2 Kings 23:4 - Meaning and Application

Here we have a reform like none we have seen in the whole history of Judah’s kings. Josiah, the king, made a thorough clearing away of every hateful thing, and he also laid a strong foundation for a good work. Yet two things still surprise us. So many wicked practices had entered and stayed so long, and even after they were removed, Jerusalem was destroyed only a few years later. That did not save the city, because most of the people still hated true reform. The refiner works in vain, and so they are called worthless silver (Jeremiah 6:29-30).

Notice first how much evil there was, and had been, in Judah and Jerusalem. Few would have believed that such sins could be found in Judah, where God was known, or in Israel, where his name was honored, or in Salem and Zion, where he had chosen to dwell. Josiah had already reigned eighteen years. He had set a good example himself and kept worship in order by the law, yet when he searched out idolatry, the amount of corruption he found was almost unbelievable.

Even in the house of the Lord, Solomon’s temple, there were vessels and tools used for the worship of Baal, the Asherah, and all the host of heaven (2 Kings 23:4). Josiah had stopped idol worship, but the objects used for it had been carefully kept, ready to be used again if the restraint was lifted. In fact, the Asherah itself, or its image, was still standing in the temple (2 Kings 23:6). Some thought this was an image of Venus, the same as Ashtaroth.

Right at the entrance of the house of the Lord was a stable for horses, kept for a religious purpose. They were “holy horses,” given to the sun (2 Kings 23:11). As if the sun needed horses to help him, since he goes forth like a strong man running a race (Psalm 19:5). More likely, they were trying to act out the sun’s swift motion, following the old false stories about the sun’s chariot. Even a little sound thinking, without any true faith, should have made such foolishness look shameful. Some say the horses were led out each morning to greet the rising sun. Others say sun worshipers rode out on them to bow before it. It seems more likely that they pulled the sun’s chariots, which the people worshiped. It is amazing that people who had God’s written word among them could be so lost in empty thoughts.

Near the house of the Lord there were also houses of the Sodomites, where every kind of shameful and filthy act was practiced, even the most unnatural ones. This too was tied to religion, done in honor of their unclean gods. Bodily sin and spiritual unfaithfulness went together. The people’s disgraceful passions were the punishment for their foolish thoughts. Those who dishonored God were rightly left to dishonor themselves (Romans 1:24). There were also women who wove hangings for the Asherah (2 Kings 23:7), likely curtains or tents around the image of Venus, where the worshipers committed all kinds of sin, even in the house of the Lord. It was bad enough to turn the Father’s house into a marketplace, and worse to make it a den of thieves. But it was worst of all to turn it into a brothel, in open defiance of God’s holiness and his temple.

There were also many idolatrous altars (2 Kings 23:12), some even in the palace, on the roof chamber of Ahaz. Since roofs were flat, people used them as high places and set up altars there (Jeremiah 19:13; Zephaniah 1:5). These were household altars. The kings of Judah had done this, and though Josiah never used them, they still stood there. Manasseh had built altars for his idols in the house of the Lord. When he repented, he removed them and threw them out of the city (2 Chronicles 33:15). But because they were not destroyed, his son Amon seems to have brought them back into the temple courts. Josiah found them there and broke them down (2 Kings 23:12).

There was also Topheth in the valley of the son of Hinnom, very close to Jerusalem, where the image of Moloch, that god of cruel child sacrifice, was kept. Some offered their children there by burning them in the fire. Others made their children pass through the fire (2 Kings 23:10), laboring in the very flames (Habakkuk 2:13). It is thought to have been called Topheth from a drum, because drums were beaten during the burning, to drown out the children’s cries.

There were high places before Jerusalem, which Solomon had built (2 Kings 23:13). We may think the altars and images there had already been taken away by earlier faithful kings, or perhaps by Solomon himself when he repented. But the buildings, or some of them, remained until Josiah’s day. People who bring corrupt worship into religion cannot know how far it will spread or how long it will last. Old age does not prove truth. There were also high places throughout the land, from Geba to Beer-sheba (2 Kings 23:8), and high places at the gates, at the entrance of the governor’s gate. On these high places, Bishop Patrick thinks, they burned incense to guardian gods, whom their idolatrous kings trusted to protect the city. The governor of the city probably had a private altar for his household gods.

There were idolatrous priests too, serving at all these false altars (2 Kings 23:5). They were called chemarim, probably because they wore black clothes. See Zephaniah 1:4. Those who sacrificed to Osiris, or who mourned for Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14), or who worshiped the gods of the underworld, wore black as mourners. The kings of Judah had appointed these priests to burn incense in the high places. It seems some were priests from Aaron’s line who dishonored their office, and others were men with no right to the priesthood at all, yet still burned incense to Baal.

