Second Book of Kings 23

¹ The king then had all the elders of Judah and of Jerusalem summoned to him,

² and the king went up to the Temple of Yahweh with all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, priests, prophets and all the people, of high or low degree. In their hearing he read out everything that was said in the book of the covenant found in the Temple of Yahweh.

³ The king stood beside the pillar, and in the presence of Yahweh he made a covenant to follow Yahweh and keep his commandments and decrees and laws with all his heart and soul, in order to enforce the terms of the covenant as written in that book. All the people gave their allegiance to the covenant.

⁴ The king ordered Hilkiah with the priest next in rank and the guardians of the threshold to remove all the cult objects that had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven; he burnt them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron and had the ashes taken to Bethel.

⁵ He did away with the spurious priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed and who offered sacrifice on the high places, in the towns of Judah and the neighbourhood of Jerusalem; also those who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven.

⁶ From the Temple of Yahweh he removed the sacred pole right out of Jerusalem to the wadi Kidron, and in the wadi Kidron he burnt it; he reduced it to ashes and threw its ashes on the common burying-ground.

⁷ He pulled down the house of the sacred male prostitutes which was in the Temple of Yahweh and where the women wove clothes for Asherah.

⁸ He brought all the priests in from the towns of Judah, and from Geba to Beersheba he desecrated the high places where these priests had offered sacrifice. He pulled down the shrine of the goats[*a] which stood at the gate of Joshua, the governor of the city, to the left as you enter the city gate.

⁹ The priests of the high places, however, could not go up to the altar of Yahweh in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread in the company of their brother priests.

¹⁰ He desecrated the furnace in the Valley of Ben-hinnom, so that no one could make his son or daughter pass through fire in honour of Molech.

¹¹ He did away with the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun at the entrance to the Temple of Yahweh, near the apartment of Nathan-melech the eunuch, in the precincts, and he burned the chariot of the sun.

¹² The altars on the roof that the kings of Judah had built, with those that Manasseh had built in the two courts of the Temple of Yahweh, the king pulled down, and broke them to pieces on the spot, then carried them away and threw their rubble into the wadi Kidron.

¹³ The king desecrated the high places facing Jerusalem, to the south of the Mount of Olives, which Solomon king of Israel had built for Astarte the Sidonian abomination, for Chemosh the Moabite abomination, and for Milcom the Ammonite abomination.

¹⁴ He also smashed the sacred pillars, cut down the sacred poles, and covered the places where they had stood with human bones.[*b]

¹⁵ Similarly, as regards the altar that was at Bethel, the high place built by Jeroboam son of Nebat who had led Israel into sin, this altar and this high place he also demolished, breaking up its stones and reducing them to powder. The sacred pole he burned.

¹⁶ As he looked around, Josiah saw the tombs there on the hillside; he had the bones fetched from the tombs and burned them on the altar. Thus he desecrated it, in accordance with the word of Yahweh which the man of God had proclaimed when Jeroboam was standing by the altar at the time of the feast. As he looked around, Josiah caught sight of the tomb of the man of God who had foretold these things.

¹⁷ ‘What is that monument I see?’ he asked. The townspeople replied, ‘It is the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and foretold what you have done to the altar’.

¹⁸ ‘Let him rest,’ the king said ‘and let no one disturb his bones.’ So they left his bones untouched, with the bones of the prophet who was from Samaria.

¹⁹ Josiah also did away with all the temples of the high places that the kings of Israel had built in the towns of Samaria, provoking the anger of Yahweh; he treated these places exactly as he had treated the one at Bethel.

²⁰ All the priests of the high places who were there he slaughtered on the altars, and on those altars burned human bones. Then he returned to Jerusalem.

²¹ The king gave this order to the whole people: ‘Celebrate a Passover in honour of Yahweh your God, as prescribed in this book of the covenant’.

²² No Passover like this one had ever been celebrated since the days when the judges ruled Israel or throughout the entire period of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah.

²³ The eighteenth year of King Josiah was the only time when such a Passover was celebrated in honour of Yahweh at Jerusalem.

²⁴ What is more, the necromancers and wizards, the household gods and idols, and all the abominations to be seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, all these were swept away by Josiah to give effect to the words of the Law written in the book found by Hilkiah the priest in the Temple of Yahweh.

²⁵ No king before him had turned to Yahweh as he did, with all his heart, all his soul, all his strength, in perfect loyalty to the Law of Moses; nor was any king like him seen again.

²⁶ Yet Yahweh did not renounce the heat of his great anger which blazed out against Judah because of all the provocation Manasseh had offered him.

²⁷ Yahweh decreed, ‘I will thrust Judah away from me too, as I have already thrust Israel; I will cast away Jerusalem, this city I had chosen, and the Temple of which I had said: There my name shall be.’

²⁸ The rest of the history of Josiah, his entire career, is not all this recorded in the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah?

²⁹ During his reign Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt was on his way to the king of Assyria at the river Euphrates when King Josiah intercepted him; but Neco killed him at Megiddo in the first encounter.

³⁰ His servants carried his body from Megiddo by chariot; they brought him to Jerusalem, and buried him in his own tomb. The country people took Jehoahaz son of Josiah and anointed him, proclaiming him king in succession to his father.

³¹ Jehoahaz was twenty-three years old when he came to the throne, and he reigned for three months in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Hamutal, daughter of Jeremiah, from Libnah.

³² He did what is displeasing to Yahweh, just as his ancestors had done.

³³ Pharaoh Neco put him in chains at Riblah, in the territory of Hamath, and imposed a levy of a hundred talents of silver and ten talents of gold on the country.

³⁴ Pharaoh Neco made Eliakim son of Josiah king in succession to Josiah his father, and changed his name to Jehoiakim. Jehoahaz he took and carried away into Egypt, where he died.

³⁵ Jehoiakim paid over the silver and gold to Pharaoh, but first had to tax the country before he could raise the sum that Pharaoh demanded: he levied the silver and gold to be paid over to Pharaoh Neco from each according to his means.

³⁶ Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he came to the throne, and he reigned for eleven years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Zebidah, daughter of Pedaiah, from Rumah.

³⁷ He did what is displeasing to Yahweh, just as his ancestors had done.