2 Kings 23

Today’s Passage: 2 Kings 23

After the Book of the Law was found in the temple and its warnings read aloud, young King Josiah does not keep the discovery to himself. He gathers everyone, elders and priests and prophets, the small and the great, and reads the whole Book of the Covenant in their hearing, then stands and binds himself and the people to the LORD. What follows is the most sweeping reform in the history of Judah. Josiah tears through the land like a man clearing rubble from a foundation, pulling down idols, burning Asherah poles, desecrating the high places, and cleansing even the shrines that Solomon himself had raised centuries before. He keeps a Passover unlike any since the days of the judges. Of him it is written that no king before or after him turned to the LORD so completely. And yet the chapter does not end in triumph. The LORD’s anger against Judah, provoked long ago by Manasseh, is not turned aside, and Josiah falls at Megiddo. His sons reign briefly and badly under the thumb of Egypt, and the road toward exile keeps running downhill.

As you read, hold this: To turn to the LORD with all your heart is the noblest thing a life can do, even when it cannot by itself undo all that came before.

2 Kings 23:1–3 (BSB)

¹ Then the king summoned all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem.

² And he went up to the house of the LORD with all the people of Judah and Jerusalem, as well as the priests and the prophets—all the people small and great—and in their hearing he read all the words of the Book of the Covenant that had been found in the house of the LORD.

³ So the king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the LORD to follow the LORD and to keep His commandments, decrees, and statutes with all his heart and all his soul, and to carry out the words of the covenant that were written in this book. And all the people entered into the covenant.

Notice first what the king does with what he found. A lesser man might have kept the frightening scroll for the palace, or softened its words, or read it in private and grieved alone. Josiah does the opposite. He gathers the whole nation, small and great together, and reads them every word, and then he stands by the pillar and gives himself away to the LORD with all his heart and all his soul. This is the hinge of the chapter and the hinge of the man. Everything that follows, all the tearing down and burning and cleansing, flows out of this one wholehearted turning. He does not reform the land in order to earn God’s favor. He binds himself to the God who has spoken, and the reform is simply what that binding looks like once it reaches his hands. And the people enter in with him, because a heart set fully on the LORD tends to draw others after it.

2 Kings 23:4–7 (BSB)

⁴ Then the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest, the priests second in rank, and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the LORD all the articles made for Baal, Asherah, and all the host of heaven. And he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron and carried their ashes to Bethel.

⁵ Josiah also did away with the idolatrous priests ordained by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the cities of Judah and in the places all around Jerusalem—those who had burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations, and to all the host of heaven.

⁶ He brought the Asherah pole from the house of the LORD to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem, and there he burned it, ground it to powder, and threw its dust on the graves of the common people.

⁷ He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes that were in the house of the LORD, where the women had woven tapestries for Asherah.

The reform begins, rightly, inside the house of God. Before Josiah touches a single hilltop shrine in the countryside, he clears the LORD’s own temple of everything that had no business being there, the vessels made for Baal, the pole raised to Asherah, even the rooms where corruption had made itself at home under the sacred roof. There is a lesson in the order. It is easy to be scandalized by the idols out in the fields and slow to notice the ones that have crept into the sanctuary itself. Josiah does not spare the temple because it is the temple. He honors it precisely by making it clean. And he is thorough past the point of comfort, burning what can be burned, grinding to powder what can be ground, scattering the dust so that nothing of the old worship can be gathered up and used again. Half-measures leave roots, and roots grow back.

2 Kings 23:8–14 (BSB)

⁸ Then Josiah brought all the priests from the cities of Judah and desecrated the high places, from Geba to Beersheba, where the priests had burned incense. He tore down the high places of the gates at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which was to the left of the city gate.

⁹ Although the priests of the high places did not come up to the altar of the LORD in Jerusalem, they ate unleavened bread with their fellow priests.

¹⁰ He also desecrated Topheth in the Valley of Ben-hinnom so that no one could sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech.

¹¹ And he removed from the entrance to the house of the LORD the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the chamber of an official named Nathan-melech. And Josiah burned up the chariots of the sun.

¹² He pulled down the altars that the kings of Judah had set up on the roof near the upper chamber of Ahaz, and the altars that Manasseh had set up in the two courtyards of the house of the LORD. The king pulverized them there and threw their dust into the Kidron Valley.

