Josiah was 8 years old when he became king, and he ruled for thirty-one years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Jedidah; she was Adaiah’s daughter and was from Bozkath. 2 He did what was right in the Lord’s eyes, and walked in the ways of his ancestor David—not deviating from it even a bit to the right or left.
3 In the eighteenth year of King Josiah’s rule, he sent the secretary Shaphan, Azaliah’s son and Meshullam’s grandson, to the Lord’s temple with the following orders: 4 “Go to the high priest Hilkiah. Have him carefully count[a] the money that has been brought to the Lord’s temple and that has been collected from the people by the doorkeepers. 5 It should be given to the supervisors in charge of the Lord’s temple, who in turn should pay it to those who are in the Lord’s temple, repairing the temple— 6 the carpenters, the builders, and the masons. It should be used to pay for lumber and quarried stone to repair the temple. 7 But there’s no need to check on them regarding the money they receive, because they are honest workers.”
8 The high priest Hilkiah told Shaphan the secretary: “I have found the Instruction scroll in the Lord’s temple.” Then Hilkiah turned the scroll over to Shaphan, who read it.
9 Shaphan the secretary then went to the king and reported this to him: “Your officials have released the money that was found in the temple and have handed it over to those who supervise the work in the Lord’s temple.” 10 Then Shaphan the secretary told the king, “Hilkiah the priest has given me a scroll,” and he read it out loud before the king.
11 As soon as the king heard what the Instruction scroll said, he ripped his clothes. 12 The king ordered the priest Hilkiah, Shaphan’s son Ahikam, Micaiah’s son Achbor, Shaphan the secretary, and Asaiah the royal officer as follows: 13 “Go and ask the Lord on my behalf, and on behalf of the people, and on behalf of all Judah concerning the contents of this scroll that has been found. The Lord must be furious with us because our ancestors failed to obey the words of this scroll and do everything written in it about us.” (Common English Bible)
“The Last Righteous King: When Josiah Reigned in Jerusalem,” Week One
When I was baptized around the age of 10 or 11, I was given my first not-a-children’s Bible, a red leather New Revised Standard Version (which, back then, really was new) embossed with my name. That red cover, a bit worn after a couple decades of use but still bright, now stands out on one of the bookshelves in the living room at home. Even after buying and being gifted over a dozen different Bibles since then, that baptismal Bible will be with me for life.
It did not always get so used, though. Even though I had been baptized into the faith in a rite of passage predicated on my profession of belief in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the son of the living God, I was not intellectually ready for an adult-level translation of Scripture. I still much preferred my dog-eared, duct-taped, illustrated children’s Bibles. My new baptismal Bible sat in a dresser drawer for years before I began reading it in earnest.
I had been given a book—The Book—but was still uncertain and unsteady as to how to read it, how to interpret it, and how to apply it. That isn’t to say I was baptized too young, but that I needed to push my starting line up a bit, like starting a few feet ahead of the tee in a game of mini-golf. I was not quite ready to navigate the course before me, and I needed to grow into the person who could.
I think of that when I read the story of Josiah, whose saga we will spend these three weeks leading up to Lent unpacking together. Josiah is remembered as the last righteous king of Judah, the southern kingdom after the unified kingdom of Israel split in two, before Judah is conquered by Nebuchadnezzar II just twenty-some years after Josiah’s death. But Josiah is also remembered as an uncommonly young king. He was crowned king at just eight years of age after his father, Amon, was assassinated after sitting on the throne for just two years—and this stood in marked contrast to the longevity of the reign of Josiah’s grandfather Manasseh, who reigned as king for fifty-five years.
Manasseh had reversed the pro-YHWH reforms of his own father, Hezekiah, in favor of idol worship, and the book of 2 Kings condemns him vigorously as a result. In his short reign, Amon continued in Manasseh’s worship of false deities. Josiah comes to the throne so young that he surely ruled with some sort of relative or royal advisor as regent. It was not until he was twenty-six and had already been on the throne for eighteen years that he begins his quest to reform the religious life of his kingdom and bring it back from worship of idols to worship only of the one true God.
Josiah sends his advisor Shaphan to the high priest Hilkiah on what ought to have been a relatively straightforward bookkeeping errand—account for the monies raised concerning the temple of God, and ensure that they are used to pay the workers repairing the temple, and to pay for their supplies.
The presence of God’s temple staffed with a high priest, even amid the worship of idols, should tell us that Jerusalem had not abandoned worship of God completely, but had made God’s temple simply one of many places of worship—a temple to God, but also places of worship for the Ba’als and other cultic deities of the ancient Near East. Depending on the king, the latter got lots of use.
