2 Kings 23: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

King Josiah gathers the elders and the people, goes up to the temple, has the book of the covenant read aloud there, and pledges to keep its words, and the people join him. He then strips the temple and the land of altars, poles, images, and priests devoted to other gods, going as far north as Bethel and the towns of Samaria, and he holds a Passover unlike any since the days of the judges. The text says the LORD's anger against Judah, stirred up by what Manasseh had done, still did not turn away. Josiah is killed at Megiddo by Pharaoh Neco, the people of the land make his son Jehoahaz king, and after three months Pharaoh Neco removes him and puts Jehoiakim on the throne, who taxes the land to pay Egypt.

Claim by Claim

1. 23:1
   • The king sent word.
   • All the elders of Judah and Jerusalem were gathered to him.
2. 23:2
   • The king went up to the house of the LORD.
   • All the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem went with him.
   • The priests went with him.
   • The prophets went with him.
   • All the people, from the least to the greatest, went with him.
   • He read aloud in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant.
   • The book of the covenant had been found in the house of the LORD.
3. 23:3
   • The king stood by the pillar.
   • The king made a covenant before the LORD.
   • The covenant was to walk after the LORD.
   • The covenant was to keep his commandments, his testimonies, and his statutes.
   • The covenant was to be kept with all the heart and all the soul.
   • The covenant was to carry out the words of the covenant written in that book.
   • All the people took their stand in the covenant.
4. 23:4
   • The king gave a command to Hilkiah the high priest, to the priests of the second rank, and to the keepers of the threshold.
   • He commanded them to bring out of the temple of the LORD all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven.
   • He burned those vessels outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron.
   • He carried their ashes to Bethel.
5. 23:5
   • He abolished the idolatrous priests.
   • The kings of Judah had appointed those priests.
   • Those priests burned incense at the high places in the cities of Judah and in the places around Jerusalem.
   • He also abolished those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, to the constellations, and to all the host of heaven.
6. 23:6
   • He brought the Asherah out of the house of the LORD.
   • He brought it outside Jerusalem to the brook Kidron.
   • He burned it at the brook Kidron.
   • He ground it to dust.
   • He threw its dust on the graves of the common people.
7. 23:7
   • He tore down the houses of the male cult prostitutes that were in the house of the LORD.
   • In those houses the women wove coverings for Asherah.
8. 23:8
   • He brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah.
   • He defiled the high places where those priests had burned incense, from Geba to Beersheba.
   • He tore down the high places of the gates at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city.
   • Those high places were on a man's left at the city gate.
9. 23:9
   • The priests of the high places did not go up to the altar of the LORD in Jerusalem.
   • They ate unleavened bread among their brethren.
10. 23:10
    • He defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom.
    • He did this so that no man could make his son or his daughter pass through the fire to Molech.
11. 23:11
    • He removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun.
    • The horses were at the entrance of the house of the LORD, by the chamber of Nathan-melech the officer.
    • That chamber was in the precincts.
    • He burned the chariots of the sun with fire.
12. 23:12
    • The altars on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz had been made by the kings of Judah.
    • Manasseh had made altars in the two courts of the house of the LORD.
    • The king broke down those altars.
    • What the king then did from that place is stated ambiguously: either he hurried away from there or he crushed the altars there.
    • He threw their dust into the brook Kidron.
13. 23:13
    • There were high places facing Jerusalem, to the right of the Mount of Corruption.
    • Solomon king of Israel had built them for Ashtoreth the detestable thing of the Sidonians.
    • Solomon had built them for Chemosh the detestable thing of Moab.
    • Solomon had built them for Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.
    • The king defiled those high places.
14. 23:14
    • He smashed the sacred pillars.
    • He cut down the Asherah poles.
    • He filled their places with human bones.
15. 23:15
    • There was an altar at Bethel, the high place that Jeroboam son of Nebat had made.
    • Jeroboam son of Nebat caused Israel to sin.
    • He broke down that altar and the high place.
    • He burned the high place.
    • He ground it to dust.
    • He burned the Asherah.
16. 23:16
    • Josiah turned and saw the tombs that were there on the mountain.
    • He sent and took the bones out of the tombs.
    • He burned the bones on the altar.
    • He defiled the altar by this.
