Josiah

The twenty-second chapter of Second Kings tells it as an administrative incident that turns into a crisis. Josiah sends his secretary Shaphan to the temple to account for the money collected for repairs; Hilkiah the high priest mentions that he has found a book of the law in the house of the Lord; Shaphan reads it, takes it to the king, and reads it to him. The king tears his clothes, because what he has heard tells him that the wrath of the Lord is kindled against Judah for what its fathers did not do. He sends a delegation to Huldah, a prophetess living in Jerusalem, who confirms the judgment but tells him he will not live to see it.

Since Wilhelm de Wette argued the case in 1805, the scroll has been widely identified with an early form of the book of Deuteronomy, on the grounds that the measures Josiah then takes match Deuteronomy's programme point by point: one sanctuary, no local high places, no cult of the sun, moon and host of heaven, no passing of children through fire, and a Passover kept centrally. That identification is the foundation stone of modern pentateuchal criticism and of the argument that a Deuteronomistic school shaped the historical books from Joshua to Kings.

What is disputed is what actually happened in the temple. Some scholars read the discovery straightforwardly, as the recovery of an old text neglected under Josiah's predecessors Manasseh and Amon. Others read it as the presentation of a newly composed or heavily edited law given the authority of a find, a device with parallels elsewhere in the ancient world. Others again treat the whole scene as a later literary construction explaining the reform's theology. The dispute is about the mechanism, not about whether the reform mattered.

The twenty-third chapter of Second Kings lists what followed as a sequence of demolitions, and its detail is the reason historians treat it as drawn from a real record whatever they make of the framing. Vessels made for Baal, for Asherah and for the host of heaven were brought out of the temple and burned in the fields of the Kidron. The idolatrous priests who had burned incense at the high places were deposed. The houses of the cult prostitutes within the temple precinct were pulled down. Topheth in the valley of the son of Hinnom was defiled so that no one could pass a son or daughter through the fire to Molech. The horses dedicated to the sun at the entrance of the house were removed and their chariots burned. Then the king went north, outside his own kingdom, and broke down the altar at Bethel that Jeroboam had made.

The reform ends with a Passover, kept in Jerusalem in the eighteenth year, of which the text says that no such Passover had been kept from the days of the judges. What that means practically is that a festival previously observed in households and at local shrines became a national pilgrimage to one sanctuary, which is what centralization looks like from the inside.

Josiah died at Megiddo in 609 BCE, confronting Pharaoh Necho II, who was marching north to support the remnant of Assyria against Babylon. Kings says only that Necho slew him when he saw him; Chronicles gives a fuller and different account in which Josiah disguises himself and is shot by archers. Within twenty-three years Jerusalem and the temple he had purified were destroyed by Babylon, and the theological problem of why the most obedient king in the record was killed young and his reform undone runs through the later prophetic literature.