There were also conjurers, wizards, and people who consulted spirits (2 Kings 23:24). When they worshiped the devil as their god, it is no wonder they also asked him for guidance. Now we come to the full destruction that good Josiah made of all these reminders of idolatry. His zeal for the Lord of armies, and his holy anger against everything that displeased God, would let nothing stand before him.

The law required that every monument of the Canaanites’ idolatry be destroyed (Deuteronomy 7:5). How much more should the same judgment fall on the idols of the Israelites, since their sin was more shameless, more unholy, and more treacherous.

Josiah first told Hilkiah and the other priests to clear out the temple. This was their duty (2 Kings 23:4). All the vessels made for Baal had to go. They were never to be used for God’s service, or even kept for ordinary use. They were to be burned, and their ashes taken to Bethel, the place that had long been a center of idolatry because one of the calves had been set up there. Since that false worship had spread from there into Judah, Josiah made Bethel the dumping place for all its filth, so that the people might find it hateful.

He also removed all the idolatrous priests. Those who were not descendants of Aaron, or who had sacrificed to Baal or other false gods, he put to death according to the law (2 Kings 23:20). He killed them at their own altars, turning those altars into the place where God’s justice was carried out. The priests who were from Aaron’s line, but had burned incense at the high places even if they meant to serve only the true God, were barred from coming near the Lord’s altar again. They had lost that honor (2 Kings 23:9). Josiah brought them out of the cities of Judah (2 Kings 23:8), so they would not quietly keep up their old harmful practices in the countryside. Still, he let them eat the unleavened bread among their fellow priests, the bread of the grain offering (Leviticus 2:4, Leviticus 2:5), so they could live under supervision and be kept from doing harm and taught to do good. Whether they were allowed to eat all the sacred food, as priests with defects were (Leviticus 21:22), is something that can be doubted.

He then broke the images into pieces and burned them. The image of the grove, likely some goddess image (2 Kings 23:6), was burned to ashes, and the ashes were scattered on the graves of the common people (2 Kings 23:6), the city’s public burying place. Since touching a grave made a person ceremonially unclean, Josiah was declaring these idols to be utterly unclean. The Chaldee version says he cast it into the graves, showing that he wanted idolatry buried out of sight, as something filthy and dead, to be forgotten (2 Kings 23:14). He also filled the places of the groves with human bones. In one case he mixed the idol’s ashes with dead men’s bones, and in the other he put bones where the images had stood. Either way, he made idolatry repulsive and kept the people away from both the ashes and the ruins of those worship sites. Dead men and dead gods were fit to go together.

He also shut down the wicked houses, those nests of evil that sheltered idolaters, the houses of the Sodomites (2 Kings 23:7). Down with them, all the way to the foundation. The high places were broken down and flattened too (2 Kings 23:8), even the one that belonged to the city governor, because no rank or power can protect a person in idolatry or corruption. Leaders should be the first to reform, and then the people are more likely to follow. Josiah defiled the high places (2 Kings 23:8, 2 Kings 23:13) in every way he could, making them detestable and turning the people against them, as Jehu had done when he made the house of Baal a latrine (2 Kings 10:27). Tophet, which was unusual because it stood in a valley instead of on a hill, was also defiled (2 Kings 23:10) and made into the city’s burial place. Jeremiah gives a full message about this in Jeremiah 19:1, Jeremiah 19:2, and following verses, where Tophet becomes a warning of how the whole city would be judged.

The horses that had been dedicated to the sun were taken away and put to ordinary use, freeing them from the empty purpose for which they had been set apart. The chariots of the sun were burned with fire. What a shame that such horses and chariots, which might have served as the horses and chariots of Israel, were used for idolatry instead. Yet if the sun is like a flame, they never looked more like him than when they were burned.

Josiah also removed the workers with familiar spirits and the wizards (2 Kings 23:24). Those convicted of witchcraft were likely put to death, which would have warned others away from such devilish practices. In all of this, he sincerely followed the words of the law that had just been found (2 Kings 23:24). He made that law his guide and kept it before him throughout the reform.

His zeal also reached the cities of Israel within his reach. The ten tribes had been taken captive, and the Assyrian settlers had not fully filled the land, so many cities likely placed themselves under the protection of the kings of Judah (2 Chronicles 30:1; 2 Chronicles 34:6). Josiah visited these places as well to continue his reform. As far as our influence extends, so far our efforts should go to do good and bring wickedness to an end.