¹³ The king also desecrated the high places east of Jerusalem, to the south of the Mount of Corruption, which King Solomon of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, for Chemosh the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.

¹⁴ He smashed the sacred pillars to pieces, cut down the Asherah poles, and covered the sites with human bones.

From the temple the cleansing spreads outward across the whole land, from Geba in the north to Beersheba in the south, the full length of the kingdom. Read the list slowly and feel how deep the rot had gone. There was a place in the Valley of Ben-hinnom where parents had burned their own children in the fire, and Josiah defiles it so that no father can ever do such a thing there again. There were altars on the palace roof and in the very courts of the temple. And there were shrines so old that Solomon himself had built them, back when the wisest king let foreign wives turn his heart to foreign gods. Josiah tears down what the founder of the temple had raised, because faithfulness is not measured by how famous or ancient a sin is but by whether it dishonors the LORD. What one wholehearted generation must sometimes do is undo the compromises that many earlier generations simply lived with.

2 Kings 23:15–20 (BSB)

¹⁵ He even pulled down the altar at Bethel, the high place set up by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had caused Israel to sin. Then he burned the high place, ground it to powder, and burned the Asherah pole.

¹⁶ And as Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the hillside, and he sent someone to take the bones out of the tombs, and he burned them on the altar to defile it, according to the word of the LORD proclaimed by the man of God who had foretold these things.

¹⁷ Then the king asked, “What is this monument I see?” And the men of the city replied, “It is the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and proclaimed these things that you have done to the altar of Bethel.”

¹⁸ “Let him rest,” said Josiah. “Do not let anyone disturb his bones.” So they left his bones undisturbed, along with those of the prophet who had come from Samaria.

¹⁹ Just as Josiah had done at Bethel, so also in the cities of Samaria he removed all the shrines of the high places set up by the kings of Israel who had provoked the LORD to anger.

²⁰ On the altars he slaughtered all the priests of the high places, and he burned human bones on them. Then he returned to Jerusalem.

At Bethel something quietly astonishing happens. This was the altar Jeroboam had built to keep the northern tribes from worshiping in Jerusalem, the founding sin of a whole kingdom. Long ago a nameless man of God had stood before that very altar and announced that a king named Josiah would one day come and defile it, and now, three centuries later, the king arrives and does exactly what was spoken, down to the burning of bones upon it. When Josiah sees the old prophet’s grave, he orders it left in peace. The detail is worth pausing over. The LORD’s word does not fall to the ground. What He promises through the smallest and least remembered of His servants He fulfills to the letter, in His own time, whether that time is next year or three hundred years away. Josiah is standing inside a prophecy, carrying out a sentence pronounced before his great-grandfathers were born.

2 Kings 23:21–23 (BSB)

²¹ The king commanded all the people, “Keep the Passover of the LORD your God, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant.”

²² No such Passover had been observed from the days of the judges who had governed Israel through all the days of the kings of Israel and Judah.

²³ But in the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, this Passover was observed to the LORD in Jerusalem.

Tearing down is only half of a true reform. The other half is building something living in the cleared ground, and so Josiah calls the nation to keep the Passover, the feast that told the whole story of how the LORD had redeemed a people out of slavery and made them His own. What a mercy that his reform did not stop at destruction but moved on to remembrance and joy. The writer tells us plainly that no Passover like this had been kept since the days of the judges, across the entire span of the kings. Generations had let the great feast of redemption grow thin or drop away entirely, and here it comes rushing back, full and glad, in one wholehearted reign. A heart truly turned to the LORD does not only clear away the false. It restores the true worship the false had crowded out.

2 Kings 23:24–25 (BSB)

²⁴ Furthermore, Josiah removed the mediums and spiritists, the household gods and idols, and all the abominations that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem. He did this to carry out the words of the law written in the book that Hilkiah the priest had found in the house of the LORD.

²⁵ Neither before nor after Josiah was there any king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, according to all the Law of Moses.

Here the writer sets down his verdict, and it is the highest praise given to any king in these books. Neither before nor after, not David, not Hezekiah, not Solomon in his glory, was there a king who turned to the LORD so completely, with all his heart and all his soul and all his strength, measuring himself against all the Law of Moses. And notice the phrase repeated from verse twenty-four: he did all of it to carry out the words written in the book. Josiah’s greatness was not a matter of temperament or cleverness or force of personality. It was obedience to the Word of God that had been found and read and taken utterly to heart. Praise God for a life like this, given wholly to Him. Of all the things a person can spend a life becoming, this is the noblest, a heart wholly turned to the LORD and a will bent to His Word.

