2 Chronicles34chapter 34

a.in the eighteenth year of his reign: The eighteenth year is where Kings begins its account of the reform outright, so the two books converge here after Chronicles has already told six years the other book leaves untold. Three officials are sent to repair the temple, and the money comes in from Manasseh and Ephraim and all the remnant of Israel as well as Judah and Benjamin, the same all-Israel reach the purge has already shown. Barnes reads the houses needing repair as the temple's chambers or outbuildings left to decay under Manasseh and Amon, the two reigns this whole chapter answers.

a.the workmen that had the oversight: Chronicles gives the repair a staff list that Kings does not carry in this much detail: Levites of Merari and Kohath overseeing the work, and among the Levites scribes, officers and porters as well as musicians. Barnes notes this is the first place scribe names an office within the Levitical body rather than a general term for a writer. Where Kings names the work in a few verses, the Chronicler slows to credit the Levites by name, consistent with the weight this book gives them everywhere from the ark's due order to the temple's courses.

a.of the Lord given by Moses: The book surfaces not through search but as a byproduct of counting out temple money, and Chronicles names it plainly, a book of the law of the Lord given by Moses. Which scroll this was is not stated in the text; the commentators generally take it as the Pentateuch or a copy kept by the ark and neglected through Manasseh's and Amon's reigns. Hilkiah hands it to Shaphan the scribe rather than to the king directly, the ordinary channel of a temple official reporting to the court.

a.carried the book to the king: Shaphan reports the money and the repairs first and only then adds that Hilkiah has given him a book, reading it before the king almost as an afterthought inside his own account. The order says something about how ordinary the discovery seemed to the men who found it, set against how the king receives it in the very next verse. Chronicles and Kings run near word for word through this stretch, and the fuller unpacking of what Josiah heard belongs to the Kings exposition of the same scene.

a.that he rent his clothes: Torn clothes are Josiah's own response, not a ritual demanded of him, and Wesley reads it as the mark of a heart not yet hardened by long familiarity with words entirely new to his own generation. He does not wait to feel better before acting; the same passage moves straight to commanding an inquiry of the Lord for himself and for them that are left in Israel and in Judah, the northern remnant again held together with Judah under one king's care. The wrath he fears is named as already poured out, not merely threatened, because the fathers did not keep the word of the Lord.

a.Huldah the prophetess, the wife: The five men sent go to a woman, Huldah the prophetess, named with her husband, her lineage, her office as keeper of the wardrobe, and her address in Jerusalem, in the college, more personal detail than the chapter gives most of the men around her. Jeremiah's ministry had already begun by this year, and Chronicles does not explain why the king's men go to Huldah rather than to him; the text simply records the choice without comment. The oracle she gives is preserved in the Kings exposition of this same scene.

a.Tell ye the man that sent you: Huldah answers as a prophet, the messenger formula thus saith the Lord opening both halves of her word, first the doom against the place and then the personal word to the king himself. The two halves are not in tension: the nation's judgment for generations of forsaking the Lord stands, and Josiah's own tender heart, his humbling, his torn clothes and his tears, earn him a personal mercy inside that same judgment, to be gathered to his grave in peace before the evil falls. Spurgeon preached this pairing as a man's own repentance heard inside a sentence already determined for others.

a.gathered together all the elders: Where Kings has Josiah accompanied by priests and prophets when he reads the book publicly, Chronicles names priests and Levites instead, the substitution Barnes calls characteristic of this book's habit of crediting the Levites wherever it can. The king reads the covenant in the people's own ears rather than having it read to him alone, then stands in his place and makes the covenant himself before binding the nation to it. The reform turns public and communal at exactly the point where the private reading of the earlier verses had been the king's alone.

a.to stand to it: Josiah makes Jerusalem and Benjamin stand to the covenant, an oath of assent Clarke reads as the people rising to their feet to testify their own resolve. The purge that began in the cities of the north at verse six closes the chapter the same way, abominations taken away out of all the countries that pertained to the children of Israel, not Judah alone. The closing formula, all his days they departed not from following the Lord, Barnes and Gill both read as holding for public and official religion, while Jeremiah's and Zephaniah's prophecies from these very years show private idolatry the reform never fully reached.