2 Kings23chapter 23

The covenant ceremony sets the pattern: the king stands by the pillar, reads the whole book aloud to the assembled nation, and the people join the covenant. Reading a treaty document publicly and having the parties assent is exactly how covenant renewal worked.

The demolition list is a tour of two centuries of accumulated worship. Vessels made for Baal and the host of heaven burned in the Kidron; the Asherah brought out of the temple, burned, beaten to dust, and the dust thrown on the common graveyard to defile it; the quarters of the shrine prostitutes inside the temple precinct torn down; the horses and chariots dedicated to the sun removed from the entrance, since sun-chariot imagery was standard in Assyrian religion; the rooftop altars smashed; Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom defiled so no one could burn a child there again; and the high places Solomon himself had built east of Jerusalem finally destroyed after three hundred and fifty years.

He then crosses into what had been the northern kingdom — possible only because Assyria could no longer stop him — and pulls down the altar at Bethel, burning bones from the surrounding tombs on it, which is what a man from Judah had announced at that altar three centuries earlier. He spares one grave, the one belonging to that prophet.

The Passover that follows is said to be unlike any kept since the days of the judges, meaning a national observance at the central sanctuary rather than family observances at local shrines. And then the reform ends abruptly at Megiddo. Pharaoh Neco II marched north in 609 to prop up the last Assyrian remnant at Carchemish against Babylon — the Hebrew preposition usually rendered 'against the king of Assyria' is better read as 'to' him — and Josiah intercepted him and was killed. Three months later Neco deposed his son, imposed a hundred talents of silver and one of gold, and installed a brother in his place.