Come, Follow Me with FAIR – 2 Kings 16–25 – Jennifer Roach Lees

King Josiah: A Tragic Hero

Ultimately, King Josiah was not a power-hungry zealot. He was an inspired leader who reclaimed his nation’s spiritual identity when everything seemed lost. He was a human king who took his priesthood duties seriously and sought justice for the poor. Eventually, he gave his life in service to the greatest commandment.

Rather than seeing him as a villain in this story, doing a power-hungry grab for his own purpose, we should see him for who he truly was—a tragic hero, a saint, who showed us the path back to God. And that begins with a return to His word.

Welcome back to FAIR’s Come, Follow Me podcast for Old Testament year. I am Jennifer Roach Lees. Today we are in 2 Kings 16–25.

The Divided Kingdoms and Their Prophets

So about a hundred years have passed since last week, since our last reading.

If you remember, Israel was divided into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom is called Israel. The southern kingdom is called Judah. Each kingdom had its own king, and there are different prophets associated with the two kingdoms at different times.

The Old Testament concept of prophet is not exactly what we think of as a prophet today. There wasn’t one assigned prophet. There wasn’t even really one assigned prophet for each kingdom.

1. Prophets weren’t assigned. They were these independent people called of the Lord.
2. They were mobile. They weren’t confined to any one place.
3. Sometimes they would speak to both kingdoms—northern and southern—and sometimes they would just speak to the needs of one specific kingdom.

The prophets in the northern kingdom, Israel, were often talking about some similar themes. Those themes were idol worship and injustice. If you remember the story about Elisha, he gets called “Baldi” by the boys who were from the town of Bethel, which was the center of idol worship. And that’s in the northern kingdom, right? So prophets are always speaking to those people about idol worship and an overall sense of injustice.

The prophets in the southern kingdom, Judah, were often talking about covenant faithfulness and temple worship. So, a slightly different—not contradictory—but a slightly different focus in the south. They had slightly different needs. The temple is located in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is in Judea, the southern kingdom. So temple issues are going to come up a lot more for them.

Some of the prophets worked with both kingdoms. The one you’re most familiar with is probably Isaiah. He had things to say to both kingdoms.

Understanding Isaiah in Historical Context

We’ve talked a little bit before on this show about how the Old Testament is not exactly in chronological order. Things go out of order, and we double back, and we have parallel stories going on.

For example, some of David’s writings are in the Psalms. They are not placed in the timeline when he lived. His writings come like eight books later, long after he is dead in the narrative. In the timeline, his writings come there—they’re not contained in the books where his life is contained.

So the same thing is happening today. We’re actually introduced to the prophet Isaiah in these chapters here in 2 Kings, but his writings don’t come for like 10 more books. He, as a human being, is living here. We don’t get his writings right here, though, so don’t get confused on that part.

You should think of this week’s reading as having a link you could click on, maybe, and go directly over to some extended version where the writings of Isaiah are.

Second Kings as Isaiah’s Historical Context

Second Kings is the historical context for what Isaiah is talking about. Sometimes people in our church say that they have a hard time understanding Isaiah. One of the ways of learning to understand him better is putting him in the context where he exists, and his context is here in Kings.

I wish that we were combining the writings of Isaiah into the time period. It just isn’t happening. The text doesn’t do that for us. Come, Follow Me doesn’t do that for us. We’ll do a little bit of it ourselves.

So we’re not in Isaiah today. And we’re not even really talking all that much about Isaiah specifically, but we’re talking about a king who lived some decades later who is heavily influenced by Isaiah. And it’s King Josiah.

If you remember, a lot of prophetic words that come to the southern kingdom have to do with temple and with worship. And King Josiah, he is over Judah, the southern kingdom, where Jerusalem is, where the temple is.

Essentially, Josiah listened to what Isaiah had to say. Isaiah lived before Josiah was king, before he was even born. But Josiah studied the words of Isaiah and took him seriously and wanted to make some reforms based on the prophet’s words.

We’ll get more into what Isaiah’s actual words were when we get to his book. Right now, what we’re really doing is looking at how Josiah, several generations later, receives Isaiah’s words.

Allen Hansen’s “Defending Josiah”

Today’s discussion about Josiah is based really, really heavily on a chapter out of a recent book that FAIR put out last fall. We did a conference on the Old Testament and put together a print volume. I think you can get it digitally, too, on the Old Testament.

All of the speakers who spoke have a chapter in that book. I have a chapter in that book. I’m super proud of it.

One of the chapters in that book is written by Allen Hansen. And I’m going to talk you through Allen Hansen’s work here, but honestly, you should actually go read it for yourself because there’s way more to it than I could cover.

