Topical Studies
What the Bible says about
Josiah
(From Forerunner Commentary)
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It will be helpful to set the stage for Josiah's appearance in 639 BC. The northern ten tribes, Israel, are in captivity, having been conquered by Assyria about 80 years earlier during the reign of Judah's king Hezekiah. A good king who tried to follow God, Hezekiah rules for 29 years. His son Manasseh, however, is a very evil man. During his 55 years on the throne, he leads the people away from God, even to the extent of sacrificing children. Coming as it does after the 29 years of obedient leadership under Hezekiah, Manasseh's reign provides a clear contrast to the people. Though Manasseh exercises corrupt leadership, it appears the people willingly follow. In II Kings 21:9, God comments, "But they [the people] paid no attention [to God's laws], and Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than the nations whom the LORD had destroyed before the children of Israel." Because of this, God says in verses 12 and 15, "Behold, I am bringing such calamity upon Jerusalem and Judah, that whoever hears of it, both his ears will tingle . . . because they have done evil in My sight and have provoked Me to anger. . . ." God prophesies severe punishment for Judah because He sees it is plain that the people themselves are corrupt, not just their king. After Manasseh's death, his son Amon rules for only two years, assassinated by his own servants. And so eight-year-old Josiah ascends to the throne of Judah. His story begins in II Kings 22:1, "Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned thirty-one years in Jerusalem." Through the chronicler, God comments, "And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, and walked in all the ways of his father David; he did not turn aside to the right hand or to the left."
Mike Ford
Josiah
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2 Kings 22:1
Obviously, at age 8, he is not handling the day-to-day matters of the kingdom. He holds the title of king, but he is more than likely being schooled and groomed by a regent. Part of that schooling is to teach him the ways of God. We do not know for sure who was responsible for this part of his education (it may have been Hilkiah, the high priest), but Josiah is receptive to it (II Chronicles 34:3-5).
Mike Ford
Josiah
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2 Kings 22:8-10
Judah has drifted so far from God that they have forgotten His written Word existed! Between Manasseh and Josiah, sixty years have gone by without righteous leadership, and only a small number of God-fearing people are left, most of them elderly. A pitiful few remember a time when the true God was worshipped, much less what that worship involves. In His mercy, giving Judah one last chance to repent, God places some of the few remaining believers in mentoring positions around the young Josiah.
Mike Ford
Josiah
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2 Kings 22:16-17
At this point, six years into Josiah's reformation, God informs the young king that the people were only giving lip-service to his efforts. Their hearts had not changed; they had not truly repented and turned to God. He is, however, a merciful God, slow to anger, quick to forgive; the terrible price will not be paid just yet.
Mike Ford
Josiah
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2 Kings 22:19-20
A normal leader at this point, his life secure, might well have walked away from trying to help any further, yet Josiah is far from typical. God's warning only motivates him to redouble his efforts.
Mike Ford
Josiah
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2 Chronicles 33:1
Manasseh was the son of the second or third best king that Judah ever had. A list of the three best kings of Judah, hands down, begins with David, and he stands in a class of his own because every king is compared to him, even the good ones. He is the standard. Only three other kings are compared favorably to David: Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah. God seems to draw special attention to Josiah as having been the second best, with Hezekiah being the third, and Jehoshaphat the fourth. That is my own list, but it has sound biblical reasoning behind it.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Why Three Kings Are Missing From Matthew 1
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2 Chronicles 34:32-33
By the sheer force of Josiah's personality and example, the people stay in line, but they do not truly live righteously like Josiah. Josiah clears everything connected with pagan practices from the land and provides the people with godly leadership. However, only twelve short years after his death—after attempts by two sons and a grandson to rule—Judah falls captive to Babylon. Even Josiah's family, both immediate and extended, fail to follow his sterling example.