    • This was according to the word of the LORD that the man of God had proclaimed.
    • The man of God had proclaimed these things.
17. 23:17
    • He asked what the monument was that he saw.
    • The men of the city said it was the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah.
    • They said that man had proclaimed these things that Josiah had done against the altar of Bethel.
18. 23:18
    • He said to let him alone.
    • He said that no one should move his bones.
    • They left his bones undisturbed.
    • They also left undisturbed the bones of the prophet who came from Samaria.
19. 23:19
    • There were houses of the high places in the cities of Samaria.
    • The kings of Israel had made them to provoke anger.
    • Josiah removed all of them.
    • He did to them according to all the acts he had done at Bethel.
20. 23:20
    • He slaughtered all the priests of the high places who were there, upon the altars.
    • He burned human bones upon the altars.
    • He returned to Jerusalem.
21. 23:21
    • The king commanded all the people.
    • He said to keep the passover to the LORD their God.
    • He said to keep it as written in this book of the covenant.
22. 23:22
    • No passover like this one had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel.
    • No such passover had been kept in all the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah.
23. 23:23
    • This passover was kept to the LORD in Jerusalem in the eighteenth year of king Josiah.
24. 23:24
    • Josiah purged the mediums.
    • Josiah purged the spiritists.
    • Josiah purged the household idols.
    • Josiah purged the idols.
    • Josiah purged all the detestable things seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem.
    • He did this in order to carry out the words of the law written in the book.
    • Hilkiah the priest had found that book in the house of the LORD.
25. 23:25
    • There was no king before him like him.
    • He turned to the LORD with all his heart, all his soul, and all his strength.
    • He did so according to all the law of Moses.
    • No king like him arose after him.
26. 23:26
    • The LORD did not turn from the fierceness of his great anger.
    • His anger burned against Judah.
    • The cause was all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him.
27. 23:27
    • The LORD said he would remove Judah also from his sight.
    • The LORD said he would do so as he had removed Israel.
    • The LORD said he would reject this city Jerusalem, which he had chosen.
    • The LORD said he would reject the house of which he had said his name would be there.
28. 23:28
    • The rest of the acts of Josiah and all that he did are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah.
29. 23:29
    • In his days Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt went up to the river Euphrates in relation to the king of Assyria.
    • Whether he went up against the king of Assyria or to support him is not made explicit.
    • King Josiah went out to meet him.
    • Neco killed Josiah at Megiddo when he saw him.
30. 23:30
    • His servants carried him dead in a chariot from Megiddo.
    • They brought him to Jerusalem.
    • They buried him in his own tomb.
    • The people of the land took Jehoahaz son of Josiah.
    • They anointed him.
    • They made him king in place of his father.
31. 23:31
    • Jehoahaz was twenty-three years old when he began to reign.
    • He reigned three months in Jerusalem.
    • His mother's name was Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.
32. 23:32
    • He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD.
    • He did so according to all that his fathers had done.
33. 23:33
    • Pharaoh Neco bound him at Riblah in the land of Hamath.
    • This was so that he would not reign in Jerusalem.
    • Pharaoh Neco imposed a fine on the land of a hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold.
34. 23:34
    • Pharaoh Neco made Eliakim son of Josiah king in place of Josiah his father.
    • He changed his name to Jehoiakim.
    • He took Jehoahaz away.
    • Jehoahaz came to Egypt.
    • Jehoahaz died there.
35. 23:35
    • Jehoiakim gave the silver and the gold to Pharaoh.
    • He assessed the land in order to give the silver at Pharaoh's command.
    • He exacted the silver and the gold from the people of the land, each according to his assessment.
    • He did this to give it to Pharaoh Neco.
36. 23:36
    • Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he began to reign.
    • He reigned eleven years in Jerusalem.
    • His mother's name was Zebudah, the daughter of Pedaiah of Rumah.
37. 23:37
    • He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD.
    • He did so according to all that his fathers had done.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

23:1

Judah was the southern part of Israel. Jerusalem was its main city. The leaders were the older men who helped run the towns.

23:2

The "book of the covenant" is the scroll discovered during temple repairs in the previous chapter (2 Kings 22). Its contents are not described here; the reforms that follow match the laws of Deuteronomy closely, and many readers ancient and modern have connected the two, though the text itself does not name it.

