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JOSIAH

(Heb. yōʾšîyāhû)

1. The son of King Amon of Judah and Jedidah, daughter of Adaiah of Bozkath. Josiah (ca. 648- 609 b.c.e.) was placed on the throne of Judah at the age of eight after the assassination of his father (ca. 640). Josiah married Hamutal, daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah, and Zebudah, daughter of Pediah of Rumah. One son from each wife reigned after him: Jehoahaz succeeded to the throne upon Josiah’s having being killed by Neco II of Egypt, but he was removed from the throne by Neco in favor of his older half-brother Jehoiakim after only three months.

Josiah came to the throne in a period of both internal and external turmoil for Judah. The assassination of Amon suggests wider unrest than mere unpopularity with this particular ruler, and the bloody reform measures engaged in by Josiah seem to confirm such discontent. The collapse of the Assyrian Empire, to which Judah had been a vassal, left the small nation with an uncertain place in international relations, a tenuous position perhaps reflected in archaeological remains by royal Judean stamped impressions both of scarabs (Egyptian icons) and rosettes (Babylonian icons).

The main event recorded of Josiah’s reign is the cult reform of Judah in which the Yahweh temple of Jerusalem became the only accepted Judean worship site while the veneration of all other deities was treated as a capital offense; indeed, 1 Kgs. 13:2 has a prophet predict Josiah’s reign for just this purpose. The polytheistic religious world of King Manasseh, as presented in Kings, had been maintained during the two-year reign of Josiah’s father and the first several years of Josiah’s reign, as is well documented in archaeological deposits. In addition, the prophecies of Zephaniah and Jeremiah reflect a Judean religious world of pervasive polytheism.

In the course of renovating the temple of Yahweh, during the 18th year of his reign, Josiah’s workers came upon a scroll which was delivered to the king (2 Kgs. 23). Since Patristic times Christians have insisted that the scroll found was the book of Deuteronomy or some variant of it. Jewish tradition has insisted, with the Hebrew text, that it was the Torah (Pentateuch). It was unlikely to have been either in any form now known. Although no one else who saw the document was perturbed by it, Josiah instantly recognized it as condemning the religious practices of the Judeans and foretelling doom for the nation.

Josiah followed ancient Near Eastern traditions by having the veracity of the scroll verified by consulting with the divine world. The prophetess Huldah confirmed that the nation would end in destruction, but the king would die in peace (2 Kgs. 22:20). What exactly was meant by “peace” continues to be debated, since Josiah would be killed by Neco II. Josiah’s actions to deflect the promise of doom for Judah included the wholesale destruction of all places of worship except the Yahweh temple in Jerusalem, the disestablishment of levitical posts away from Jerusalem, and the execution of personnel involved with cults of deities other than Yahweh, most notably at Bethel, the national temple of Israel. 2 Chr. 35 concentrates on a Passover which Josiah called for all of Judah and Israel, having given only a cursory notice (34:33) to the reform so central to 2 Kings, perhaps because the Chronicler had already assigned that reform to Hezekiah (2 Chr. 31) and Manasseh (2 Chr. 33:15-16).

Both in 2 Chronicles (2 Chr. 34:2) and Sirach (Sir. 49:4) it is stressed that Josiah was devoted to Yahweh from his youth and that he attempted to reform the religious world of Judah even before the “discovery” of the scroll in the temple. Jewish tradition has ascribed to Josiah the act of hiding the ark of the covenant from the Babylonians and attributed his death to the disregard of Jeremiah’s admonitions. Matthew noted Josiah’s ancestry to Jesus (Matt. 1:10-11), an item lacking in Luke.

It is generally agreed that Josiah took a contingent of soldiers to Megiddo in order to block the advance of Pharaoh Neco II and his army who were attempting to deliver the remnant of the Assyrians from annihilation at the hands of the Babylonians in 609. Josiah was slain on sight by the pharaoh according to 2 Kgs. 23:29, or in battle according to 2 Chr. 35:22-23. His body was returned to Jerusalem for burial. Jeremiah (Jer. 22:15-16) remembered Josiah as a righteous ruler who cared for the poor.

2. Son of a certain Zephaniah, whose house is to be the place for receiving gifts from the Judean exiles as decreed by the prophet Zechariah (Zech. 6:10, 14).

Bibliography. W. G. Dever, “The Silence of the Text: An Archaeological Commentary on 2 Kings 23,,” in Scripture and Other Artifacts, ed. M. D. Coogan, J. C. Exum, and L. E. Stager (Louisville, 1994), 143-68; L. K. Handy, “Historical Probability and the Narrative of Josiah’s Reform in 2 Kings,” in The Pitcher Is Broken, ed. S. W. Holloway and L. K. Handy, JSOTSup 190 (Sheffield, 1995), 252-75; A. Laato, Josiah and David Redivivus: The Historical Josiah and the Messianic Expectations of Exilic and Postexilic Times. ConBOT 33 (Stockholm, 1992); N. Naʾman, “The Kingdom of Judah under Josiah,” Tel Aviv 18 (1991): 3-71; Z. Talshir, “The Three Deaths of Josiah and the Strata of Biblical Historiography,” VT 46 (1996): 213-36.

Lowell K. Handy

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

JOSIAH

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)