Josiah the Cult Killer

Hezekiah was able to defend Jerusalem and after a while, Sennacherib up and left and later wrote that he trapped Hezekiah in his capital city like a bird in a cage, but ultimately couldn’t, couldn’t—

Take the city, couldn’t get at the bird, but man, he was trapped there.

Yeah, he rattled the cage a bit and got upset and was like, I’m—

Not changing your newspaper, so take that bird.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good.

I—

This is funny. When we were, when I was prepping for this episode, I thought it was a cool idea for a topic and I was excited about like delving into it and learning about it. And the more I learned about it, the more I was like, I don’t know about talking about this in a time of Christian nationalism in our country. It’s made me a little bit nervous. So I’m still excited about it. I still think it’s a very interesting story from the Bible.

But don’t try what you’re about to hear at home. Is that what you’re—

Don’t share this with any of your Christian nationalist friends. They’ll think it is a, an instruction manual. And it—it’s very much not.

Thus the interrogative nature of the title of this segment, which is Biblical Heroes? Question mark. Yes.

Yeah, that question mark is really important.

There’s a lot—that’s a load-bearing question mark. It is a pregnant question mark. Thus the rounded shape.

Yes, indeed, because we’re going to be talking about Josiah, a king who is talked about in, in both Kings and Chronicles, because somehow Kings and Chronicles are the same thing. Are they the same thing?

They’re—they’re very different. However, Chronicles is basically taking Samuel and Kings and then some other stuff that we don’t have and rewriting it to tell most of the same stories but in a different way.

Yeah, that’s weird.

Yes, because it’s coming much later, right? Yeah.

Okay, well, we’re going to start. I mean, my main focus was on Second Kings chapter 23.

22 and 23.

22 and 23, sure.

Okay.

But I mean, the rubber really hits the road in 23. That’s, that’s where the exciting stuff happens.

22 is the, is the pretense for everything that happens in 23.

So why don’t we talk—why don’t we start there? Tell us a little bit about what’s happening. Give us a little bit of background leading into 22.

Yeah.

And—and we’ll go from there.

So we’re going to back up a little over a century to King Hezekiah just to talk about the invasion of Sennacherib. Okay. So under—when, when King Hezekiah comes to the throne, the, the—the nation of Judah is under vassalage to the Neo-Assyrian kingdom. So they are paying them a tribute, they are sending soldiers. When Assyria says send soldiers, and Hezekiah decides that he doesn’t like this and he’s kind of—he wants to ally with Egypt, so he’s kind of going over to Egypt saying, can you help me throw off vassalage to the Assyrians? I’ll pay tribute to you.

I’ll be your vassal. That’s much better.

And Assyria gets wind of this, and so we have Sennacherib, this Assyrian king, who decides he’s going to invade. Scorched earth campaign starts in the north, destroys most of the northern kingdom, comes down south, destroys a bunch of major cities. Lachish—we’ve talked about Lachish a bit in the past. That is—he destroys that city and memorializes that process on a bas-relief that covered numerous walls of his palace in Nineveh. And we have those reliefs. Well, the British Museum stole those reliefs.

Yes. I just barely saw them a month ago.

Oh, you did. You saw them.

They were fantastic. Yeah, that’s one of the things that, you know, when, when you and I do a tour into England, that’s one of the things that we will show everybody.

Yeah, definitely. And, and it’s a fascinating portrayal of an Assyrian siege of a city. And we actually have the remains from the siege and can reconstruct the siege ramp and all that kind of stuff.

Couldn’t, couldn’t get at the bird, but, man, he was trapped there.

Yeah, he rattled the cage a bit and, and got upset and was like, I’m not changing the newspaper. You’re going to have to just pile up that crap.

Take that bird.

But we, and, and, you know, we have we have material remains from this event. So, like, there was a, a tunnel that was carved under the City of David that you can walk through to this day. I find it a quite unnerving experience. I have done it multiple times and I have found it quite unnerving. But that was dug so that they would have access to a spring that was outside the city. They would kind of have secret access to this water. But anyway, the result of this is that pretty much all of the main cult sites, all the main places where people went to worship, if they were not worshiping privately in their own home or in little local shrines around the corner or something like that, they had to go to temples or larger cult centers. And, and these were all destroyed, all except for the temple in Jerusalem. And so you have what some scholars call a de facto cult centralization where just incidentally, there only happens to be one main cult center where we can go.

