Josiah the Last Good King and Solomon's Fallen Throne

The Son of a Wicked Father

Amon, king of Judah, was bad enough that the sages said his sins should have cost him his share in the world to come. He had done the full inventory of wickedness: idol worship, corruption, the abandonment of every reform his grandfather Hezekiah had made. He reigned for two years and was assassinated by his own servants. He was twenty-four years old when he died.

His son Josiah was eight years old when they put the crown on his head. The kingdom Amon had left was a ruin of everything it was supposed to be. The Temple was in disrepair. Idols dotted the high places. The Torah scroll, the actual scroll of the law, had been lost somewhere in the Temple's deterioration, forgotten so thoroughly that when it was rediscovered during Josiah's reign it was read to the king like a new document he had never heard before.

The tradition says that Amon's portion in the world to come was granted to him because his son repented. The good child atoned for the bad father. Josiah's entire reign, in this reading, was the payment of a debt his father had accumulated.

A King Who Actually Reformed

Josiah was not a reformer who issued proclamations and expected things to change. He sent his most trusted, pious followers into every house in the kingdom to inspect whether idols were being hidden behind doors and inside walls. He reinstituted the Passover observance on a scale that the biblical text says had not been seen since the time of Samuel. He tore down the altars that his grandfather Manasseh had built and his father had maintained. He burned the bones of the priests of Baal on their own altars.

The tradition adds the detail that gave his reign a dimension no other king's had matched since Solomon: the prophet Jeremiah went north and brought back the ten exiled tribes. For the first time in three hundred years, since the split after Solomon's death, a king ruled over both Judah and Israel. The northern and southern kingdoms were reunited under the last righteous king. Solomon's throne, fallen since the division of the kingdom three centuries before, had something approaching restoration in the child who had inherited its ruins.

The Prophetess and the Verdict

When the Torah scroll was found and read to Josiah, he tore his garments and wept. The curses were not abstract. He recognized them as descriptions of what had already happened and what was still coming. He sent to the prophetess Huldah to ask what could be done.

Josiah specifically chose Huldah over Jeremiah. The Talmud's explanation was that he believed women were more easily moved to compassion and might intercede with greater force. Huldah's answer was compassionate and devastating: the destruction was coming. Everything the scroll threatened would arrive. But not in Josiah's lifetime. Because your heart was tender and you wept before me, you will be gathered to your ancestors in peace. Your eyes will not see the disaster.

Josiah was warned. He knew what was coming. He spent the rest of his reign as a man who had been told he would die before the catastrophe but could not stop working to delay it.

The Needless Battle

The end was not what anyone expected. Pharaoh Necho of Egypt was marching north through Judah to fight against Babylon. He had no quarrel with Josiah. He sent messengers to say so: I am not coming against you today. I am fighting against another kingdom. God told me to hasten. Do not interfere, or God will destroy you.

Josiah went out to fight him anyway. The tradition struggles with this. One account says Josiah could not allow a foreign army to march through his territory, that national sovereignty demanded resistance. Another says he had misread the political situation. Another says he was pursuing the prophecy toward its end, unwilling to be passive while history happened around him. Whatever the reason, he went out to the valley of Megiddo and the archers shot him and he said to his servants: take me away, for I am badly wounded.

He died in Jerusalem at thirty-nine. The mourning lasted longer and ran deeper than for any king before or after him. Jeremiah composed laments. The singers and singers-women have spoken of Josiah in their laments to this day. Every year at the appointed time. The tradition says his death was a tragedy that did not need to happen, which made it worse than necessary suffering. It was the loss of the last man who could have slowed the disaster down.