The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Isreal and the Origin of Sacred Texts (43 page)

Manasseh’s success in transforming Judah from the wasteland left by Sennacherib into a highly developed state in the Assyrian empire brought great wealth to some and social dislocation and uncertainty to many. As Baruch Halpern first pointed out, with the influx of refugees from the north after the fall of Samaria, the reorganization of the countryside under Hezekiah, and the second torrent of refugees from the desolation of the Shephelah by Sennacherib, many of the traditional clan attachments to particular territories had been forever destroyed. In the countryside, economies of scale—needed to produce the enormous quantities of olives for pressing and grain for distribution—benefited those who could organize the machinery of trade and agricultural production far more than those who labored in the fields. To whatever extent the surviving clans could claim an unbroken chain of inheritance on their fields, villages, and hilltops, the effects of war, population change, and intensified royal economic planning may have encouraged many to dream of a past golden age—real or imagined—when their ancestors were settled securely in well-defined territories and enjoyed the divine promise of eternal peace and prosperity on their land.

Soon will come the climax of the story. Manasseh died in the year
642
BCE
and was succeeded by his son Amon. According to the second book of Kings, Amon “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, as Manasseh his father had done” (
2
Kings
21
:
20
). Within two years a coup d’état broke out in Jerusalem, during which Amon was assassinated. In horror, the “people of the land”—apparently the social and economic elite of Judah—slew the conspirators and placed Amon’s eight-year-old son Josiah on the throne. Josiah would reign in Jerusalem for thirty-one years and be praised as the most righteous king in the history of Judah, rivaling the reputation of even David himself. And during his reign the “YHWH-alone” camp would once more come into power.

This time, too, their passionate religious convictions and single-minded vision of the power of YHWH to protect Judah and the Davidic dynasty
against all earthly opponents would founder on the hard realities of history. But this time they would leave behind them a brilliant testament that would keep their ideas alive. Their great monument would be a timeless collection of Hebrew texts expressing their view of history and their hopes for the future. That collective saga would be the unshakable foundation for the Hebrew Bible we know today.

The reign of King Josiah of Judah marks the climax of Israel’s monarchic history—or at least it must have appeared that way at the time. For the author of the Deuteronomistic History, Josiah’s reign marked a metaphysical moment hardly less important than those of God’s covenant with Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt, or the divine promise to King David. It is not just that King Josiah is seen in the Bible as a noble successor to Moses, Joshua, and David: the very outlines of those great characters—as they appear in the biblical narrative—seem to be drawn with Josiah in mind. Josiah is the ideal toward which all of Israel’s history seemed to be heading. “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the L
ORD
with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him,” reports 2 Kings 23:25 in a level of praise shown for no other biblical king.

A sixteenth-generation lineal descendant of King David, Josiah came to the throne at age eight in the violent aftermath of his father’s assassination in Jerusalem. Of his early life, we know very little. Stories of his teenage religious awakening reported in 2 Chronicles 34:3 are almost certainly biographical idealizations after-the-fact. But during his thirty-one-year reign over the Kingdom of Judah, Josiah was recognized by many as the greatest hope for national redemption, a genuine messiah who was destined to restore
the fallen glories of the house of Israel. Because of—or in accordance with—the tenets of a law book miraculously “discovered” in the Temple in Jerusalem, he embarked on a campaign to root out every trace of foreign or syncretistic worship, including the age-old high places in the countryside. He and his puritan forces did not even stop at the traditional northern border of his kingdom but continued northward to Bethel, where the hated Jeroboam had established a rival temple to that of Jerusalem—and where (so the prophecy of 1 Kings 13:2 related) a Davidic heir named Josiah would someday burn the bones of the north’s idolatrous priests.

Josiah’s messianic role arose from the theology of a new religious movement that dramatically changed what it meant to be an Israelite and laid the foundations for future Judaism and for Christianity. That movement ultimately produced the core documents of the Bible—chief among them, a book of the Law, discovered during renovations to the Jerusalem Temple in 622
BCE
, the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign. That book, identified by most scholars as an original form of the book of Deuteronomy, sparked a revolution in ritual and a complete reformulation of Israelite identity. It contained the central features of biblical monotheism: the exclusive worship of one God in one place; centralized, national observance of the main festivals of the Jewish Year (Passover, Tabernacles); and a range of legislation dealing with social welfare, justice, and personal morality.