23:3

"Stood by a pillar" points to a fixed, recognized spot in the temple courtyard where the king took his place on formal occasions, the same position mentioned at Joash's coronation in 2 Kings 11:14. "Covenant" is a binding, formally sworn agreement, the kind of instrument used between a ruler and his people or between states. KJV's "commandments, testimonies and statutes" are three near-synonyms for categories of law, piled up for completeness rather than to mark three distinct kinds.

23:4

Baal was the Canaanite storm and fertility god, worshiped across the region. Asherah (KJV "the grove") was a goddess whose emblem was an upright wooden pole set beside an altar, KJV translators guessed "grove" from an old Greek rendering, but the object is a single carved pole, not a stand of trees. "The host of heaven" means the sun, moon, stars and planets worshiped as divine beings. The Kidron is the ravine running along the east side of Jerusalem, the city's dumping ground for refuse. Sending the ashes to Bethel is an insult: Bethel was the rival northern sanctuary, so the polluted remains were tipped onto the place that had rivaled the temple.

23:5

Burning incense was a standard act of worship at an altar, not merely perfuming a room. "High places" were open-air worship sites, usually on hilltops or raised platforms, with an altar and sacred objects; they had been ordinary places of worship for centuries, and the reform's point is that they are now forbidden in favor of Jerusalem alone. KJV's "planets" translates a word for the signs of the zodiac or constellations.

23:6

Grinding the pole to dust and scattering it over a public burial ground made it permanently unusable: contact with the dead rendered a thing ritually unclean, so the ashes could never be gathered up and treated as sacred again. "The graves of the children of the people" means the common cemetery where ordinary citizens were buried, as opposed to family tombs of the wealthy.

23:7

The Hebrew word behind KJV's "sodomites" is *qedeshim*, literally "consecrated men", men attached to a shrine. Whether their role was sexual, and in what way, is disputed among scholars; the older translations assumed male prostitution, but the text says only that they were shrine personnel housed at the temple.

23:8

Geba lay at Judah's northern edge and Beersheba at its southern edge; "from Geba to Beersheba" is a stock phrase meaning the whole kingdom, end to end. To "defile" a site was a deliberate act: making it ritually unclean so that no one could use it for worship again. City gates were public spaces with chambers and shrines built into the gatehouse structure.

23:9

Priests removed from the country shrines were barred from serving at the Jerusalem altar, but still drew a share of the priestly food allowance. The "unleavened bread" is the bread baked without yeast that formed part of the offerings and was eaten by priests as their portion.

23:10

Topheth was the installation in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem's southern wall, where children were burned as sacrifices. "Pass through the fire" is the standard phrase for this. Molech (or Molek) is either the name of a god or a term for the type of offering; both readings are argued. The valley's name, *ge-hinnom*, later became the word Gehenna.

23:11

Horses and chariots dedicated to the sun belong to a widespread Near Eastern practice of picturing the sun god driving across the sky in a chariot; the animals and vehicles were real, kept at the temple entrance as sacred property. KJV's "chamberlain" means a court official with charge of rooms or household duties, not a eunuch attendant in the later sense; "suburbs" here means an outer courtyard or precinct of the temple complex, not a residential district.

23:12

Flat roofs were used for worship of the stars, which is why altars stood there. Ahaz and Manasseh were earlier kings of Judah (2 Kings 16 and 21) who had installed these altars; Manasseh was Josiah's own grandfather.

23:13

The "mount of corruption" is the southern ridge of the Mount of Olives, east of the city. The name is a deliberate distortion: the Hebrew for "anointing" or "oil" has been altered by one sound into the word for "destruction" or "corruption." Ashtoreth, Chemosh and Milcom were the chief deities of Sidon (Phoenicia), Moab and Ammon, Israel's neighbors. Solomon had built these shrines for his foreign wives some three centuries earlier (1 Kings 11), so they had stood a very long time. "Abomination" is a term of disgust for a forbidden object of worship; it is a label the writer applies, not the neighbors' own word for their gods.

23:14

The "images" (KJV) are standing stones, upright slabs set up to mark a sacred site or represent a deity's presence. Scattering human bones over the sites made them permanently unclean and so unusable for worship.

