International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

The name given 6 years before the death of his grandfather Manasseh resumes the Judaic custom, suspended in the case of that king and Amon, of compounding royal names with that of Yahweh; perhaps a hint of the time, when, according to the Chronicler, Manasseh realized Yahweh's claim on his realm (2Ch_33:12, 2Ch_33:13). One of the most eminent of the kings of Judah; came to the throne at 8 years of age and reigned circa 637-608 BC.

The earliest history (2Ki_22:1) is dispassionate in tone, betraying its prophetic feeling, however, in its acknowledgment of Yahweh's wrath, still menacing in spite of Josiah's unique piety (2Ki_23:26, 2Ki_23:27). For “the rest of his acts” (to which the rather bald account of his death is relegated as a kind of appendix), it refers to “the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah.” In the later history (2 Ch 34; 35), written from the developed ecclesiastical point of view, he is considerably idealized: the festal and ceremonial aspects of his reform are more fully detailed, and the story of his campaign and death is more sympathetically told in the sense of it as a great national calamity.

For the spiritual atmosphere of his time and the prophetic consciousness of a day of wrath impending, the prophet Zephaniah is illuminating, especially for the first half of the reign. Jeremiah, born at about the same time as Josiah, began prophesying in the 13th year of the reign (Jer_1:2). His intimate connection with state affairs, however, belongs to succeeding reigns; but some prophecies of his, notably those revealing his attitude toward the temple misuse (Jer_7:1-15) and toward the Deuteronomic reform (Jer_11:1-13), throw much light on the prevailing conditions. Nahum, writing near the end of the reign, and from an outlying village, is less concerned with home affairs than with the approaching end of Nineveh (fell 606 BC).

In Jesus Sirach's Praise of Famous Men there is a passage (Sirach 49:1-4), wholly eulogistic of Josiah, on the score that “in the days of wicked men he made godliness to prevail”; and along with David and Hezekiah he is one of the three who alone did not “commit trespass.” Jeremiah's lamentation for. Josiah, mentioned in 2Ch_35:25, is not preserved to us; instead there is only an allusion (Jer_22:10), naming his successor Shallum (Jehoahaz) as a fitter subject. The lamentations which became “an ordinance in Israel” (2Ch_35:25) are not to be referred to the Scripture book of that name; which has no hint of Josiah, unless Lam_4:20 be so construed.

Until his 18th year 2 Kings gives no events of Josiah's reign; 2 Chronicles, however, relates that in his 8th year (at 16 years of age) he “began to seek after the God of David his father,” and that in the 12th year he began the purgation of Judah and Jerusalem. The Chronicler may be mistaken in putting the completion of this work before the finding of the law (2Ch_34:8), but of his disposition and of his beginning without documentary warrant on a work which Hezekiah had attempted before him, there is no reason to doubt. And indeed various influences were working together to make his procedure natural. The staunch loyalty to the Davidic house, as emphasized by the popular movement which seated him (see under AMON), would in itself be an influence to turn his mind to the God of David his father. Manasseh's all-embracing idolatry had indeed reduced his aristocracy to a people “settled on their lees, that say in their heart, Yahweh will not do good, neither will he do evil” (Zep_1:12); but these represented merely the inertia, not the intelligence, of the people. Over against them is to be reckoned the spiritually-minded “remnant” with which since Isaiah the prophets had been working; a remnant now seasoned by persecution, and already committed to the virtue of meekness (Zep_2:3) and the willing acceptance of affliction as their appointed lot, as against the arrogance of the “proudly exulting ones” (Zep_3:11-13). To such courage and hope the redeeming element of Israel had grown in the midst of a blatant infidelity and worldliness. Nor were they so unconnected with the established order as formerly. The ministers of the temple-service, if not subjected to persecution, had been ranked on a level with devotees of other cults, and so had a common cause which would work to unite the sympathies of priests and prophets in one loyalty to Yahweh. All this is adduced as indicating how the better elements of the nation were ripening for a forward step in enlightened religious progress.

Josiah's immediate procedure was to call to the temple a representative assemblage - elders, prophets, priests, populace - and to read to them this “book of the covenant” (2Ki_23:2). Then he made a solemn covenant before Yahweh to obey it, and all the people stood to the covenant. So, perhaps for the first time, the people of Judah and Jerusalem had for their guidance not only the case decisions of judges and priests, nor only the emergency warnings and predictions of prophets, but a written and accessible document, covering in a large and liberal way the duties of their civic, social and religious life. One of the most momentous productions of all history, the book became the constitution of the Jewish race; nor were its noble provisions superseded when, centuries later, the tethers of race were broken and a Christian civilization came into its heritage. But the book that was destined to have so large a significance in all coming history had its immediate significance too, and never had this been so pressing. Josiah's consternation arose from the sense of how much of the nation's obvious duty had been left undone and unregarded. First of all, they had through heedless years and ages drifted into a medley of religious ideas and customs which had accumulated until all this lumber of Manasseh's idolatry was upon them. Hezekiah had tried to clear away some of its most crude and superstitious elements (see under HEZEKIAH), but he was handicapped by the lack of its clear issue and objective, which now this book supplied. Zephaniah too was showing what Yahweh's will was (Zep_1:2-6); there must be a clean sweep of the debasing and obscuring cults, and the purgation must be done to stay. So Josiah's first reforming step was to break up the high places, the numerous centers of the evil, to destroy the symbols and utensils of the idolatrous shrines and rites, and to defile them past resuscitation. His zeal did not stop with Jerusalem and Judah; he went on to Bethel, which had been the chief sanctuary of the now defunct Northern Kingdom, and in his work here was recognized the fulfillment of an old prophecy dating from the time of its first king (2Ki_23:17; compare 1Ki_13:1, 1Ki_13:2). This necessitated the concentration of public worship in the temple at Jerusalem, and in Dt was found the warrant for this, in the prescript, natural to Moses' point of view, that the worship of Israel must have a single center as it had in the wilderness. From this negative procedure he went on to the positive measure of reviving the festival services inseparable from a religion requiring pilgrimage, instituting a grand Passover on a scale unheard of since the time of the Judges (2Ki_23:21, 2Ki_23:22), a feature of his reform on which the Chronicler dwells with peculiar zest (2Ch_35:1-15). Thus both in the idolatries they must abolish and in the organized worship that they must maintain, the people were committed to a definite and documented issue; this it was which made Josiah's reform so momentous. That the reform seemed after Josiah's untimely death to have been merely outward, is what might reasonably be expected from the inveteracy of the unspirituality that it must encounter. Jeremiah had small faith in its saving power against the stubborn perversity of the people (Jer_11:1-14); and the historian of 2 Kings intimates that more than the piety of a zealous king was needed to turn away the stern decree of Yahweh's anger (2Ki_23:26, 2Ki_23:27). In spite of all hardness and apostasy, however, the nation that had once “stood to the covenant” of Deuteronomy could never again be at heart the nation it was before.

(2) A contemporary of Zechariah (Zec_6:10), at whose house in Jerusalem the prophet met some returned Jews from Babylon.

Taken from: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia by James Orr, M.A., D.D., General Editor