Josiah (; ) entry "Josiah"] Dictionary.com. Retrieved 25 July 2011 or Yoshiyahu () was the 16th king of Judah (–609 BC). Josiah’s reign is difficult to reconstruct, but the evidence suggests Judah remained largely under foreign suzerainty, with limited territorial expansion; the accuracy of the depictions of his religious reform descriptions is widely debated among scholars.
According to the Hebrew Bible, Josiah became king of Judah at age eight after his father’s assassination and reigned for 31 years. According to 2 Kings, in his 18th year, the discovery of the “Book of the Law” prompted Josiah to undertake major reforms, centralizing worship in Jerusalem, destroying other shrines and idols, and extending his reforms north.
Despite no direct reference to Josiah in other contemporary texts from Egypt or Babylon, and no inscriptions bearing his name, a seal bearing the name "Nathan-melech," an official under Josiah mentioned in , was discovered in situ in an archeological site in Jerusalem.
The influence of Josiah's reign may be evident in the Deuteronomistic History, a collection of biblical texts that evaluate the reigns of Israelite and Judahite kings based on their adherence to the laws of Deuteronomy. Josiah is depicted as the most righteous king in this tradition, the only one to fully implement the reforms outlined in the "Book of the Law."
Biblical narrative The Bible describes him as a righteous king in 2 Kings 22:2, "He did what was pleasing to GOD and he followed all the ways of his forefather David; he did not deviate to the right or to the left." A similar phrase appears in 2 Chronicles 34:2. He is also one of the kings mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, one of the two genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament (cf. Matthew 1:10–11).
Family According to the biblical narrative, Josiah was the son of King Amon of Judah and Jedidah, daughter of Adaiah of Bozkath."Josiah", Jewish Encyclopedia (1906). His grandfather Manasseh was one of the kings blamed for turning away from the worship of YHWH. Manasseh adapted the Temple for idolatrous worship. Josiah's great-grandfather was King Hezekiah, a noted reformer also respected by the biblical writers as having "done what was right in the sight of the LORD, as David had done." in 2 Kings 18:3 and 2 Chronicles 29:2.
According to 1 Chronicles 3:15, 2 Kings 23:31 and 36, 2 Kings 24:18, Josiah had four sons: Johanan and Eliakim (born c. 634 BC), whose mother was Zebidah, the daughter of Pedaiah of Ruma; and Shallum (633/632 BC) and Mattanyahu (c. 618 BC), whose mother was Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. Eliakim had his name changed by the Saïte pharaoh Necho II to Jehoiakim according to 2 Kings 23:34.
Shallum, his third son, succeeded Josiah as Jehoahaz according to 1 Chronicles 3:15 and Jeremiah 22:11. Eliakim succeeded Shallum as Jehoiakim in 2 Chronicles 36:4, and he was succeeded by his son Jeconiah in 2 Chronicles 36:8. Jeconiah was succeeded to the throne by his uncle Mattanyahu, under the name Zedekiah in 2 Kings 24:17. Zedekiah was the last king of Judah before the kingdom was conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Babylonian captivity began.
Religious reform The Second Book of Chronicles records that Josiah was eight years old when he became king. In the eighth year of his reign, he "began to seek the God of his father David" and in the twelfth year of that reign he began a program of destruction of Baalist altars and images throughout Jerusalem and Judah according to 2 Chronicles 34:1-3. The Chronicler records in detail the execution of this program. In contrast, the account in 2 Kings begins with a restoration of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, which both accounts say was initiated in the eighteenth year of his reign.;
Josiah ordered Hilkiah, the High Priest, to use the tax money collected over the years to renovate the Temple. While Hilkiah was clearing the treasure room of the Temple, he allegedly discovered a scroll described in 2 Kings 22:8 as "a scroll of the Teaching" and in 2 Chronicles 34:14 as "the book of the Law of the LORD given by Moses". The phrase "scroll of the Teaching" () in 2 Kings 22:8 is identical to the phrase used in Joshua 1:8 and 8:34 to describe the sacred writings Joshua had received from Moses. The book is not identified in the text, but scholarly consensus holds that this was either a copy of the Book of Deuteronomy or a text that became a part of Deuteronomy.Sweeney, Marvin A. (2001), King Josiah of Judah, Oxford University Press, p.137. .
The story of the Temple restoration is based on those ordered by an earlier Judean king, Joash in 2 Kings 12, who ruled c. 836 – 796 BC.Encyclopaedia Judaica (second edition, vol 11) pg. 459.
Hilkiah brought this scroll to Josiah's attention. Josiah consulted the prophetess Huldah, who assured him that the evil foretold in the document for non-observance of its instructions, would come, but not in his day; "because", she said, "thine heart was tender and thou didst humble thyself before the Lord". An assembly of the elders of Judah and Jerusalem and of all the people was called, and Josiah then encouraged the exclusive worship of YHWH, forbidding all other forms of worship. The instruments and emblems of the worship of Baal and "heavenly host" were removed from the Temple in Jerusalem. Local sanctuaries, known as high places, were destroyed from Beersheba in the south to Bethel and the cities of Samaria in the north. Josiah had pagan priests executed and even had the bones of the dead priests of Bethel exhumed from their graves and burned on their altars. Josiah also reinstituted Passover celebrations.
