The Story of Josiah and the Idols in the Bible

Josiah has heard the book and torn his clothes. What he does next is the longest clean-up operation in the Old Testament.

He does not start with the obvious targets. He works through the temple, the capital, the countryside, and then across the border into what used to be Israel, and along the way he pulls down shrines that had stood since Solomon.

The Story of Josiah and the Idols

The king gathered all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem, went up into the house of the LORD with the priests and the prophets and all the people, both small and great, and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the LORD.

Then he stood by a pillar and made a covenant before the LORD, to walk after the LORD and to keep his commandments with all their heart and all their soul. And all the people stood to the covenant.

The clearing began inside the temple. He commanded that all the vessels made for Baal and for the grove and for all the host of heaven be brought out, and he burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and carried the ashes to Bethel. He brought the grove out of the house of the LORD, burned it at the brook Kidron, stamped it small to powder, and cast the powder on the graves of the common people.

He put down the idolatrous priests that the kings of Judah had ordained. He defiled Topheth in the valley of the children of Hinnom, so that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire to Molech. He took away the horses the kings of Judah had given to the sun, and burned the chariots of the sun with fire. He broke down the altars Manasseh had made in the two courts of the temple and cast their dust into the brook Kidron.

Then he went after the oldest ones. The high places before Jerusalem which Solomon the king of Israel had builded for Ashtoreth, for Chemosh and for Milcom, did the king defile. These had been standing for roughly three hundred years, built by the man who built the temple.

He crossed into the north as well, breaking down the altar at Bethel that Jeroboam had made, and taking away the houses of the high places in the cities of Samaria. Then he commanded the people to keep the passover, and there had not been such a passover from the days of the judges. The verdict on him is unmatched: like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the LORD with all his heart. And the chapter still ends with a shadow. Notwithstanding the LORD turned not from the fierceness of his great wrath against Judah, because of all the provocations that Manasseh had provoked him withal.

What the Story of Josiah and the Idols Teaches Us

The reform starts with reading, not demolition. Before a single altar comes down, the whole nation stands and hears the book out loud. What follows is people acting on something they have all now heard together.

Josiah goes after shrines that had become part of the landscape. The high places Solomon built had outlasted a dozen kings and were simply part of how Jerusalem looked. Age had made them normal, and he treated age as no argument at all.

The ending refuses to be tidy. Judah gets its best king and its best passover, and the sentence Manasseh earned still stands. The chapter does not present the reform as a failure, but it does not pretend it reversed everything either.

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