This was the formative moment in the crystallization of the biblical tradition as we now know it. Yet the narrative of Josiah’s reign concentrates almost entirely on the nature of his religious reform and its reported geographical extent. Little is recorded of the larger historical events that were unfolding in the areas around Judah and how they may have influenced the rise of the Deuteronomistic ideology. An examination of the contemporary historical sources and archaeological finds may help us to understand how Josiah, this otherwise forgotten king, who ruled over a tiny kingdom under the shadow of the world’s great powers, would—consciously or unwittingly—become the patron of the intellectual and spiritual movement that produced some of the Bible’s major ethical teachings and its unique vision of Israel’s history.

This momentous chapter in the political and spiritual life of Judah began with the accession of the young prince Josiah as king in 639
BCE
. It seemed to mark a turning point in the Bible’s view of the ups-and-downs of “evil” and “righteous” kings in the history of Judah. For Josiah was a faithful successor of David, who “did what was right in the eyes of the L
ORD
, and walked in all the way of David his father, and he did not turn aside to the right hand or to the left” (2 Kings 22: 2).

According to the Bible, that righteousness led Josiah to decisive action. In his eighteenth year of rule—622
BCE
—Josiah commanded the high priest Hilkiah to use public funds to renovate the House of the God of Israel. The renovations led to the dramatic surfacing of a text, found by the high priest in the Temple and read to the King by his secretary Shaphan. Its impact was enormous, for it suddenly and shockingly revealed that the traditional practice of the cult of YHWH in Judah had been wrong.

Josiah soon gathered all the people of Judah to conclude a solemn oath to devote themselves entirely to the divine commandments detailed in the newly discovered book.

And the king went up to the house of the L
ORD
, and with him all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the priests and the prophets, all the people, both small and great; and he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant which had been found in the house of the L
ORD
. And the king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the L
ORD
, to walk after the L
ORD
and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book; and all the people joined in the covenant.” (
2
K
INGS
23:2–3).

Then, in order to effect a thorough cleansing of the cult of YHWH, Josiah launched the most intense puritan reform in the history of Judah. His first targets were the idolatrous rites being practiced in Jerusalem, even within the Temple itself:

And the king commanded Hilkiah, the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the keepers of the threshold, to bring out of the temple of the L
ORD
all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron and carried their ashes to Bethel. And he deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places at the cities of Judah and round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens. And he brought out the Asherah from the house of the L
ORD,
outside Jerusalem, to the brook Kidron, and burned it at the brook Kidron, and beat it to dust and cast the dust of it upon the graves of the common people. And he broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes, which were in the house of the L
ORD
, where women wove hangings for the Asherah. (
2
K
INGS
23: 4–7)

He eradicated the shrines of foreign cults, notably the shrines that had reportedly been established under royal patronage in Jerusalem as early as the time of Solomon:

And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech. And he removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, at the entrance to the house of the L
ORD,
by the chamber of Nathan-melech the chamberlain, which was in the precincts; and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire. And the altars on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the L
ORD,
he pulled down and broke in pieces, and cast the dust of them into the brook of Kidron. And the king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem, to the south of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. And he broke in pieces the pillars, and cut down the Asherim, and filled their place with the bones of men. (
2
K
INGS
23: 10–14)

Josiah also put an end to the sacrificial rituals conducted by the rural priesthood who conducted their rites at the scattered high places and shrines throughout the countryside. “And he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense, from Geba to Beersheba” (2 Kings 23:8).

The old scores were being settled one by one. Next was the great “sin of
Jeroboam” at the idolatrous altar at Bethel, where he fulfilled the biblical prophecy that one day a righteous king named Josiah would see that it was destroyed:

Moreover the altar at Bethel, the high place erected by Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, that altar with the high place he pulled down and he broke in pieces its stones, crushing them to dust; also he burned the Asherah. And as Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the mount; and he sent and took the bones out of the tombs, and burned them upon the altar, and defiled it, according to the word of the L
ORD
which the man of God proclaimed, who had predicted these things. Then he said, “What is yonder monument that I see?” And the men of the city told him, “It is the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and predicted these things which you have done against the altar at Bethel.” And he said, “Let him be; let no man move his bones.” So they let his bones alone, with the bones of the prophet who came out of Samaria. (2 K
INGS
23
:15–18)