Josiah and His Reforms

I find that my issue with blogging is that you always have to find something to say that is going to be both relevant and interesting. I’m not all too sure where to begin with such things, since what is interesting to me is rarely interesting to many other people. Ron basically told me last night that I’m “special” because my interests are not the same as others’.

For instance, I can stay up all night talking with people online or over the phone about the development of the Hebrew Bible and the reign of Josiah. It’s something that interests me to no end. I get really excited by what I read in the records of the kings of Judah when it comes to what Josiah did and how he enacted the reforms of his time – not that I think that it’s particularly good how he forced the people to observe his form of monotheism, but I think it’s extremely important to understand just what was happening at that time, since it can drastically change how we view the entirety of Israelite/Jewish history.

Relevant information from the Bible regarding Josiah: 1 Kings 13:2; 2 Kings 21:23-23:30; 2 Chronicles 33:25-35:27.

The Bible is really the only information that we have about Josiah and the reforms that he undertook with regard to Judaism as he found it in his time. We have a lot of information presented in these few chapters that includes:

• Information about the state of Judaism as it was being practiced at that time. Specifically, the people worshiped many different gods, and even the Jerusalem temple included devotions to various deities in addition to Yahweh. Surprisingly, even kdeshim (קְדֵשִׁים “shrine prostitutes”) were present in the temple. We become aware from this story that even the Passover was not observed among the people until the time of Josiah.
• Details of the various campaigns that Josiah undertook to rid the people of their previous beliefs and to force them to worship Yahweh only, not just as a better choice than other forms or worship (practical monolatry, as they had observed until then) but as the only valid form of worship (that Yahweh alone was a deity at all, and more specifically the only deity).
• The story of the “discovery” of the Torah scroll in the temple. This is probably a cover-up for the actual composition of the Torah at the time, which was surely undertaken under the coalition of Josiah, Shafan (the scribe) and other religious leaders of the time as part of the centralization of worship in Jerusalem (political) and in an attempt to give the people a unified backstory so that they would feel like part of the whole and be less likely to defect.

I’ve become convinced that Josiah represents the turning point in the development of Jewish religion. It’s probably the time at which the Torah was pieced together and completed as a composition. Laws were written into the Torah to prohibit worship in places other than in Jerusalem, to outlaw shrine prostitution (a major part of the religious rites in worship of other deities in the area), to create an ethos and standard of behavior that was acceptable for the people, etc. The Torah was pieced together with stories from different perspectives, probably stories that had been passed down from generation to generation, and these were worked into an overall narrative that was full of threats from Yahweh for those who would dare disobey. Capital punishment was worked in throughout the Levitical law code in order to justify the types of murders that Josiah was carrying out as a result of his religious zeal.

Myths about the people having come from slavery and having been redeemed by the hand of Yahweh were created in order to (1) provide a background for cultural unity among the Judahite people and (2) justify the demands of Yahweh on their lifestyle and daily restrictions. After all, if Yahweh redeemed the people from slavery and saved their lives, then they rightly owed him their allegiance and obedience – and by extension, they owed their obedience to the Davidic king, the representative of Yahweh upon the throne of Judah.

This is surely where the Torah came from, and all of the legal portions of the Torah should be read with Josiah in sight, understanding what significance the various restrictions – from dietary legalities to sexual mores – played in the time of Josiah, not in the time of the Exodus. In this way, all of the “at that time” statements of the Torah make much better sense. It was written much later than traditional religious thinkers would have us believe. The Torah was composed under the direction of Josiah with political interest and religious compulsion at the heart of the drive to create the holy book.

This is something that transformed how I look both at religion and at life. I hope it’s also something that others find interesting, at least to a degree.