Josiah

The sixteenth king of Judah's southern kingdom. Josiah ruled from 640 to 609 BC. He was a godly man and was very different from his grandfather, Manasseh, and his father, Amon. The Bible says that no other king before or after him obeyed the law of Moses as fully as he did (2 Kings 23:25). The Greek form of his name is Josias. It appears in Matthew 1:10–11 in the King James Version.

The Era of Josiah

When Josiah became king in 640 BC, the world was about to change. After the great Assyrian king Ashurbanipal died in 633 BC, weaker rulers took over. Because of this, the empire became unstable. In 626 BC, Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar, took control of Babylon and began the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

The Babylonians soon formed an alliance with the Medes. Together they attacked the Assyrian Empire and destroyed the city of Nineveh in 612 BC. As Babylon gained power, Assyria lost control over the region that had once been the northern kingdom of Israel. Their pressure on Judah also decreased during this time.

After Nineveh fell, the Assyrians moved their capital to Haran. In 610 BC, Babylonian and Scythian forces defeated them there. Pharaoh Neco II of Egypt then chose to support the weakened Assyrians. In the late spring of 609 BC, he marched through Judah. Josiah tried to stop him, but Neco defeated and killed him before continuing his military campaign in Syria.

Before Josiah became king, Judah had turned to serious idol worship during the reign of Manasseh from 697 to 642 BC. People worshiped Baal, Molech, and other pagan gods. Practices connected to magic and astrology also spread throughout the land. A false altar even stood in the temple in Jerusalem, and some people offered human sacrifices to these deities near the city. The nation had become deeply corrupt.

Manasseh changed some of these practices late in his life, but the people returned to their former behavior when his son Amon ruled from 642 to 640 BC. In 640 BC, officials in Amon’s household killed him. The “people of the land” then made Josiah king (2 Kings 21:26; 22:1; 2 Chronicles 33:25–34:1).

Josiah's Reform Efforts

Josiah was eight years old when he became king. He likely had advisers who encouraged him to follow God. By the time he was sixteen, he chose on his own to seek the God of his ancestor David (2 Chronicles 34:3).

When he was 20, he became very concerned about the idolatry in Judah. He began a major effort to remove the pagan high places, sacred groves, and images from Judah and Jerusalem. His opposition to idolatry was so strong that he opened the tombs of pagan priests and burned their bones on the pagan altars before destroying the altars themselves.

Josiah continued his reform work beyond the borders of Judah. He focused especially on the worship center at Bethel, where Jeroboam had set up false worship. Josiah destroyed the altar and the high place there and burned the bones of the priests on the altar to make the site unclean (2 Kings 23:15–18). This fulfilled the prophecy in 1 Kings 13:1–3. He did the same things in the rest of the kingdom of Samaria (2 Kings 23:19–20).

When Josiah was 26, he began a project to cleanse and repair the temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 22:3). Shaphan, the king’s administrative assistant, organized the work, and Hilkiah the priest supervised the repairs. During the restoration, Hilkiah found the Book of the Law. Its exact form and contents are not known today. It is possible that, during the difficult years under Manasseh, someone had tried to destroy the word of God. In any case, very few people in Judah knew the Scriptures at that time.

When Shaphan read the Book of the Law to Josiah, the king became deeply troubled by the warnings of punishment for turning away from God. He sent a group of officials to ask Huldah the prophetess what these warnings meant for Judah. Huldah replied that God’s judgment would certainly come on the land because of the people’s sins. However, she also told Josiah that, because he had a humble and devoted heart, the punishment would not happen during his lifetime.

The ruler gathered a large group of leaders and people so they could hear the Book of the Law read in public. These parts of the law explained their responsibilities toward God. Then the ruler and the people made an agreement before God that they would obey his commandments.

The king understood the importance of preserving true worship of the one God. This inspired him to carry out even more serious efforts to cleanse the temple and the city of Jerusalem. He removed the objects used in Baal worship, the horses and chariots that earlier kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, and the group of men who took part in sexual acts as part of pagan worship near the temple. He also destroyed the shrines that had been built in the days of Solomon. In addition, he worked hard to remove the pagan shrines and high places in every town of Judah (2 Kings 23:4–14).

The Death of Josiah

The exact reason Josiah opposed Pharaoh Neco’s march through Judah is not known. He may have wanted to stop Neco from helping the Assyrians, or he may have wanted to protect Judah’s independence. During the battle, Josiah was severely wounded and later died. Jeremiah and all the people mourned for him (2 Chronicles 35:25). Their grief was great, because they had lost a godly king, and the judgment God delayed during his lifetime would come upon the nation only a few years later.

A son of Zephaniah who returned to Jerusalem with other Jews after the exile in Babylon. His name in Hebrew is Hen (Zechariah 6:10, 14).