The regulations in regard to divine worship had not as yet been drawn up in that spirit of hair-splitting minuteness which, later on, became a characteristic of Hebrew legislation. Only three great festivals are mentioned in the Book of the Law. The Passover was celebrated in the month of Abîb, when the grain is in the ear, and had already come to be regarded as commemorative of the Exodus; but the other two, the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles, were merely associated with the agricultural seasons, and took place, the former seven weeks after the beginning of the harvest, the latter after the last of the crops had been housed.* The claim of the priest to a share in the victim and in the offerings made on various occasions is maintained, and the lawgiver allows him to draw a similar benefit from the annual and triennial tithes which he imposes on corn and wine and on the firstborn of cattle, the produce of this tithe being devoted to a sort of family festival celebrated in the Holy Place.** The priest was thus placed on the same footing as the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, and his influence was but little greater than it had been in the early days of the monarchy. It was to the prophet and not to the priest that the duty belonged of directing the public conscience in all those cases for which the law had made no provision. “I will put My words into his mouth (said Jahveh), and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass that whosoever will not hearken unto My words which he shall speak in My name, I will require it of him. But the prophet which shall speak a word presumptuously in My name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?—when a prophet speaketh in the name of Jahveh, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which Jahveh hath not spoken: the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously; thou shalt not be afraid of him.”
* Deut. xvi. 1-17.
** Deut. xviii. 1-8; as to the share in the triennial tithe,
cf. Deut. xiv. 28, 29; xxvi. 12, 13.
When the reading of the law had ended, Josiah implored the people to make a covenant with Jahveh; that is to say, “to walk after Jahveh, and to keep His commandments, and His testimonies, and His statutes, with all their hearts and all their souls, to confirm the words of this covenant that were written in this book.” The final words, which lingered in every ear, contained imprecations of even more terrible and gloomy import than those with which the prophets had been wont to threaten Judah. “If thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of Jahveh thy God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command thee this day; then all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee. Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy kneading-trough. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, the increase of thy kine, and the young of thy flock.... Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her; thou shalt build an house, and shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not use the fruit thereof. Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof.... Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people; and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day: and there shall be naught in the power of thine hand.... Jahveh shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand; a nation of fierce countenance, which shalt not regard the person of the old, nor show favour to the young.” This enemy was to burn and destroy everything: “and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, throughout all thy land, which Jahveh thy God hath given thee. And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters... in the straitness wherewith thine enemies shall straiten thee.” Those who escape must depart into captivity, and there endure for many a long year the tortures of direst slavery; “thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have none assurance of thy life: in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.” *
* Deut. xxviii. The two sets of imprecations (xxvii.,
xxviii.) which terminate the actual work are both of later
redaction, but the original MS. undoubtedly ended with some
analogous formula. I have quoted above the most
characteristic parts of the twenty-eighth chapter.
The assembly took the oath required of them, and the king at once displayed the utmost zeal in exacting literal performance of the ordinances contained in the Book of the Law. His first step was to purify the temple: Hilkiah and his priests overthrew all the idols contained in it, and all the objects that had been fashioned in honour of strange gods—the Baals, the Asherim, and all the Host of Heaven—and, carrying them out of Jerusalem into the valley of the Kidron, cast them into the flames, and scattered the ashes upon the place where all the filth of the city was cast out. The altars and the houses of the Sodomites which defiled the temple courts were demolished, the chariots of the sun broken in pieces, and the horses of the god sent to the stables of the king’s chamberlain;* the sanctuaries and high places which had been set up at the gates of the city, in the public places, and along the walls were razed to the ground, and the Tophet, where the people made their children pass through the fire, was transformed into a common sewer.
* [The Hebrew text admits of this meaning, which is,
however, not clear in the English A.V.—Tr.]
The provincial sanctuaries shared the fate of those of the capital; in a short time, from Geba to Beersheba, there remained not one of those “high places,” at which the ancestors of the nation and their rulers had offered prayers for generations past. The wave of reform passed even across the frontier and was borne into the Assyrian province of Samaria; the temple and image which Jeroboam had set up at Bethel were reduced to ashes, and human bones were burnt upon the altar to desecrate it beyond possibility of purification.*
* 2 Kings xxiii. 3-20, 24-27, where several glosses and
interpolations are easily recognisable, such as the episode
at Bethel (v. 15-20), the authenticity of which is otherwise
incontestable. The account in 2 Chron. xxxiv. is a defaced
reproduction of that of 2 Kings, and it places the reform,
in part at least, before the discovery of the new law.
The governor offered no objection to these acts; he regarded them, in the first place, as the private affairs of the subjects of the empire, with which he had no need to interfere, so long as the outburst of religious feeling did not tend towards a revolt: we know, moreover, that Josiah, guided on this point by the prophets, would have believed that he was opposing the divine will had he sought to free himself from the Assyrian yoke by ordinary political methods; besides this, in 621, under Assur-etililâni, five years after the Scythian invasion, the prefect of Samaria had possibly not sufficient troops at his disposal to oppose the encroachments of the vassal princes. It was an affair of merely a few months. In the following year, when the work of destruction was over, Josiah commanded that the Passover should be kept in the manner prescribed in the new book; crowds flocked into Jerusalem, from Israel as well as from Judah, and the festival made a deep impression on the minds of the people. Centuries afterwards the Passover of King Josiah was still remembered: “There was not kept such a Passover from the days of the Judges... nor in all the days of the Kings of Israel, nor of the Kings of Judah.” *
1 2 Kings xxiii. 21-23; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 1-19. The text of
the Soptuagint appears to imply that it was the first
Passover celebrated in Jerusalem. It also gives in chap.
xxii. 3, after the mention of the eighteenth year, a date of
the seventh or eighth month, which is not usually accepted,
as it is in contradiction with what is affirmed in chap,
xxiii. 21-23, viz. that the Passover celebrated at Jerusalem
was in the same year as the reform, in the eighteenth year.
It is to do away with the contradiction between these two
passages that the Hebrew text has suppressed the mention of
the month. I think, however, it ought to be considered
authentic and be retained, if we are allowed to place the
celebration of the Passover in what would be one year after.
To do this it would not be needful to correct the regnal
date in the text: admitting that the reform took place in
621, the Passover of 620 would still quite well have taken
place in the eighteenth year of Josiah, that being dependent
on the time of year at which the king had ascended the
throne.