2 Kings 22:3

And it came to pass in the eighteenth year of King Josiah,.... Not of his age, but of his reign, as appears from 2 Chronicles 34:8 nor is what follows the first remarkable act he did in a religious

And it came to pass in the eighteenth year of king Josiah, that the king sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, the son of Meshullam, the scribe, to the house of the LORD, saying, In the eighteenth year of king Josiah.

In the eighteenth year, not of his life, but of his reign, as it is expressed, ,8. What he did before this time, see , &c. The scribe; the king’ s secretary.

2 Kings 22:3 And it came to pass in the eighteenth year of king Josiah, [that] the king sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, the son of Meshullam, the scribe, to the house of the LORD, saying,Ver. 3. In the eighteenth year of king Josiah.] That is, In the eighteenth year of his reign; after that, with a great deal of zeal, he had purged the land and the house. In which time also it seemeth that a collection was made for the repairing of the temple, which now this pious king taketh order to have done, and herein he proceedeth aequabiliter, iuste, prudenter. And from this famous eighteenth year of Josiah’ s reign, both those thirty years, and those forty days or years of the sin of Judah, seem to take their rise and reckoning. Ussher., Annal. Vet. Testam., p. 115.

(3) In the eighteenth year.—See the Notes on 2 Chronicles 34:3, seq. The discourses of Jeremiah, who began his prophetic ministry in the thirteenth year of Josiah, to which Thenius refers as incomprehensible on the assumption that idolatry was extirpated throughout the country in the twelfth year of this king, would be quite reconcilable even with that assumption, which, however, it is not necessary to make, as is shown in the Notes on Chronicles. Josiah did not succeed, any more than Hezekiah, in rooting out the spirit of apostasy. (See Jeremiah 2:1; Jeremiah 4:2). The young king was, no doubt influenced for good by the discourses of Jeremiah and Zephaniah; but it is not easy to account for his heeding the prophetic teachings, considering that, as the grandson of a Manasseh and the son of an Amon he must have been brought up under precisely opposite influences (Thenius).The king sent Shaphan . . . the scribe.—Chronicles mentions beside Maaseiah, the governor of the city, and Joah the recorder. Thenius pronounces these personages fictitious, because (1) only the scribe is mentioned in 2 Kings 12:10 (?); (2) Joshua was the then governor of the city (but this is not quite clear: the Joshua of 2 Kings 23:8 may have been a former governor; or, as Maaseiah and Joshua are very much alike in Hebrew, one name may be a corruption of the other); (3) Maaseiah seems to have been manufactured out of the Asahiah of 2 Kings 22:12 (but Asahiah is mentioned as a distinct person in 2 Chronicles 34:20); and (4) Joah the recorder seems to have been borrowed from 2 Kings 18:18 (as if anything could be inferred from a recurrence of the same name; and that probably in the same family !). Upon such a basis of mere conjecture, the inference is raised that the chronicler invented these names, in order “to give a colour of genuine history to his narrative.” It is obvious to reply that Shaphan only is mentioned here, as the chief man in the business. (Comp, also 2 Kings 18:17; 2 Kings 19:8). Go up to Hilkiah the priest.—The account of the repair of the Temple under Josiah naturally resembles that of the same proceeding under Joash (2 Kings 12:10, seq.) More than 200 years had since elapsed, so that the fabric might well stand in need of repair, apart from the defacements which it had undergone at the hands of heathenish princes (2 Chronicles 34:2). The text does not say that the repair of the Temple had been “longtemps nιgligιe par l’incurie des prκtres” (Reuss),Hilkiah.—See 1 Chronicles 6:13 for this high priest. He is a different person from Hilkiah, the father of Jeremiah, who was a priest, but not high priest (Jeremiah 1:1). That he may sum—i.e., make up, ascertain the amount of . . . The LXX. reads, seal up (σφράγισον), which implies a Hebrew verb, of which that in the present Hebrew text might be a corruption.

3. And it came to pass in the eighteenth year] The Chronicler gives two dates anterior to this for events in the course of Josiah’s life. He says (2 Chronicles 34:3-7 R.V.) ‘In the eighth year of his reign while he was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David his father, and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the Asherim, and the graven images and the molten images. And they brake down the altars of the Baalim in his presence, and the sun-images that were on high above them he hewed down, and the Asherim and the graven images and the molten images he brake in pieces, and made dust of them and strewed it upon the graves of them that had sacrificed unto them. And he burnt the bones of the priests upon their altars and purged Judah and Jerusalem. And so did he in the cities of Manasseh and Ephraim and Simeon, even unto Naphtali, in their ruins round about. And he brake down the altars and beat the Asherim and the graven images into powder, and hewed down all the sun-images throughout all the land of Israel, and returned to Jerusalem’. It is clear that we have here, a most comprehensive summary of the destruction of idolatry in the whole of Josiah’s reign and not what he began to do in his twelfth year. The Chronicler however having given us the date at which Josiah first manifested his disposition to destroy the idols out of the land, includes in the same sentences all that was done by the king in the after part of his reign. We cannot but think that the chief impulse toward the utter destruction of the idols was given, as the writer of Kings tells us (2 Kings 23:3) when the king made a covenant to walk after the Lord, according to the words of the book of the Law, and all the people stood to the covenant. Then began the extermination of all remaining traces of idolatry, which the king himself had begun to remove in some degree in his twelfth year. The LXX. adds to the date given in this verse, ἐντῷμηνὶτῷὀγδόῳ, ‘in the eighth month’, but with no warrant from the original. the king sent Shaphan … the scribe] The event on which all else in Josiah’s reformation seems to hinge is the restoration of the temple. There it was that the book of the Law was discovered which stirred both king and people to attempt a thorough reformation. Therefore the writer of Kings passes to that undertaking without pausing over minor matters which preceded it. Shaphan … the scribe] Shaphan whose father and grandfather are here mentioned, was the father of Ahikam mentioned below (verse 12) and of Gemariah (Jeremiah 36:10-12), and the grandfather of Gedaliah (Jeremiah 39:14; Jeremiah 40:5; Jeremiah 40:9; Jeremiah 40:11, &c.). The office of Scribe in his time was clearly an important one.

In the eighteenth year - This is the date of the finding of the Book of the Law and of the Passover (marginal reference, and 2 Kings 23:23), but is not meant to apply to all the various reforms of

MADE TO REPAIR THE TEMPLE, 2 Kings 22:3-7. 3. The eighteenth year of king Josiah — This is a memorable date, and made especially prominent by the writer of Kings, because it was in this year that the