2 Kings 23:26–27 (BSB)

²⁶ Nevertheless, the LORD did not turn away from the fury of His burning anger, which was kindled against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to provoke Him to anger.

²⁷ For the LORD had said, “I will remove Judah from My sight, just as I removed Israel. I will reject this city Jerusalem, which I chose, and the temple of which I said, ‘My Name shall be there.’”

And then comes the hardest word in the chapter, and we must sit with it honestly. “Nevertheless.” For all Josiah’s wholehearted turning, the LORD did not turn away from His burning anger against Judah, because the guilt of Manasseh’s long and bloody reign had gone too deep. One righteous king, however great, could not by himself unmake generations of sin. This is not a failure in Josiah, and it is not injustice in God. It is the sober truth that sin has consequences that outlast the sinner, that a nation which fills its cup for decades cannot always empty it in a single reign, and that judgment, once long-warned and long-deserved, still falls. Josiah’s faithfulness was not wasted. It was real, and it was pleasing to God, and it delayed the storm and spared him from seeing it. But it teaches us that we do not obey the LORD because our obedience buys the outcome we want. We obey Him because He is worthy, and we leave the outcome, delay or judgment, mercy or justice, in His holy hands.

2 Kings 23:28–30 (BSB)

²⁸ As for the rest of the acts of Josiah and all his accomplishments, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?

²⁹ During Josiah’s reign, Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt marched up to help the king of Assyria at the Euphrates River. King Josiah went out to confront him, but Neco faced him and killed him at Megiddo.

³⁰ From Megiddo his servants carried his body in a chariot, brought him to Jerusalem, and buried him in his own tomb. Then the people of the land took Jehoahaz son of Josiah, anointed him, and made him king in place of his father.

The best king Judah ever knew dies young and far from home, struck down at Megiddo when he goes out to stand against Pharaoh Neco. The account is spare, almost abrupt, and that plainness is itself a kind of reverence. Scripture does not linger over the manner of his death or turn it into spectacle. It simply tells us that the great reformer fell, that his servants carried his body home in a chariot, and that they laid him in his own tomb in the city he had cleansed for the LORD. There is real grief in these few lines. A light that had shone so brightly is gone, and the nation is left to mourn. Yet even here the mercy of chapter twenty-two holds true: the LORD had promised Josiah would be gathered to his grave in peace, spared the sight of the disaster to come, and so he was. He did not live to see the city fall. He was carried home, and buried in honor, by the people he had led back to God.

2 Kings 23:31–37 (BSB)

³¹ Jehoahaz was twenty-three years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months. His mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah; she was from Libnah.

³² And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, just as his fathers had done.

³³ And Pharaoh Neco imprisoned Jehoahaz at Riblah in the land of Hamath so that he could not reign in Jerusalem, and he imposed on Judah a levy of a hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold.

³⁴ Then Pharaoh Neco made Eliakim son of Josiah king in place of his father Josiah, and he changed Eliakim’s name to Jehoiakim. But Neco took Jehoahaz and carried him off to Egypt, where he died.

³⁵ So Jehoiakim paid the silver and gold to Pharaoh Neco, but to meet Pharaoh’s demand he taxed the land and exacted the silver and the gold from the people, each according to his wealth.

³⁶ Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. His mother’s name was Zebidah daughter of Pedaiah; she was from Rumah.

³⁷ And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, just as his fathers had done.

The turn is swift and sad. Josiah’s son Jehoahaz reigns only three months before Pharaoh drags him off to die in Egypt, and the sentence that measures him is the old, weary refrain: he did evil in the sight of the LORD, just as his fathers had done. His brother Jehoiakim takes the throne only because Egypt sets him there, changes his name to prove who owns him, and squeezes the silver out of his own people to pay a foreign master. The same verdict falls on him too. Consider how quickly it all unravels. The father turned to the LORD with all his heart, and the sons return to evil as if the reform had never happened, because a father’s faith cannot simply be handed down like a crown. Each generation must turn for itself. Josiah’s wholeness still shines, undimmed by what came after, but the throne now belongs to men who serve Egypt instead of God, and the road runs on toward Babylon.