Josiah’s Reform and the Book of the Law

Josiah became king of Judah at the age of eight (2 Kings 22:1). His grandfather Manasseh had rebuilt the high places and set up altars to the host of heaven in the courts of the temple (2 Kings 21:3–5).

In his eighteenth year Josiah sent his secretary Shaphan to the temple to arrange payment for the workmen repairing it. The high priest Hilkiah told Shaphan, “I have found the book of the law in Yahweh’s house.” Shaphan read it, and then read it to the king (2 Kings 22:3–10).

When Josiah heard it he tore his clothes, because his people’s ancestors had not done what the book required. He sent Hilkiah and four officials to inquire of the Lord. They went to the prophetess Huldah, who lived in the second quarter of Jerusalem. She answered that the disaster written in the book would come on the city for its worship of other gods, but that Josiah, who had humbled himself, would be buried in peace before it came (2 Kings 22:11–20).

The king gathered the elders and the people at the temple, read the book aloud and made a covenant before the Lord to keep its commands, and the people joined in it (2 Kings 23:1–3). He had the vessels made for Baal, Asherah and the host of heaven taken out of the temple and burned. He defiled the high places of Judah from Geba to Beersheba and the place of child sacrifice in the valley of Hinnom, and desecrated the shrines Solomon had built for foreign gods (2 Kings 23:4–14). At Bethel he destroyed the altar set up by Jeroboam I, and he did the same in the towns of Samaria (2 Kings 23:15–20). Then he ordered a Passover kept as the book prescribed. Kings says there had been none like it since the days of the judges (2 Kings 23:21–23).

Chronicles orders the events differently. There Josiah begins to seek God in his eighth year and to purge the land in his twelfth, and the book is found in the eighteenth, when the purge is already done (2 Chronicles 34:3–8) (2 Chronicles 34:14–19). The Passover is described at length (2 Chronicles 35:1–19).

The account shows a written book of the law read in public, accepted as binding and made the measure of king and people. Thirteen years later Josiah was killed at Megiddo. Kings says of the two sons who followed him that they did evil as their fathers had done (2 Kings 23:29–37).