Mike Ford
Josiah
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Jeremiah 22:15-16
God is saying, "Do you think you are ruling because you have the trappings of royalty, because you have money, power, and prestige, because you are the sons of David, the literal sons of Josiah?" To put it more plainly, He says, "Your right to reign does not rest on your wealth or position." It relied on God Himself. His statement probably infuriated them. "Did not your father eat and drink, and do justice and righteousness?" may sound a bit odd, but He is painting a word picture. Just as Josiah, their father, ate and drank, it was also a normal part of his life to do justice and righteousness. To him, those godly acts were like eating and drinking. They are supposed to be innate to us too, as natural as eating and drinking to do righteousness and justice! Josiah was a child when he came to the throne, and by the time he was sixteen, he had begun to purge Judah of idolatry. He did a splendid job of putting Judah back on track, as much as any man could do. Then God says, "Then it was well with him." That is the way it works. That is how blessings come. Verse 16 continues the thought: "'He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Was not this knowing Me?' says the LORD." Here is a critical point. We should not think that just judging the cause of the poor and the needy is involved in knowing God. It is certainly part of knowing God. The thought stems from the earlier mention that Josiah performed justice and righteousness naturally, as part of his everyday behavior, and it manifested in defending the cause of the poor and needy. Through this process, he came to know God. Knowing God was the ultimate result of thinking through the good works he was doing, considering how they would work out, weighing the various ways he might work through the various situations, and then carrying them through to its end. Why is this? Because God does things the same way! He does this all the time! He is constantly thinking, working the problem, and projecting how things will work out if He does this or that. If His choices seem equally good, He will figure out which one will work the best to bring about His ultimate aim. When we begin to do things as He does, we come to know Him. The mind of God starts to form in us. We learn to judge situations—people's actions, situations, everything—as He does. As a result of our imitation of God, our relationship grows because we are becoming like each other. We enjoy each other's company because we see ourselves in each other.
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
"If I Have Not Charity"
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Lamentations 2:1-9
Jeremiah is the likely author of Lamentations, writing after reflecting on the devastation of Jerusalem following the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian army. A number of prophets, Jeremiah being the most obvious, had thoroughly warned the Jews for many years. God even raised up a righteous king, Josiah, to provide godly governmental and religious leadership, but it was to no avail because the people were not truly repentant and sincere in any changes they made. The changes were only on the surface, not reaching their hearts, so idolatry—especially—continued to rage unabated. The chapter continues with more of the same, leaving no doubt at all that God was directly responsible for His reaction to their sins. Jerusalem's devastation did not merely happen randomly in the course of history. God was directly involved. He brought on the horrific fear and pain. It was His warnings through the prophets that were ignored because they did not fear the Lord and did not truly believe that they were answerable to Him.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Fully Accepting God's Sovereignty (Part One)
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Matthew 1:7-11
I Chronicles 3 contains a counterpart to Matthew's list, at least his middle section covering the kings of Judah, that is, the family of David: Solomon's son was Rehoboam; Abijah was his son, Asa his son, Jehoshaphat his son, Joram his son, Ahaziah his son, Joash his son, Amaziah his son, Azariah his son, Jotham his son, Ahaz his son, Hezekiah his son, Manasseh his son, Amon his son, Josiah his son. The sons of Josiah were Johanan the firstborn, the second Jehoiakim, the third Zedekiah, and the fourth Shallum. The sons of Jehoiakim were Jeconiah his son and Zedekiah his son. (I Chronicles 3:10-16) From David to Zedekiah, twenty-one kings reigned in Judah. But in Matthew's list, only the names of fifteen kings appear. Three of the six left out, the three who followed Josiah (Shallum/Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Zedekiah), were of the same generation, brothers—blood relatives, of the same family line. However, two of them, Shallum and Zedekiah, are not direct ancestors of Jesus and so are not included, providing a logical reason for their absence. Matthew further disparages this generation by skipping over Jehoiakim and naming his son, Jehoiachin or Jeconiah, as Josiah's son (his literal grandson). In addition, a renegade queen, Athaliah, is not on either list. She was the granddaughter of Omri, king of Israel (II Chronicles 22:2), and a truly evil woman. She usurped the throne following her son Ahaziah's death by killing all his heirs. She deserves exclusion, yet some of the most evil kings of Judah are on the list as part of Christ's ancestry. Another three kings whose names appear in the king list in I Chronicles 3 fail to appear in Matthew's list. Which three kings they are is not entirely clear because of a confusion of names. There are two possibilities. The kings in question appear in I Chronicles 3:11-12: “Joram his son, Ahaziah his son, Joash his son, Amaziah his son, Azariah his son, Jotham his son.” The first possibility is that Matthew excluded Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah from his list because of their connection to Athaliah. The second possibility is that he left Joash, Amaziah, and Azariah off his list. The last of these kings is better known as Uzziah. Why did Matthew drop them from Jesus' family tree? Rather than excluding them due to their connection to Athaliah, he may have omitted them to draw attention to a disastrous flaw these three men had in common. God does not tell us which is the correct answer. Either of the two possibilities would be a good enough reason for their absence from Matthew's list. The second, however, has greater application to Christians living and growing today. We are not descended from or have any direct connections to Athaliah, but we may well have a similar spiritual problem to what Joash, Amaziah, and Uzziah had.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Three Missing Kings (Part One)
