Josiah
JOSIAH, or, in Hebrew, Yoʾshiyyahu, was a king of Judah (c. 640–609 BCE). Josiah came to the throne at eight years of age upon the assassination of his father, Amon. The account of his reign in 2 Kings 22–23 is almost entirely taken up with a presentation of his cultic reform program in the eighteenth year. The parallel account in the much later history of 2 Chronicles 34–35, which divides this reform activity between the twelfth and eighteenth years, probably has no independent validity and so should not be used in the reconstruction of the events of his reign.
The version in Kings states that during the course of the renovations of the Temple a "book of the law" (sefer ha-torah) was found. Its contents raised great consternation in the royal court and led to a large-scale reform program to purify the cult in Jerusalem. This last act meant the obliteration of other cult places throughout Judah and as far north as the region of Bethel, with the unemployed Levitical priests of "the high places" becoming wards of the state.
Because of the close match between the nature of the cultic reform program, especially the centralization of worship, and these same concerns in Deuteronomy, scholars have long identified "the book of the law" with this part of the Pentateuch. The time of Josiah is thus understood as a period of nationalistic and religious fervor resulting from the decline of Assyrian domination and influence in the west. It was within the context of these events that the framers of Deuteronomy were able to promulgate their reform program.
It must be kept in mind that the presentation of events in 2 Kings 22–23 is shaped by a historian whose outlook is strongly influenced by Deuteronomy. It is possible, however, that both purification and centralization of the cult did not become firmly established until the Second Temple period, and even then there were exceptions. Some scholars have sought to offer archaeological evidence for the destruction of Judean sanctuaries at Arad and Beersheba in the late seventh century BCE, but the evidence is ambiguous and must be treated with caution.
Josiah is also credited with a brief revival of the Judean state and some expansion into the former Israelite kingdom to the north. About this, however, the Bible says little except for its reference to Josiah's destruction of the altar at Bethel. The archaeological evidence for Josiah's territorial control consists mostly of royal seal impressions on jar handles, which would limit his sphere of activity within the borders of Judah.
Apart from its description of the cultic reform, Kings contains only a few enigmatic remarks about Josiah's death at the hands of Pharaoh Necho at Megiddo while Necho was on his way to aid the Assyrians at Carche mish (2 Kgs. 23:29–30). The subsequent Babylonian hegemony led to the end of de facto Judean independence for the next four centuries.
The author of Kings rates Josiah highest of all the kings of Judah after David because of his religious reforms, and there is some further reflection of this esteem in Jeremiah 22:15–16.
Bibliography
Treatments of the history can be found in John Bright's A History of Israel, 3d ed. (Philadelphia, 1981), and in the contributions by Hanoch Reviv, Yohanan Aharoni, and Yigael Yadin to The World History of the Jewish People, vol. 4, The Age of the Monarchies, edited by Abraham Malamat (Jerusalem, 1979), pt. 1, chaps. 9, 14; pt. 2, chap. 8. On the relationship of Deuteronomy to the reforms of Josiah, see E. W. Nicholson's Deuteronomy and Tradition (Philadelphia, 1967), Moshe Weinfeld's Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford, 1972), and Hans-Detlef Hoffmann's Reform und Reformen (Zurich, 1980).
New Sources
Barrick, W. Boyd. The King and the Cemeteries: Toward a New Understanding of Josiah's Reform. Leiden and Boston, 2002.
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