"The king ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the Lord all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron Valley and took the ashes to Bethel. He did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem---those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations and to all the starry hosts." (2 Kings 23:4-5) Many scholars believe that the "idolatrous priests" mentioned here were an order of priests set up and supported by the kings of Judah who had been idolaters. These priests have been making offerings to pagan gods at various hilltop altars throughout the land. Something similar happened in the northern kingdom of Israel when King Jeroboam I appointed priests who were not of the tribe of Levi to serve at the sinful religious sites he set up at Dan and at Bethel.
"He took the Asherah pole from the temple of the Lord to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem and burned it there. He ground it to powder and scattered the dust over the graves of the common people." (2 Kings 23:6) Josiah's grandfather Manasseh had erected an Asherah pole in the temple but later, after his conversion, he removed it. The author of 2 Chronicles stated that he cast it and his other idolatrous images out of the city. (2 Chronicles 33:15) The Bible does not say that Manasseh destroyed the Asherah pole and I can only assume that his son, King Amon, either brought the same Asherah pole back to the temple or fashioned his own Asherah pole for the temple. It must still have been there when Josiah ascended to the throne at the age of eight. It must still have been at the temple until Josiah's eighteenth year as king when the reforms in our text are taking place.
Why does he scatter the ashes of the Asherah pole on the graves of the common people? From my background study it does not appear as if Josiah intended any disrespect to the people buried there but that he intended to desecrate the ashes of the idolatrous images. Contact with a dead body and contact with anything that had touched a dead body rendered a person ceremonially unclean, as we learned earlier in the Old Testament when we studied the laws the Lord gave to the people through Moses. Certain rituals had to take place in order to restore ceremonial cleanliness of a person who had handled a dead body, but these rituals (removing the clothes that had been worn while handling the body, bathing, putting on clean clothes, waiting until sundown to take part in social or religious activities) could not be performed with ashes. It may be that many other cultures (even though they were pagan cultures) believed that anything that came in contact with a dead body was rendered unclean. So what Josiah is doing is making the ashes of the Asherah pole unusable for any religious purposes by scattering them across graves. If he had simply burned the pole and dumped the ashes in a pile somewhere outside the city, it's likely that some of the adherents of the cult of Asherah would have come and scooped up portions of the ashes so they could take them home and continue carrying out their sinful religious practices in private. Now the ashes have been desecrated and they cannot do this.
Some pagan religions used what were called "shrine prostitutes" and next we find Josiah ordering the destruction of the quarters where this type of thing was taking place in Jerusalem. In some cultures the shrine prostitutes were all females but other cultures used both female and male prostitutes. "He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes that were in the temple of the Lord, the quarters where women did weaving for Asherah." (2 Kings 23:7) It is believed that these women of the cult of Asherah were weaving the tent coverings for the booths in which the sexual rituals were taking place. So although these women may or may not have taken place in the immoral physical acts, they were contributing to immorality by giving it their approval in the form of weaving the tapestries for the curtains behind which those physical acts took place. It's difficult for us to understand why, during the reign of Josiah, an area of the temple complex was being used for what basically amounts to a pagan brothel. Did he not understand what was actually going on behind those curtains? Did he not know, until he heard the words of the Book of the Law, how much the Lord hated these practices and how sinful it was to mix idolatrous rituals with the true worship of the Lord?
I will tell you my own personal theory; whether or not it is correct I cannot say. The Bible told us that Josiah set his heart on the Lord from a very young age, but it does not say that he received correct Scriptural instruction during his first eighteen years as king. I think he thought a lot about the Lord and talked to the Lord and tried to do what seemed best. But I think the same things could be said of him that the Apostle Paul said about many of the Israelites of his day: "I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness." (Romans 10:2-3) I believe that from a very young age King Josiah had a zeal for the Lord. But his zeal wasn't based on very much knowledge of the Lord and that was mostly the fault of his predecessors who brought so much sin into the land that the priests had had to hide the Book of the Law, likely to keep it from being desecrated or destroyed.
Josiah ascended to the throne right after two of the most wicked kings of Judah had done a lot of spiritual damage to the nation. He was born into an era where there were still many hilltop altars dotting the land and although a large number of these were not idolatrous in the strictest sense of the word, they were locations where people were worshiping the Lord as each of them saw fit---a customized religion, if you will, that suited each of their personal beliefs and personal preferences. These people were seeking to establish their own righteousness, to quote the Apostle Paul, and they had gone astray to varying degrees. As a result, Josiah himself has been developing his relationship with the Lord without the benefit of the Book of the Law until now. He has been feeling his way along, one step at a time, in a "dark ages" type of era. Without the book he could not know as much about the Lord as he needed and wanted to know. His heart was in the right place but without the law he didn't have a clear idea about how the Lord felt about various situations. Josiah may have already felt quite uncomfortable with a lot of the things going on at the temple and in the nation but without the Book of the Law to back him up, he may have found himself in a difficult position to defend his reasons for ordering the removal of all these things. I am sure he would have been met with a great deal of resistance from some of the people in high positions who were happy with the status quo and who wanted things to remain as they were. But with the Book of the Law in hand---the book by which their theocratic government was founded in the first place---any opponents of Josiah's reforms don't have a firm foundation upon which to stand against him.
Join us tomorrow as we continue studying the widespread reforms Josiah is able to make now that he knows the Lord and the Lord's law are on his side.
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