2 Chronicles34chapter 34

Josiah came to the throne at eight, began to seek God at sixteen, and started demolishing shrines at twenty. The purge is described physically: altars broken down, incense stands cut off, carved and cast images broken into powder and scattered over the graves of the people who had sacrificed to them, and the bones of their priests burned on their own altars.

The reform reaches deep into the north — Manasseh, Ephraim, Simeon, as far as Naphtali. A king of Judah could only do that because Assyria was collapsing in those exact years, and the political vacuum let Jerusalem act in territory it had not touched for a century.

The repair fund is a working system. Levite doorkeepers had collected money from Manasseh, Ephraim, all the remnant of Israel, Judah, Benjamin, and the residents of Jerusalem; it was handed to the foremen and paid out to carpenters and builders for dressed stone and for timber to make couplings and beams for the buildings the kings of Judah had let fall apart. And the auditors' note is one of the finest lines in the book: no accounting was required of them, because they dealt faithfully.

During that work Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law of the LORD given by Moses. Scrolls stored in a temple that had been shut, plundered, and refilled with idols could easily be lost for a generation; finding one during structural repairs is exactly how such things are found.

Shaphan the scribe read it to the king, and the king tore his clothes. The word was sought from Huldah the prophetess, who lived in the second quarter of Jerusalem — and she was consulted while Jeremiah and Zephaniah were both active prophets, which the text records without comment. Her answer had two parts: the judgment written in the book would come, and Josiah would not live to see it.