According to an unnamed "man of God" (sometimes identified as Iddo) had prophesied to King Jeroboam of the northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria), approximately three hundred years earlier, that "a son named Josiah will be born to the house of David" and that he would destroy the altar at Bethel. And the only exception to this destruction was for the grave of an unnamed prophet he found in Bethel (), who had foretold that these religious sites Jeroboam erected would one day be destroyed (see ). Josiah ordered the double grave of the "man of God" and of the Bethel prophet to be left alone, as these prophecies had come true.
Josiah's reforms are described in two biblical accounts, 2 Kings 22–23, and 2 Chronicles 34–35. They began with the ending of ancient Israelite religious practices, and the astral cults that had become popular in the 8th century, and led to centralisation of worship in Jerusalem, and the destruction of the temple at Bethel.Encyclopaedia Judaica, second edition, vol 11, pg 459 Some scholars have rejected the entire historicity of these accounts,Grabbe, Lester (2017). Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?. T&T Clark. p. 249-250. "We have no direct evidence outside the biblical text, which makes us at least ask whether it is an invention of the Deuteronomist. The alleged absence of any reference to this reform in Jeremiah has always been a major puzzle. Some have found allusions here and there, but one has to admit that they are surprisingly obscure. Considering Jeremiah's overall message and position, he should have embraced such a reform and made copious comments about it." while others have defended the historical existence of a religious reform under Josiah's reign.
According to the later account in 2 Chronicles, Josiah destroyed altars and images of certain pagan deities in cities of the tribes of Manasseh, Ephraim, "and Simeon, as far as Naphtali" (), which were outside of his kingdom, Judah, and returned the Ark of the Covenant to the Temple.
Book of the Law
The Hebrew Bible states that the priest Hilkiah found a "Book of the Law" in the temple during the early stages of Josiah's temple renovation. Hilkiah then gave the scroll to his secretary Shaphan, who took it to King Josiah. According to the Bible, King Josiah then changed his leadership entirely, entering into a new covenant with God. He wiped out rival cults that had formed within his land. He, along with his people, then entered into this new covenant with God to keep the commandments.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was widely accepted among biblical scholars that this "Book of the Law" was an early version of the Book of Deuteronomy, but recent scholarship views it as a largely legendary narrative of one of the earliest stages in the creation of the Deuteronomistic work."The Book of Josiah's Reform", Bible.org. Retrieved 24 July 2011. William G. Dever, for example, argues that the Book of the Law was actually composed by orthodox Yahwist priests, who attributed it to the legendary figure of Moses and then hid it in the Temple, where it would be dramatically discovered; in this way, a "miraculous new Word from Yahweh" would seem to have appeared, giving Judah a chance to redeem itself and save itself from the advance of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
Many scholars view the entire core narrative, from Joshua to 2 Kings, as a Deuteronomistic History (DtrH) written during Josiah's reign.Friedman 1987Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts, Touchstone, New York, 2002 In fact, some recent European theologians even go so far as to posit that most of the Torah and Deuteronomistic History was composed and finalized several centuries later, during the Persian rule.Konrad Schmid, "The Persian Imperial Authorization as a Historical Problem and as a Biblical Construct," in G.N. Knoppers and B.M. Levison (eds.): The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding its Promulgation and Acceptance, Eisenbrauns 2007 However, biblical scholars are coming to believe that the Deuteronomistic History was composed using other earlier sources, including a brief chronicle of king's names, age at the beginning of their reign, and their mother's names.
Prophets and King Josiah
According to rabbinic interpretation, Huldah said to the messengers of King Josiah, "Tell the man that sent you to me ..." (), indicating by her unceremonious language that for her Josiah was like any other man. The king addressed her, and not Jeremiah, because he thought that women are more easily stirred to pity than men, and that therefore the prophetess would be more likely than Jeremiah to intercede with God in his behalf.Megillah 14a,b; compare Seder 'Olam R. 21 Huldah was a relative of Jeremiah, both being descendants of Rahab by her marriage with Joshua.Sifre, Numbers 78; Megillah 14a, b While Jeremiah admonished and preached repentance to the men, she did the same to the women.Pesiḳta Rabbah 26 [ed. Friedmann, p. 129] Huldah was not only a prophetess, but taught publicly in the school according to the Targum of 2 Kings 22:14. It is doubtful whether "the Gate of Huldah" in the Second Temple (Middot 1:3) has any connection with the prophetess Huldah; it may have meant "Cat's Gate"; some scholars, such as Rashi, associate the gate with Huldah's schoolhouse.