You can buy the book on Amazon. Maybe you can download parts of it from the FAIR website. I know that you can download Allen’s chapter, which we’re going over today, from the FAIR website. There might also be other ones.

The chapter is called “Defending Josiah.” I highly recommend it to you. It’s 52 pages. Allen is a serious scholar, so buckle down. But I’m going to give you the overall gist of it today. ¹

Two Contrasting Views of King Josiah

Sometimes King Josiah is presented as kind of this peerless hero, a man who almost single handedly tries to pull his nation back from spiritual oblivion—that he is this very strong man.

But there is debate about this. Some want to actually say, “No, no, no, he was not the hero. He’s actually this power-hungry zealot who’s trying to grab whatever power he could for himself and for the southern kingdom, even if it came at the expense of gutting the temple worship system.”

So you have these two different views on Josiah, and they are very stark contrasts, right? In one, he’s really good in following the Lord. And in one, he’s only following himself. He doesn’t care about the consequences for the Lord.

So is Josiah this calculating sort of political strategist, or is he giving a desperate, pious response to his culture that was literally falling apart? Is the story someone who’s walking away from the Lord, or is it the story of a restoration? Is this a leader who’s reclaiming his nation’s soul? Or is this somebody who doesn’t care and is just trying to destroy his nation at whatever expense, as long as he himself profits?

The World Josiah Inherited

So, to understand any of this, we have to try and figure out the world that was crushing these people of Israel.

We’re in Judah. We’re about the seventh century before Christ—seventh century B.C.E. And for Josiah, like most people in that era, your geography was kind of your destiny. They did not have the same sense of, “I could just pick up and go live wherever.”

Judah was a tiny kingdom. And because of where it is on the map, it actually turned into kind of this buffer state because they’re in between some other more powerful states. They are kind of caught in the gears of the wars that these other states are having with each other.

If a superpower like Assyria wanted to reach Egypt, they pretty much had to march through Josiah’s backyard. They had to go through Judah. And there’s a number of these kinds of cross-geographical things that would happen.

By the seventh century, Judah was struggling under the weight of the Assyrians. Assyria was kind of the superpower of its day, the invincible power of its day—a civilization that viewed the world as kind of civilized if you were Assyrian, or peripheral and meant to be exploited if you were not.

So they were the center of the world. Everything else was just there for their use.

Assyria didn’t always try to force their gods on Judah, though they did do that a fair amount. Their power over them was still overwhelming. Even if they weren’t pushing their gods, they were marching their armies through.

Judah’s Spiritual and Political Crisis

Josiah’s grandfather is Manasseh. Under Manasseh, Judah had sunk into a spiritual mess. They had adopted a lot of the Assyrian cultural practices, in part just as a survival tactic. But still, the practices had been adopted.

And on top of all of that, Josiah was facing some real internal pressures. They were having a depopulation problem. The northern kingdom of Israel was just a ghost of its former self—a physical reminder of this spiritual death, the broken covenants.

Josiah knew that is where the south was headed unless something happened to change the trajectory. So he looked to the northern kingdom and was like,

“We can’t have that. We need to have more people. We need to have more population. We need to be following the Lord.”

There’s also, at the same time, a refugee crisis that they’re experiencing. Jerusalem was sort of busting at the seams in that day with refugees from the north who were escaping the social upheaval and conflicting cultural practices that were going on there.

If you remember, one of the northern kings tried heavily to keep this from happening. To discourage it, he gave them golden calves to worship. But still, there were many who would not. A high number of refugees fled the north, and they went to the south. They’re living there essentially as refugees without their own land.

They’re also in pretty deep economic ruin at this moment. Judah’s sort of breadbasket, where they would have grown all their food, has been stripped away by the Assyrians, and eventually they have to give it to the Philistines. They don’t have great areas to grow their food anymore. The Assyrian encroachment.

A Young King Inheriting a Broken Kingdom

Judah’s prestige at this moment is sort of at an all-time low. They’ve become a vassal state to an empire that viewed them as nothing. They had no respect for them. They kind of didn’t care what happened to them. And so they’re completely encroaching upon them.

So imagine being about eight years old and your father dies, and you inherit this mess and become king. You’re eight years old. That’s what happens to Josiah.

This is all handed to him—immense pressure that required a very specific type of leader, sometimes called a sacral king.

The Role of a Sacral King

So what about a sacral king?

In our modern world, we separate church and state. But in the ancient world, kingship was a corporal and sacral concept. The king was viewed as the life or vitality of the nation itself. If the crops failed or if a plague broke out, the ancient mind immediately looked at the king’s righteousness or his goodness.