Perhaps that is surprising to you, that God would still be worshiped alongside false gods. But it should not be so surprising, because that is exactly how we live our lives today—we continue to worship God alongside false gods. We worship God on Sundays, but Monday through Saturday we are perfectly willing to worship selfishness, greediness, prejudice, and all manner of idols that, like the serpent in Eden, are more than happy to pull us away from what God’s will for us truly is.
That reality is a big reason why I felt Josiah’s story speak to me through the Spirit as something to lead us into the forty days of Lent. Lent is a time of temptation from Satan, the falsest of the false, and the Lenten story is of Jesus choosing to resist those temptations. That is very much a story interwoven throughout Scripture—of us as people facing temptations, whether of power or coercion or violence or wealth or often some combination thereof—and the people of the Bible, through their choices, end up resisting or succumbing to those temptations.
We have been given this book that shares with us, in the most lifegiving way possible but also in the starkest possible terms, the eventual fruits of being tempted by false worship, and they are rotted. This is a lesson Josiah takes to heart he is presented with a book, or a scroll, of “instruction,” which suggests that it was a Torah scroll, or a portion of a Torah scroll, likely the book of Deuteronomy. In his commentary on 2 Kings for the Jewish Study Bible, Ziony Zevit notes that a traditional Jewish belief held that Josiah’s grandfather Manasseh had burned all the existing Torah scrolls, which is why the discovery of one such scroll is being treated by Shaphan and Hilkiah as momentous enough to bring it directly to Josiah himself.
In response to Hilkiah bringing this book, Josiah tears his clothes, a sign of deep lamentation or remorse in Scripture, because he realizes that God must be so upset that God’s instructions had never, ever fully gone away and they most certainly had not been followed since the death of Josiah’s great-grandfather Hezekiah seventy-five years earlier.
Seventy-five years is a long time to be living enthralled to false deities, but the core of Josiah’s entire narrative, and the remaining thirteen years of his kingship, is repenting for those seventy-five years and committing to wholesale reform of Judah’s religious practices and allegiances. Josiah in this moment is unconcerned with how much time he may have to repent for the practices of his father and grandfather—he is simply determined to do so with whatever time he does have as king.
There is a lesson in Josiah’s example for all of us, both individually and collectively: the best time to acknowledge an error or harm done is right now. The less-best time to do so is the future. And the absolute worst time to do so is never.
It is not always so easy to admit that you, you personally as an individual, made a mistake or harmed somebody else. We might call that pride, or ego, or simply a lack of empathy, but all of those things have the common denominator of stopping your repentance, repair, and growth all in their tracks. Pride and ego are powerful paralytic agents if we allow them to be. Josiah does not allow them to be, and as we will continue reading next week, he is prepared to diminish them to be taught by others.
Pride and ego, can unsurprisingly, commonly inhibit a king like Josiah or any person of power, just by nature of the position and the aspirations entailed. But the example of Josiah’s lamentation and repentance is that they do not have to be. If an absolute monarch can be humbled by the Word of God, then so too can we. So, too, must we.
For collectively, not just individually, that humbling is still a long time in coming. We have long been accustomed to being the most prominent religious group in the most prominent superpower of the modern world. To the extent there is a king in such a world order, it has been us. Imagine ourselves in Josiah’s place, then, being given this book by Hilkiah. Do we choose to let our pride in ourselves and in our assorted false gods—including that pride—keep us from acting out of faith in the one true God? Or do we choose a different way? Do we choose to tear our clothes and declare our intention to be better?
We have, in fact, been given this book—The Book—to instruct and teach us, lead us and inspire us as a people. The best time for us to let it guide us is the present moment, yes, but we also need time—years, decades of living out our faith to plumb its depths, hear its lessons in new ways, and be moved by it in ways we might not have even thought possible earlier in our faith journeys.
The purpose of the Bible isn’t to save us. That was always Christ’s role, and Jesus and the Bible are not synonymous. Expecting a book, even one so holy and divinely inspired as the Bible, to save us is expecting far too much of ink on a page.
But the Bible can better us, hone us, perfect us, over time. Give it a lifetime, and it can unlock Truth, capital-T Truth in profound, life-changing, world-altering ways. Give the Word of God time and good faith, and I believe that, over that time, it will have something to teach you, to illuminate to you, that will impact your life forever for the better.
And may our doing so be an act of kindness to ourselves. We may have been given this book to begin our walk with God through Christ, but sometimes, we have to let ourselves grow into the book we have been given, so that it might have the greatest, most lasting impact on us possible.
In saying this, I am choosing to be kind to that adolescent boy whose maturity and reading comprehension was not fully prepared for a frequently translated text produced thousands of years ago halfway around the world. But I am also choosing to not rest easy either, to delude myself into thinking that God or God’s Word has nothing left to teach me—for they surely do.
And may such divine revelation come to you, to each of you, to all of us, as surely as it came to Josiah, the last righteous king of Judah.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
January 31, 2021