a past that was largely fictitious but more attractive than the confusions of the present.
As part of this nostalgic return to the past, Josiah had decided to restore the Temple of Solomon, which, after three hundred years, must have been in serious need of repair. While the work was in progress, the chief priest Hilkiah discovered a scroll which may have been part of the text that we know as the Book of Deuteronomy. When the scroll was read to Josiah, the young king was shocked to discover that God’s favor did not rest on Israel unconditionally as a result of his eternal election of the House of David; it was wholly dependent, rather, upon the observance of the Mosaic Law.38 It was no longer sufficient to rely on Yahweh’s presence in his Temple on Mount Zion. Josiah’s extreme reaction to this new theology shows that the Law had not been central to the religious life of Judah. The cult and the rule of the king, Yahweh’s Messiah, had been the foundation of Judah’s polity hitherto: now the Torah, the Law of Moses, should become the law of the land.
Accordingly, Josiah began his reform, and, like all such reformations, it was an attempt to re-create the past. First, all the elders of Judah were summoned to renew the ancient covenant in the Temple. The people vowed to cast away alien gods and commit themselves to Yahweh alone. Next the cults had to be purged, and D’s account shows the ubiquity of these “pagan” cults in Jerusalem. All the cult objects in the worship of Baal, Asherah, and the astral deities were carried out of the city and burned in the Kidron Valley. The Temple was also cleared of the matzevot and the houses of sacred prostitutes dedicated to Asherah in the courtyard:
He desecrated the furnace in the Valley of Hinnom so that no one could make his son or daughter pass through the fire in honor of Moloch. He did away with the houses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun at the entrance to the Temple of Yahweh.… The altars on the roof that the Kings of Judah had built, with those that Manasseh had built in the two courts of the Temple of Yahweh, the King pulled down and broke them to pieces on the spot.… The King desecrated the bamoth facing Jerusalem to the south. of the Mount of Olives, which Solomon, King of Israel, had built for Astarte, the Sidonian abomination, for Chemosh, the Moabite abomination, and for Milcom, the Ammonite abomination. He also smashed the sacred pillars, cut down the sacred poles, and covered the places where they had stood with human bones.39
There is a worrying violence in this catalogue of destruction. It marked the start of Israel’s abhorrence of “idolatry,” which seems to fill prophets, sages, and psalmists with a furious and violent disgust. Perhaps this is because Israelites felt the attraction of these old religious symbols so strongly that they could not simply set them peaceably to one side, as the Buddha would be able to do when he reformed the old paganism of India. Yet “idolatry” is part of the religious quest, because the sacred never manifests itself to humanity directly but always through something other: in myths, objects, buildings, people, or human ideas and doctrines. All such symbols of the divine are bound to be inadequate, because they are pointing to a reality that is ineffable and greater than human beings can conceive. But the history of religion shows that when a people’s circumstances change, the old hierophanies cease to work for them. They no longer reveal the divine. Indeed, they can become obstacles to religious experience. It is also possible that people can mistake the symbol—the stone, the tree, or the doctrine—for the sacred reality itself.
There was clearly such a religious transition in Judah at the time of Josiah. For three hundred years, the people of Jerusalem had found spiritual sustenance in the other religious symbols of Canaan, but now they seemed so flawed that they appeared evil. Instead of looking through the matzevot to the mysterious reality they symbolized, Josiah and Hilkiah could see only an obscenity. There was a strain that would also become apparent in the later monotheistic traditions. This denial expressed itself with particular ferocity in the northern territories, the lands that had once been the Kingdom of Israel. Assyria was now in decline and no longer in control of its province of Samerina. Josiah’s campaign there was probably part of a reconquista, another attempt to restore the United Kingdom of David. But here his reformation became savage and brutal. Josiah demolished the ancient altar at Bethel, which the “apostate” Jeroboam had made the royal shrine of Israel. In revenge, Josiah broke up its stones and beat them to powder. Then he desecrated the bamah by digging up corpses in a nearby cemetery and burning the bones on the site of the altar. He repeated this act in all the old cultic places of Israel and murdered their priests, burning their bones too upon their own altars. This cruelty and fanatical intolerance is a far cry from the courtesy shown by Abraham to other religious traditions. There is also no sign here of that absolute respect for the sacred rights of others, which the prophets had insisted was the litmus test of true religiosity. This is the spirit that the Deuteronomist historians would praise in Joshua, when he had—so they claimed—ruthlessly slaughtered the Israelites’ predecessors in Canaan in the name of his god. Sadly, this spirit would henceforth become a part of the spiritual climate of Jerusalem.