In Judah, the king isn’t the lawgiver. He was the law’s top servant, but he’s not the lawgiver. And at this time, he’s head of the priesthood on earth. That isn’t always true—that the king is head of the priesthood—but at this time, he’s head of the priesthood.

Josiah is responsible for ensuring that the temple was up and running. Essentially, his legitimacy didn’t come from his own ego. It came from trying to maintain the covenants that they had been given.

Cleaning House

The narrative in 2 Kings 23 that we get is Josiah deciding that we need to clean house. It describes a systematic removal of a poison.

It gets a little bit confusing here because we’re talking about removing some symbolic items. And the reality is symbols change over time. They don’t have a fixed meaning. What a symbol meant to one generation might mean another thing three generations later.

One of the examples Allen gives in his paper is the pentagram analogy. In the Middle Ages, the pentagram was a Christian symbol. It represented the five wounds of Christ, and you can see it actually in the architecture of many cathedrals in Europe. It’s even on the original Nauvoo Temple, right?

But today that symbol has been so thoroughly changed it’s seen as a satanic symbol, to the degree that no Christian church would use it. Even though many generations ago, that is not what that symbol meant at all. The meaning completely flipped.

Why Josiah Removed Certain Symbols

So in a similar way, symbols like the Asherah pole—or what they call the solar chariots—had been corrupted by enemies. The horses dedicated to the sun weren’t just pagan. They were sort of a rebranding from the Assyrians. This wasn’t like, “Oh, here are the horses that the Lord has given us. It’s a symbol of the Lord’s strength.” 

Now it’s a cultish, pagan symbol. And it’s the Assyrians who brought that meaning. Josiah removes these symbols, and many others, because of their immediate association—because it had been so radically changed from the original association.

So when Josiah removes the Asherah symbol, he’s removing it because it no longer means what it used to.

Some people would say he was stripping the temple of some of its important meaning. Allen’s point—and I agree—is that he’s stripping the temple of things that used to mean one thing, and now they actually mean another, and they’re not helpful symbols at the moment.

So Josiah actually removes things like altars and vessels, or objects used in the temple, certain horses, chariots, the Asherah pole, as we’ve mentioned, and more.

Is Josiah saying that altars are bad? No.

Is he saying that horses are bad? No, of course not.

He’s saying that at that time, those specific items had taken on symbolic meaning that was not helpful for the people if they were supposed to be worshiping God.

The Discovery of the Book of the Law

This purge takes on a new, terrifying urgency because they find this book—the Book of the Law, sometimes called the “found book”—during temple repairs. It shifts the reforms from a cultural cleanup to almost a national emergency. During the repairs, the high priest finds this Book of the Law. What it likely was, though we’re not sure, was the core of Deuteronomy—probably chapters 26 through 29.

Sometimes it’s said, “Oh, this is a made-up book, and it would be an invention of a new religion, not the recovery of a covenant book.” And Josiah will take them at their word that he recovers this Book of the Law, this section of Deuteronomy, and that he feels called back to righteousness.

So when Josiah reads the curses and the blessings in that book—you can go read them yourselves in Deuteronomy—he doesn’t celebrate a political victory. He rips his clothes: he rends his clothes in grief.

Josiah sends a delegation to the current prophet, who validates the text. Josiah realizes the need for a clean slate, essentially. He’s going to clean out the temple.

A little bit similar to some reformations that we have had in our faith—for example, in the 1850s, leaders called for a rebaptism as an outward sign of recommitment. Josiah was kind of leading a national rebaptism to renew a broken oath.

Cleansing the Land

But how do we reconcile the spiritual renewal with the accounts of violence that are also happening alongside it? Modern critics will paint Josiah as kind of murder-happy. However, in the ancient mindset, idolatry was a literal contagion:

• It was toxic material.
• It was radioactive.
• It was sludge.

The language of 2 Kings 23—burning, beating, scattering dust—echoes the priestly language of Leviticus. In Leviticus 14, for example, they have to go through and ‘clean house’ ² and eradicate all the mold or the plague, right? They must burn, beat, or scatter it out.

Scholars call these rites of riddance. ³ In simple terms, it’s a spiritual kind of biohazard containment. Josiah is acting as the head of the priesthood, and he is performing this ritual hazmat to stop the pollution of chaos from destroying the land.

The single recorded instance of execution involved the priests of Samaria—foreign elements opposed to the land. This wasn’t tyranny. It was a ritual necessary to stop the land from kind of spitting out its inhabitants, as the text puts it.