23:15

Jeroboam son of Nebat was the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel after it split from Judah, roughly three centuries earlier. He set up sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan so his subjects would not travel to Jerusalem to worship; the books of Kings treat this as the founding sin of the north and repeat the phrase "who made Israel to sin" as a fixed tag for him.

23:16

The "man of God" is the unnamed prophet of 1 Kings 13, who had stood at this altar generations earlier and announced that a king named Josiah would one day burn human bones on it. "Polluted" means made ritually unclean and therefore unfit for use.

23:17

KJV's "title" means an inscribed marker or monument over a grave, the sense the English word had in 1611, not a rank or a heading.

23:18

The prophet from Samaria is the old prophet of Bethel in 1 Kings 13, who asked to be buried in the same tomb as the man of God from Judah. "Samaria" is used loosely here for the northern territory; the city of Samaria itself was not yet founded in that prophet's lifetime.

23:19

By Josiah's day Samaria was no longer an independent kingdom: Assyria had destroyed it about a century earlier and ruled it as a province. Josiah is therefore acting well outside his own borders, in territory that was not formally his.

23:20

Under the law of Moses, leading Israel to worship other gods was punished by death. Josiah was applying that law to the priests of these shrines.

23:21

Passover was the annual festival marking Israel's escape from Egypt, kept with a lamb slaughtered and eaten by household. The novelty here is that it is held centrally in Jerusalem rather than in homes and local shrines across the country.

23:22

"The days of the judges" refers to the period before Israel had kings, described in the book of Judges, several hundred years earlier. The claim is about how the festival was kept, not that it had never been kept at all.

23:23

Josiah's eighteenth year is around 622 BC. The same year is given in 2 Kings 22:3 as the year the scroll was found, so the discovery, the covenant ceremony, the purge and the Passover are all dated to a single year.

23:24

KJV's "workers with familiar spirits" and "wizards" mean mediums who consulted the dead and practitioners who claimed knowledge from spirits. The "images" are *teraphim*, small household figures kept in ordinary homes, used for protection and for divination.

23:25

"Heart, soul and might" is the wording of Deuteronomy 6:5, quoted here; "soul" in Hebrew means the whole living self, not an immaterial part of a person, and "might" means force or capacity, including property.

23:26

Manasseh, Josiah's grandfather, reigned fifty-five years and is described in 2 Kings 21 as having filled Judah with the practices Josiah is now dismantling.

23:27

"I have removed Israel" refers to the northern kingdom's destruction by Assyria about a century before. Putting one's name on a place is an ancient idiom of ownership and claim, used in royal inscriptions as well: the temple is marked as belonging to the LORD.

23:28

This "book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah" is a royal record kept at court, now lost. It is not the biblical books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, which were written later.

23:29

Around 609 BC. The Hebrew preposition is ambiguous and can mean Neco marched "against" the king of Assyria or "to" him; other sources indicate Egypt was going to support what remained of Assyria against the rising power of Babylon, but the wording itself leaves both readings open. Megiddo commanded the main pass through the Carmel ridge on the coastal highway, the standard route for armies moving north.

23:30

"The people of the land" is a set term for the landholding citizens of Judah, a body with real political weight who several times chose or confirmed a king. Pouring oil on the head was the formal act that installed a king; the Hebrew word for it gives the term "messiah," meaning simply "anointed one."

23:31

The books of Kings name the mother of each king of Judah as part of a fixed formula, along with age at accession and length of reign; the queen mother held a recognized position at court. Libnah was a town in Judah's lowlands.

23:33

Riblah, in the region of Hamath in what is now Syria, was a standard forward base for armies operating in the north; Egypt used it as a command post. KJV's "put him in bands" means put him in irons. A talent was a weight of roughly seventy-five pounds (about thirty-four kilograms), so the levy came to something over three tons of silver and about seventy-five pounds of gold, a crushing sum for a small kingdom.

23:34

Renaming a vassal king was a public assertion of control by the overlord who installed him. Both names are built on Hebrew words for God: Eliakim means roughly "God establishes," Jehoiakim "the LORD establishes." KJV's "in the room of" simply means "in place of."

23:35

"According to his taxation" means each person was assessed individually, by property or means. The point is that Jehoiakim did not pay the tribute from royal treasure but levied it on the population.