And Hezekiah was king when all this happens. And then you have two other kings after Hezekiah, Manasseh and Amon. And then we get to Josiah, who reigns between around 639 to 609 BCE and there are scholars, and I’m one of them, who think that after Hezekiah’s reign, the next two kings tried to restore the cultic sites and the cultic practices that were going on in these cities prior to the invasion of Sennacherib. And then we get to Josiah and things change. Yes, yes.

I think it’s important to point out that, like, when we’re talking about these, the, these sort of cult places to worship, we’re not just talking about worshiping a single God.

Right.

And, and I think that it’s. I think that the, the image that, that most people have about sort of biblical times is that God’s people as sort of presented in the Bible, were always just, we worship our one God and that’s all there is. And you know, as long as you’re one of our people, that’s all you do.

Right.

If they’re even aware that other gods exist in the Bible, there’s no sense that like other Judeans would be, would, would have any other ideas, but to worship that single God in, in whatever correct way you would do it. But these. What, what’s about to happen, what Josiah is about to do, make it clear first of all that, like, that wasn’t the case at all.

Yeah, yeah. When, when we look at the facts on the ground, they tell a much different story. And what we get in the Bible is kind of a sanitized, idealized set of propagandistic stories. The. And they’re trying to assert, well, this is the way it is. And, and in reality, these texts are actually coming from a later time period and are looking back and saying, we’re going to tell you the story of our, our, you know, forefathers, but in a way that serves our interests. And so, and that’s, and that’s one of the hard things to tease apart. Biblical scholars look at the archeology, they look at the text, they, they look at human nature and how these things work. And they’ve got to try to tease apart what seems likely to be historical versus what seems likely to be a retelling that is ahistorical precisely because it serves the structuring of power of someone later down the road. So.

Right. I mean, it’s the old adage that history is written by the victors. Right. It’s, it’s this idea that like, however it turned out, that’s going to be written as the correct way for it to have turned out. Like that’s how, that’s, that’s how that’s going to be written, at least if it worked out well for the people who are currently in power.

Yeah. And you know, when I was growing up learning about early American history, you know, we’re taught that George Washington was this larger than life figure who was a champion for, for all these different virtues and ideals. And you know, in the, the paintings that we see that are in legislative buildings around the country, he’s like literally a god in, in a lot of the ways that he’s represented.

I wonder if, let me just paint a picture and you tell me how, how off base I am, okay. Because the image that I get even from just reading this, this bit written by the victors, as we say, and written in a propagandistic way to serve a specific agenda, I still, when I read it and I don’t, you know, I don’t go into it with the same, the same eyes that I would have had when I was a believer. Like, when I was, when I was a believer, I would have seen this very differently. But when I look at it now, I see it as there were a bunch of people who, you know, things just worship was sort of spread out more. And you have a, you know, you have a society where, yes, you can worship Adonai and you can probably, like, go to Asherah, you know, the Asherah shrines. And, you know, there, there’s talk of women who are, who are. What is it, knitting or weaving?

Yeah, weaving.

They’re. Yeah, they’re. They’re making things for Asherah or in honor of Asherah. And then there are other people who are worshiping Baal and, and, you know, but everybody seems to be getting along well. Like, society seems to be working. And that’s just, you know, like many other places in, in the world at that time, you. You could worship multiple gods and, and, you know, different gods had different uses for you. Is that about what we’re looking at?

Yeah, yeah, they be. And you’ve also got a bunch of social levels at which this is going on, because in your house, you might have an ancestral shrine. You’ve got. And, and, you know, this goes all the way back into Neolithic time periods where we’ve got your Jericho skull where they’ve, they’ve used clay and seashells to, to put flesh back on a skull. And that sits on the, on the, the mantle. And that is, you know, that’s Uncle Dave. And you know, you bring him out on his birthday and you have a festival or you have a meal and he’s at the table and like, you know, that, that kind of stuff is. Is old tale as old as time. And you have something similar going on probably in early Israel, where you might have a standing stone that represents one of your ancestors and you share a meal with it, you pour one out for the homies in front of the standing stone. You. There are just numerous different ways that you can privately, in your own home, engage in ancestor worship.

