23:15 He also tore down the altar in Bethel 1 at the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who encouraged Israel to sin. 2 He burned all the combustible items at that high place and crushed them to dust; including the Asherah pole. 3 23:16 When Josiah turned around, he saw the tombs there on the hill. So he ordered the bones from the tombs to be brought; 4 he burned them on the altar and defiled it. This fulfilled the Lord’s announcement made by the prophet while Jeroboam stood by the altar during a festival. King Josiah 5 turned and saw the grave of the prophet who had foretold this. 6 23:17 He asked, “What is this grave marker I see?” The men from the city replied, “It’s the grave of the prophet 7 who came from Judah and foretold these very things you have done to the altar of Bethel.” 23:18 The king 8 said, “Leave it alone! No one must touch his bones.” So they left his bones undisturbed, as well as the bones of the Israelite prophet buried beside him. 9
23:19 Josiah also removed all the shrines on the high places in the cities of Samaria. The kings of Israel had made them and angered the Lord. 10 He did to them what he had done to the high place in Bethel. 11 23:20 He sacrificed all the priests of the high places on the altars located there, and burned human bones on them. Then he returned to Jerusalem.
23:21 The king ordered all the people, “Observe the Passover of the Lord your God, as prescribed in this scroll of the covenant.” 23:22 He issued this edict because 12 a Passover like this had not been observed since the days of the judges; it was neglected for the entire period of the kings of Israel and Judah. 13 23:23 But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah’s reign, such a Passover of the Lord was observed in Jerusalem.
23:24 Josiah also got rid of 14 the ritual pits used to conjure up spirits, 15 the magicians, personal idols, disgusting images, 16 and all the detestable idols that had appeared in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem. In this way he carried out the terms of the law 17 recorded on the scroll that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the Lord’s temple.
1 map For location see Map4-G4; Map5-C1; Map6-E3; Map7-D1; Map8-G3.
2 tn Heb “And also the altar that is in Bethel, the high place that Jeroboam son of Nebat who encouraged Israel to sin, also that altar and the high place he tore down.” The more repetitive Hebrew text is emphatic.
3 tn Heb “he burned the high place, crushing to dust, and he burned the Asherah pole.” High places per se are never referred to as being burned elsewhere. בָּמָה (bamah) here stands by metonymy for the combustible items located on the high place. See M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 289.
4 tn Heb “and he sent and took the bones from the tombs.”
5 tn Heb “the king”; this has been specified as “King Josiah” in the translation for clarity (cf. TEV, CEV, NLT).
6 tc The MT is much shorter than this. It reads, “according to the word of the
7 tn Heb “man of God.”
10 tn Heb “he”; the referent (the king) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
11 tn Heb “and they left undisturbed his bones, the bones of the prophet who came from Samaria.” If the phrase “the bones of the prophet” were appositional to “his bones,” one would expect the sentence to end “from Judah” (see v. 17). Apparently the “prophet” referred to in the second half of the verse is the old prophet from Bethel who buried the man of God from Judah in his own tomb and instructed his sons to bury his bones there as well (1 Kgs 13:30-31). One expects the text to read “from Bethel,” but “Samaria” (which was not even built at the time of the incident recorded in 1 Kgs 13) is probably an anachronistic reference to the northern kingdom in general. See the note at 1 Kgs 13:32 and the discussion in M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (AB), 290.
13 tc Heb “which the kings of Israel had made, angering.” The object has been accidentally omitted in the MT. It appears in the LXX, Syriac, and Vulgate versions.
14 tn Heb “and he did to them according to all the deeds he had done in Bethel.”
16 tn The Hebrew text has simply “because.” The translation attempts to reflect more clearly the logical connection between the king’s order and the narrator’s observation. Another option is to interpret כִּי (ki) as asseverative and translate, “indeed.”
17 tn Heb “because there had not been observed [one] like this Passover from the days of the judges who judged Israel and all the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah.”
19 tn Here בִּעֵר (bi’er) is not the well attested verb “burn,” but the less common homonym meaning “devastate, sweep away, remove.” See HALOT 146 s.v. בער.
20 sn See the note at 2 Kgs 21:6.
21 sn See the note at 1 Kgs 15:12.
22 tn Heb “carrying out the words of the law.”