Today, I am reading and commenting on  2 Kings 22-25.

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Some scholars argue that the Book of the Law which Hilkiah “found”  and gave to Josiah was actually compiled at the time of this passage and that it is what we now know as Deuteronomy (I use quotation marks around the word found because those who hold this theory would say that it was not actually found).   In fact, they claim that Deuteronomy was written to support Josiah’s religious reforms.  I am not going to go into most of their arguments for that claim, nor am I going to discuss the elements of the Book of Deuteronomy which make me think that unlikely.  I think the narrative here has enough to make that argument suspect.  I think it makes more sense to believe that Josiah’s reforms were the result of discovering a Book of the Law than that a “Book of the Law” was compiled in order to support those reforms.  The account here makes it clear that something changed when Josiah was twenty-six years old.  As this, and other accounts of Josiah’s reign, tell it, Josiah strove to serve God from the time he took the throne.  Finally, when he was twenty-six, he began restoration of the temple.  Then, suddenly, he begins celebrating Passover and starts a campaign to wipe out all elements of idolatry throughout the land of Israel, including land which had been controlled by the Northern Kingdom from Samaria.  If Josiah, or the people around him, were working on compiling a book to support the religious reforms, I would expect to see those reforms start when Josiah reached his majority, even if it took a year or two for them them to finish compiling the book which would allow them to go full-bore with the reforms.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.