The Purge, and Megiddo

The twenty-third chapter of Second Kings lists what followed as a sequence of demolitions, and its detail is the reason historians treat it as drawn from a real record whatever they make of the framing. Vessels made for Baal, for Asherah and for the host of heaven were brought out of the temple and burned in the fields of the Kidron. The idolatrous priests who had burned incense at the high places were deposed. The houses of the cult prostitutes within the temple precinct were pulled down. Topheth in the valley of the son of Hinnom was defiled so that no one could pass a son or daughter through the fire to Molech. The horses dedicated to the sun at the entrance of the house were removed and their chariots burned. Then the king went north, outside his own kingdom, and broke down the altar at Bethel that Jeroboam had made.

The reform ends with a Passover, kept in Jerusalem in the eighteenth year, of which the text says that no such Passover had been kept from the days of the judges. What that means practically is that a festival previously observed in households and at local shrines became a national pilgrimage to one sanctuary, which is what centralization looks like from the inside.

Josiah died at Megiddo in 609 BCE, confronting Pharaoh Necho II, who was marching north to support the remnant of Assyria against Babylon. Kings says only that Necho slew him when he saw him; Chronicles gives a fuller and different account in which Josiah disguises himself and is shot by archers. Within twenty-three years Jerusalem and the temple he had purified were destroyed by Babylon, and the theological problem of why the most obedient king in the record was killed young and his reform undone runs through the later prophetic literature.