He defiled and broke down Jeroboam’s altar at Bethel, along with the high place and the grove connected to it (2 Kings 23:15, 2 Kings 23:16). The golden calf seems to have been gone already, “your calf, O Samaria, has cast you off,” but the altar remained, and those still attached to old idolatries continued to use it. Josiah defiled it by opening the tombs in the hill, where the idolatrous priests were probably buried near the altar they had served and loved so much. He took out their bones and burned them on the altar, showing what he would have done to the priests themselves if they had still been alive, just as he did to those he found alive (2 Kings 23:20). In this way he polluted the altar, desecrated it, and made it hateful. The warning against idolaters in Jeremiah 8:1, Jeremiah 8:2, that their bones would be scattered before the sun, points in the same direction as what happened here. It suggests a judgment beyond death for those who live and die without repentance in that sin or any other. Burning bones, by itself, is a small thing, but if it points to the torment of the soul in a worse fire (Luke 16:24), then it is a fearful matter.

This, as Josiah’s own act, seems to have come from a very sudden decision. He would not have done it unless he had happened to turn and notice the tombs. Yet this had been foretold more than 350 years earlier, when Jeroboam, king of Israel, first built this altar (1 Kings 13:2). God always foresees, and has sometimes clearly foretold, what still seems to us most uncertain.

The king’s heart is in the Lord’s hand, and Josiah’s heart was there too. The Lord turned it, even before Josiah himself fully realized what was happening (Song of Solomon 6:12). No work of God will fail.

The altar was then destroyed. Josiah broke down the altar and all its parts (2 Kings 23:15). He burned what could be burned, and because an idol is nothing in itself, he went as far as possible to erase it. He crushed it into fine powder and scattered it like dust before the wind.

He also destroyed all the houses of the high places, all those synagogues of Satan in the cities of Samaria (2 Kings 23:19). The kings of Israel had built them, and God raised up this king of Judah to pull them down, for the honor of David’s ancient royal house, from which the ten tribes had broken away. He justly made the priests offer sacrifice on their own altars (2 Kings 23:20).

Josiah also carefully preserved the tomb of the man of God who had come from Judah to announce these things. Now a king who came from Judah was carrying out what that prophet had spoken. This was the faithful prophet who had spoken against the altar at Bethel, even though he was later killed by a lion for disobeying the word of the Lord. Still, to show that God’s anger against him ended with his death, God arranged it so that when all the graves around him were disturbed, his own tomb was left untouched (2 Kings 23:17, 2 Kings 23:18). No one moved his bones. He had entered into peace, so he should rest in his grave (Isaiah 57:2).

The old lying prophet, who seems to have wanted to be buried as near him as possible, likely knew what he was doing. His own bones, mixed with those of the good prophet, were preserved for that man’s sake. See (Numbers 23:10).

We are also told here about the solemn Passover Josiah and his people kept after all this. Once they had cleared the land of the old leaven, they turned to keeping the feast. When Jehu destroyed Baal worship, he still did not take care to walk in God’s commands and laws. But Josiah understood that we must learn to do right, not just stop doing wrong. He also knew that the way to keep out corrupt customs is to keep God’s appointed worship in place (see (Leviticus 18:30)). So he commanded all the people to keep the Passover. It was not only a memorial of their rescue from Egypt, but also a sign that they belonged to the Lord who brought them out and had fellowship with him.

He found this written in the book of the law, here called the book of the covenant. Even though God may deal with us by a direct command, his grace also condescends to covenant terms, that is, he binds his people to himself in a gracious agreement. So Josiah observed it.

We do not have as full an account of this Passover as we do of Hezekiah’s in (2 Chronicles 30). But in general we are told that no Passover like it had been kept in any earlier reign, not even since the days of the judges (2 Kings 23:22). That also suggests that, although the book of Judges gives a sad picture of Israel in that time, there were still some golden days then.

This Passover seems to have been remarkable for the large number of worshipers, their devotion, their sacrifices and offerings, and their careful keeping of the feast laws. It was not like Hezekiah’s Passover, when many who took part had not been purified according to the cleansing rules of the sanctuary, and the Levites, that is, the tribe set apart for temple service, were allowed to do the priests’ work.

We have reason to think that religion flourished for the rest of Josiah’s reign, and that the Lord’s feasts were carefully kept. But in this Passover, the joy was especially deep. They had just renewed the covenant, begun reforming the land, and rediscovered in the law the divine origin of an ordinance that had long been neglected or carelessly observed. All this filled them with great holy joy. God also rewarded their zeal in destroying idolatry with unusual signs of his presence and favor. All these things together made it a very special Passover.