Josiah and Jeremiah

It’s very much in keeping with what Isaiah taught just a few decades earlier, and it’s also in line with the greatest prophetic voice of that era, which is Jeremiah.

The relationship between the king, King Josiah, and the prophet Jeremiah is often seen as a puzzle because Jeremiah is rather silent on the specific details of these reforms that are going on while he is the prophet.

But the solution is found in their shared righteousness.

Jeremiah’s Assessment of King Josiah

In Jeremiah 22, we find a divine assessment, as it were, of Josiah. He is praised not for his political power, but for doing justice, for his care for the poor and needy, and for the temple reforms that he makes. Jeremiah supports the king because they share the same goal: rooting out exploitation of the vulnerable and the worship of false gods.

Jeremiah laments the people’s repentance because it was only skin deep. They were only doing it to get gain. He clearly viewed Josiah as a partner in the struggle for the nation’s soul.

Josiah’s Death at Megiddo

This partnership, however, would reach a tragic conclusion at a place called the Pass of Megiddo. ⁴

As we said earlier, the land of Judah was a bit of a highway for some other world powers at the time. When Josiah was 39 years old, he made the decision to bar the way of the Egyptians, who wanted to aid the dying Assyrian Empire.

Assyria and Egypt are friends at this point. Egypt wants to rush to the Assyrians’ aid. They have to go straight through Judah. And Josiah says, “No, you cannot.”

Josiah recognizes that for Egypt or Assyria to get stronger would be a bad thing long term for him and for his people. So he refuses to let them pass through the land.

In the ensuing battle that happens, Josiah loses his life. He dies trying to protect his people from a future threat—that if Egypt or Assyria got stronger, that would mean more influence on his people, more temptation toward idol worship, and more of their hearts being taken away from the Lord.

So he dies trying to protect Judah from the influence of any more foreign gods.

The Fall of Judah

Right after he dies, King Zedekiah comes to power. He is not a righteous king. He allows the spiritual decline of Judah to continue. And according to the Book of Mormon, what happens during the first year of his reign? Lehi and his family leave Jerusalem.

You can imagine—or at least I can imagine—Lehi and his family are in deep mourning after King Josiah dies. He was the last good king of Judah, the last one to fight for righteousness before the Babylonians come and carry the people into slavery.

When Zedekiah becomes king, Lehi is able to read the tea leaves well enough to know that it is time to get out of town.

Joseph Smith and the Book of the Law

So was Josiah wrong to make the reforms that he made? Joseph Smith doesn’t actually seem to think so.

From Allen Hansen’s paper:

Joseph took particular care to avoid the potential for misreading the verse as meaning that Josiah engaged in any of David’s sins. In the Old Testament Revision 2 manuscript, Joseph changed the word order of 2 Chronicles 34:16 from “and brought the king word back again” to “and brought the word of the king back again.”

Whatever Joseph may have meant by this, he was clearly not claiming Josiah and his men created this Book of the Law themselves—that they were trying to bring about a new religion, that they were trying to lead people away from the Lord, or that they deliberately brought the people into wrongdoing or endangered their walk with the Lord.

Orson Pratt also saw the discovery of the Book of the Law as a perfect parallel to the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, both requiring a prophet’s witness. Spencer W. Kimball pleads with us to liken Josiah to ourselves, returning to the scriptures and letting them work mightily within us.

A Tragic Hero Who Called His People Back to God

Ultimately, King Josiah was not a power-hungry zealot. He was an inspired leader who reclaimed his nation’s spiritual identity when everything seemed lost. He was a human king who took his priesthood duties seriously and sought justice for the poor. Eventually, he gave his life in service to the greatest commandment.

Rather than seeing him as a villain in this story, doing a power-hungry grab for his own purpose, we should see him for who he truly was—a tragic hero who was a saint and showed us the path back to God. And that begins with a return to His word.

Join us next week, and we will continue marching toward the Babylonians carrying the people away. I will see you then.

Abstract

This episode examines the life and reforms of King Josiah in 2 Kings 16–25, arguing that he should be understood not as a political opportunist but as a faithful covenant king who sought to restore Judah’s relationship with God. Jennifer Roach Lees places Josiah within the historical context of Assyrian domination, refugee crises, economic hardship, and covenant decline before exploring how the rediscovery of the Book of the Law shaped his reforms. Drawing heavily from Allen Hansen’s Defending Josiah, the episode addresses common scholarly criticisms of Josiah’s actions, explains the symbolic significance of removing corrupted temple objects, and considers the support Josiah received from prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. The discussion concludes by examining Josiah’s sacrificial death, his influence on later Restoration leaders, and the enduring invitation to return to the scriptures as the foundation of covenant renewal.