The story
Josiah was born into the wreckage of two reigns. His grandfather Manasseh ruled fifty-five years and filled Jerusalem with idolatry and innocent blood (2 Kings 21:1–16). His father Amon lasted two years and was murdered by his own servants. The people of the land killed the conspirators and made Josiah king, he was eight years old (2 Kings 22:1; 2 Chronicles 34:1).
The two accounts order the reform differently, and it is worth saying so out loud. Chronicles gives stages: in the eighth year of his reign, while he was still young, Josiah began to seek the God of David his father; in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, groves, and carved images; and in the eighteenth year the scroll was found (2 Chronicles 34:3, 8). Kings tells the story as one movement, beginning with the discovery in the eighteenth year and then listing the purge (2 Kings 22–23). They are describing the same reform. Chronicles spreads it across a decade; Kings gathers it around the Book.
The find came during a building project. In the eighteenth year Josiah sent Shaphan the scribe, Maaseiah the governor of the city, and Joah the recorder to repair the house of the LORD, and the money was handed to the workmen without an accounting, because they dealt faithfully (2 Chronicles 34:8; 2 Kings 22:7). In the middle of the repairs Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD (2 Kings 22:8).
Shaphan read it himself, then carried it to the palace and read it before the king. When Josiah heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes (2 Kings 22:10–11). The text never tells us which scroll it was. Because the reforms that follow track so closely with Deuteronomy, many readers from the early church onward have concluded it was Deuteronomy or a core of it, a reasonable inference, not a statement of Scripture.
Josiah sent for a word, and the men went to Huldah the prophetess, wife of Shallum, keeper of the wardrobe, who lived in the Second Quarter of Jerusalem (2 Kings 22:14). Jeremiah had been prophesying since Josiah's thirteenth year (Jeremiah 1:2) and Zephaniah was active in the same reign, but it was Huldah they consulted. Her answer had two halves: the evil written in the book will come on this place, and it will not be revoked, but because your heart was tender and you humbled yourself and wept, you will be gathered to your grave in peace, and your eyes will not see all the evil (2 Kings 22:16–20). Josiah later died of battle wounds; the peace promised him was that he would not live to watch Jerusalem fall.
He did not soften the message. He called the elders, the priests, the prophets, and all the people, small and great, went up to the house of the LORD, and read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found (2 Kings 23:1–2). Then he stood by the pillar and made a covenant to walk after the LORD and keep His commandments with all his heart and soul, and all the people stood to it (23:3).
The purge that followed was thorough and public. The vessels made for Baal and for the host of heaven were burned in the fields of Kidron and the ashes carried to Bethel. The Asherah pole was brought out of the temple itself and burned. He defiled Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom, so that no one could make a son or daughter pass through the fire to Molech. He removed the horses dedicated to the sun and pulled down the altars on the roof. He even defiled the high places Solomon had built for Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom, three centuries earlier (2 Kings 23:4–14). At Bethel he broke the altar Jeroboam had made and burned bones on it, fulfilling a word spoken against that altar generations before, which had named Josiah by name (2 Kings 23:15–18; 1 Kings 13:1–2). He spared the tomb of the prophet who had spoken it.
Then the Passover, on the fourteenth day of the first month of that eighteenth year (2 Chronicles 35:1, 19). Josiah gave thirty thousand lambs and kids and three thousand bullocks out of his own substance, and his officials gave thousands more (35:7–9). The two accounts measure its greatness against different markers: Kings says no such Passover had been held since the days of the judges (2 Kings 23:22), and Chronicles says none like it since the days of Samuel the prophet (2 Chronicles 35:18). Both mean the same thing, nothing in living memory or recorded memory came close.
Josiah died at Megiddo, going out against Pharaoh Necho, who was marching to Carchemish and who told him plainly he had no quarrel with Judah. Josiah disguised himself and fought anyway, was hit by archers, and was carried back to Jerusalem to die. Jeremiah lamented for him, and the singing men and singing women kept the lament for generations (2 Chronicles 35:20–25). And the honest close is the one Kings gives: for all of it, the LORD did not turn from the fierceness of His wrath, because of the provocations of Manasseh (2 Kings 23:26). Within about twenty-three years, Jerusalem fell.