For Josiah’s reform was also a campaign for Zion. He was attempting to implement the Deuteronomic ideal by making Jerusalem the one and only shrine of Yahweh in the whole of Israel and Judah. All other holy places were to be destroyed and desecrated to preserve this central sanctity. Josiah’s particular vehemence at Bethel was inspired partly by the fact that this royal temple had dared to challenge Jerusalem. Northern priests were killed, but the priests of the country shrines of Judah were simply taken from their destroyed bamoth and moved to Jerusalem, where they took their places in the lower echelons of the Zion priesthood. The exaltation of Jerusalem had inspired destruction, death, desecration, and dispossession. Where the prophets had preached mercy and compassion as an essential concomitant to the cult, Josiah’s reform saw the honor and integrity of the holy city as paramount.
The reform did not last, even though the spirit that it had unleashed would remain. In 609, Josiah made a bid for total political independence, when he attacked Pharaoh Necho II, who was trying to establish an Egyptian presence in the country. The Judaean and Egyptian armies fought at Megiddo, and Josiah was killed at the first encounter. Necho immediately tightened his grip on Judah by deposing Josiah’s son Jehoahaz, the choice of the Judaean aristocracy, in favor of his brother Jehoiakim. But the Egyptians did not retain control of Jerusalem. In 605, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, defeated Assyria and Egypt, and Babylon became the greatest power in the Near East. Like the other states in the area, Judah became a vassal of Babylon, and at first it seemed that it could prosper under this new empire. Jehoiakim was confident enough to build himself a splendid palace in the Mishneh suburb. Yet it was not long before a fatal chauvinism returned to Jerusalem. The king switched allegiance to Egypt, which was attempting a comeback, and thus defied the might of Babylon. Prophets assured the people in the old way that Yahweh’s presence on Zion would protect Jerusalem against Nebuchadnezzar, as it had done against Sennacherib. The opposition to this suicidal tendency was led by Jeremiah, the son of Josiah’s colleague Hilkiah. He warned the people that, on the contrary, Yahweh would destroy Jerusalem as he had once destroyed Shiloh, and for this blasphemy he faced the death penalty. Jeremiah was acquitted but still continued to wander through the streets of Jerusalem warning of the impending catastrophe. They were treating Zion as a fetish, he proclaimed, when they repetitively chanted the slogan “This is the Temple of Yahweh!” like a magic spell.40 But Yahweh would protect them only if they turned away from alien gods and observed the laws of compassion, treating one another fairly and refusing to exploit the stranger, the orphan, and the widow.
Before Nebuchadnezzar arrived to punish his contumacious vassal, Jehoiakim died and was replaced by his son Jehoiachin. Jerusalem was besieged almost immediately by the Babylonian army and three months later capitulated in 597 BCE. Since the city had surrendered, there were no mass executions and the city was not destroyed. Nebuchadnezzar contented himself with plundering the Temple and deporting the Judaean leadership to Babylon. The Deuteronomist tells us that only the poorest people were left behind. The king and his bureaucracy were taken, together with ten thousand members of the aristocracy and the military and all blacksmiths and metalworkers.41 These were standard procedures in ancient empires to prevent further rebellion