show favour to the young.”  This enemy was to burn and destroy everything:  “and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, throughout all thy land, which Jahveh thy God hath given thee.  And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters... in the straitness wherewith thine enemies shall straiten thee.”  Those who escape must depart into captivity, and there endure for many a long year the tortures of direst slavery; “thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have none assurance of thy life:  in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see."*

* Deut. xxviii.  The two sets of imprecations (xxvii., xxviii.) which terminate the actual work are both of later redaction, but the original MS. undoubtedly ended with some analogous formula.  I have quoted above the most characteristic parts of the twenty-eighth chapter.

The assembly took the oath required of them, and the king at once displayed the utmost zeal in exacting literal performance of the ordinances contained in the Book of the Law.  His first step was to purify the temple:  Hilkiah and his priests overthrew all the idols contained in it, and all the objects that had been fashioned in honour of strange gods—­the Baals, the Asherim, and all the Host of Heaven—­and, carrying them out of Jerusalem into the valley of the Kidron, cast them into the flames, and scattered the ashes upon the place where all the filth of the city was cast out.  The altars and the houses of the Sodomites which defiled the temple courts were demolished, the chariots of the sun broken in pieces, and the horses of the god sent to the stables of the king’s chamberlain;* the sanctuaries and high places which had been set up at the gates of the city, in the public places, and along the walls were razed to the ground, and the Tophet, where the people made their children pass through the fire, was transformed into a common sewer.

     * [The Hebrew text admits of this meaning, which is,
     however, not clear in the English A.V.—­Tr.]

The provincial sanctuaries shared the fate of those of the capital; in a short time, from Geba to Beersheba, there remained not one of those “high places,” at which the ancestors of the nation and their rulers had offered prayers for generations past.  The wave of reform passed even across the frontier and was borne into the Assyrian province of Samaria; the temple and image which Jeroboam had set up at Bethel were reduced to ashes, and human bones were burnt upon the altar to desecrate it beyond possibility of purification.*