writing of the letter was written in the Syrian [character], and set forth in the Syrian [tongue]. Rehum the chancellor and Shimshai the scribe wrote a letter against Jerusalem to Artaxerxes the king in this sort" (Ezr 4:7-8). The list of co-signing peoples includes the Apharsites: "then [wrote] Rehum the chancellor, and Shimshai the scribe, and the rest of their fellow slaves, the Dinaites, and the Apharsathchites, the Tarpelites, the Apharsites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Shushanchites, the Dehaites, the Elamites" (Ezr 4:9). The next verse identifies all of these groups as transplanted populations: "and the rest of the nations whom the great and noble Osnappar brought over, and set in the city of Samaria, and in the rest [of the country] beyond the River, and so forth" (Ezr 4:10).

The earlier Assyrian phase of that resettlement is reported in Kings, with a different — though overlapping — list of source cities: "And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the sons of Israel; and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in its cities" (2Ki 17:24). The Apharsites are not named in that earlier notice, but Ezra's list places them within the same overall program of foreign peoples settled in the territory of the former northern kingdom.