When the festival and the celebration were over, the spirit thereof did not die with the departure of the people from Jerusalem to their homes in all parts of the country. Josiah went to work in earnest to accomplish his share of the keeping of the new covenant. He dismissed every idolatrous priest in the land and destroyed every vestige of their worship in Jerusalem, in every town and village and on every high place.
Up in Israel he carried on this work under his personal direction, and at Bethel, with his own hands, he destroyed the altar erected by Jereboam I. at the time of the division of the kingdom.
It was while in northern Israel, where he ordered the dead bones of the idolatrous priests to be burned upon the very altars at which they worshiped, that Josiah espied two sepulchers, of a type that he had not met before. They were so unlike the sepulchers of the idolators that he marked them especially and talked about them. One of the monuments, he was told, "is the sepulcher of the Man of God who came from Judah and proclaimed these things that thou hast done against the altar at Bethel;" and when he found that the other ancient monument was the last bed on earth of "the Prophet that came out of Samaria," he ordered that neither one should be touched. The memory of those early prophets was sacred and hallowed to the king.
Within a few years, all this work undertaken by Josiah was accomplished. Genuine love of God and genuine living in accordance with His commandments seemed to have been restored everywhere among the people. In addition, the political changes that were taking place in Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt, left Josiah entirely at peace to work out the destiny of his own people and kingdom.
In the year 608, however, in the thirty-ninth year of Josiah's reign, he entered upon a political campaign that proved to be the first and greatest mistake of his life and resulted not alone in his death, but in a great religious and moral decline that eventually led to the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah.
CHAPTER VII.
To the Fore Again.
The mystery of the Scythian invasion of Asia has not yet been clearly solved. The results of that invasion, however, shook thrones and shattered kingdoms and changed the face of the then known civilized world.
Assyria was the greatest sufferer, for the Scythian ravages had so weakened the great empire that it never recovered. Incidentally, this same cause reawakened the spirit of conquest in the Medes, led to the re-establishment of the independent Babylonian kingdom and brought about, indirectly and unnecessarily, the death of the good King Josiah.
During the last years of Ashurbanipal's long and brilliant reign over Assyria, the Medes, under their king, Phraortes, turned the tables on Assyria and invaded the empire. Ashurbanipal's army defeated the ambitious Mede and drove him back into his own territory. But his son and successor, Cyaxerxes, having made certain changes in the organization of the Median army, again invaded Assyria and actually besieged Nineveh.