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Matthew 26:17-19
Matthew, Mark, and Luke each contain language that appears to put Jesus and the disciples' Passover preparations and observance on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It is helpful to understand the religious environment of the first century and what led up to it. In so doing, we will have taken a long step toward answering this seeming contradiction. First, the original instructions clearly stipulate that Passover is a single day—Abib 14—followed by the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread, beginning on Abib 15 (Exodus 12:6-20; Leviticus 23:5-8; Numbers 9:2-5). These instructions also direct the Israelites to keep the Passover in individual homes rather than at the Tabernacle or Temple (Exodus 12:22). Over time, though, the children of Israel moved farther from God and His instructions. During the reigns of the kings, Israel and Judah, now separate nations, adopted many practices from the pagan cultures surrounding them, with the kings often leading the way. However, a few kings of Judah, such as Hezekiah and Josiah, stand out for their dedication to God. Under these zealous monarchs, various religious reforms were instituted to try to bring Judah back to God's way. Among other reforms, they reinstated the commanded observance of the Passover, which the people were not keeping to any significant degree, if at all. However, these well-meaning reforms also contained a subtle change: Under both Hezekiah and Josiah—at the king's command rather than God's—the people observed the Passover at the Temple rather than in individual homes (II Chronicles 30 and 35). The kings may have done this to ensure that the people actually kept the Passover and did so without mixing in the Baalism that was so prevalent in the land. These kings' examples introduced a second way of observing the Passover. Now the Jews had both God's original Passover instructions as well as the kings' reforms to draw on when determining how to observe the festival. While God intended the Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread to be separate (though adjacent) observances, the Jews combined the two during the Babylonian exile, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica confirms: "The feast of Passover consists of two parts: The Passover ceremony and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Originally, both parts existed separately; but at the beginning of the [Babylonian] exile they were combined" (vol. 13, p. 169). This careless and unscriptural merging of festivals resulted in the Jews observing Passover late on Abib 14, just hours before the Feast of Unleavened Bread began. Thus, a third variation of Passover observance was added to the mix. At the time of Jesus Christ, this mixture was on full display. Philo of Alexandria, in De Vita Mosis, notes that in the early first century, the Passover was not strictly a Temple-kept event, but one in which people also killed their own lambs without help from the priests. In his Wars of the Jews, Flavius Josephus records that in 4 BC over 250,000 lambs were sacrificed for Passover. However, given the limited space of the Temple environs and the fact that Jewish tradition (not the Word of God) held that the lambs were to be slain within a two-hour time slot (from the ninth to the eleventh hour, or 3:00-5:00 pm), it is readily apparent that not all of those lambs could have been sacrificed at the Temple. In fact, Joachim Jeremias, in Jerusalem in the Times of Jesus, calculates that the three courses of priests on duty could slay only 18,000 lambs during those two hours. Josephus records that the rest of the lambs—a far greater number—were slain by individuals at their own homes. Another critical point is that, despite Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread being distinct festivals, they were commonly grouped together and simply called "Passover." Thus, when the gospel writers mention "Passover," it can sometimes refer to the Passover sacrifice itself (Matthew 26:17; Mark 14:12), the day when the sacrifice was made (Mark 14:1), or the whole eight-day period of Abib 14-21 (Passover plus Unleavened Bread; Luke 22:1). In actuality, then, there were really two Passover observances happening at the time of Jesus: one led by the priests at the Temple and the other observed by the people in their homes. These separate observances were also at different times: The Temple-kept Passover was observed late in the afternoon of Abib 14, while the home-kept Passover was kept at the beginning of Abib 14. As the gospels show, Jesus and His disciples ate the Passover in a home rather than at the Temple, observing it the evening before the priests did at the Temple. In other words, Jesus kept it as Abib 14 began, while the priests kept it as Abib 14 ended.
David C. Grabbe
Is Passover on the First Day of Unleavened Bread? (Part One)
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Find more Bible verses about Josiah:
Josiah {Nave's}
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