And you might seek their, their aid. You might in one way or another invoke their blessing on your family, on a new marriage, on, you know, so and so won’t give me my, my tools back. So you might ask the, the ancestor to curse them with, you know, really bad something. So it can go on privately, it can go on within your little village. Maybe you got a little hamlet you got a dozen homes, and maybe there’s one ancestor, the great, great grandfather who established the town. Maybe his standing stone and that of his wife is at the entrance to the town. We have discovered a bunch of this. And so, you’ve got a local cult of some kind going on. Maybe you’re. You’re worshiping Asherah because you’re in a women’s group, some kind of guild of. Of weavers or of pot makers or something like that, and you have either Asherah or some other deity who’s supposed to bless you for doing this kind of thing.

Maybe you get together and you, in some way or another, worship that goddess. There are a bunch of different levels on which the worship is going on as well.

I mean, this kind of thing still happens. This is not different from. From, you know, from invoke, you know, trying to pray to saints or to, you know, people do go to their ancestors and, like, ask for help from their, you know, from their grandmothers, who’s looking out over them. Yeah, that’s not. This is. This is still happening. This is very, like. I mean, it’s very clear.

You.

You’ve talked about this from a cognitive science of religion perspective as just something that’s very human to do.

Yeah, very, very natural to seek out connection with the people who’ve gone before, particularly if they’ve had significant impact on your life or you sense in some way that you need help and you think they’re best equipped to provide that help. That’s perfectly natural. And yeah, that’s almost certainly what was going on in early Israel. We have found inscriptions, funerary inscriptions, so, you know, “Blessed be so-and-so by Adonai and his Asherah,” which seems to suggest that both are sources of blessing in one way or another, and probably sources of different kinds of blessings. El was the patriarchal high deity you went to who was benevolent, and you went to beseech for help in certain situations. Adonai was the storm deity that you might beseech if you needed rain for your crops or you needed some kind of blessing of fertility. “My wife has a difficult pregnancy. We want to make sure that this baby makes it or that my wife survives the delivery,” or stuff like that.

So you would go to different deities for this kind of stuff. And we have evidence of people going to different deities and just kind of generically seeking some kind of divine agency. There’s—there are artifacts we call Judean Pillar figurines, which are small, you know, maybe 6 to 8 inch high figurines that have a little base. And it looks like the bottom half of it is just kind of a cylinder that widens a little bit to a base. But the top half is usually—there’s a face of a woman, either, like, pinched to create eye sockets and a nose, or there can be a molded female face, and then they’re usually arms holding up breasts. And these have been found all—hundreds and hundreds of these have been found all around Jerusalem and Judah. And we think they’re probably just kind of generic.

We’re—

We’re seeking some kind of agency out there to help heal somebody who might be sick or to protect somebody. You know, you might line them up around your bed or something, or your kid’s bed if they have a really high fever to ward off the demons or something like that. So there’s an awful lot of that kind of stuff going on in this time period, and nobody seems to have concern with it. Like, yeah, you don’t have any very negative references to this.

All of this is going fine. Everybody’s getting along, and then someone finds—

A book, which is—isn’t this always the way? So suddenly appears—

Talk about that a little bit.

So it’s about this kid named Atreyu, and now Artax.

All right, go on.

And so the high priest comes to the king Josiah one day and says, “So I found a book. It was in the temple. And turns out we’ve been doing everything wrong.” And Josiah tears his clothes and they take the book to Huldah, the prophetess who lived in the college, which is how the King James Version reads, which I always thought was hilarious. I did a little, like, cartoon showing some high priests, like, at a dorm room, like, knocking on a door, and Huldah opens the door, and she’s like, “If the RA catches you here, I’m gonna get in a lot of trouble.” But they—and then they read the book and they go, “Oh, crap, we’re in a lot of trouble. We’ve been doing everything wrong.” And Josiah, because he’s the most righteous, righteous man to ever live, decides, “Well, we got to make things right.”

And Josiah, if Chronicles is to be believed—I don’t remember if it said it in Kings—but Josiah was a kid. Like, he came according to Chronicles, he came to power at age 8, and by the time this stuff was happening, he was, like, 16 to 20.

Yeah. So in 2 Kings 22 , it says Josiah was 8 years old when he began to reign. He reigned 31 years in Jerusalem.

Yeah, okay. Right.

Yeah. And so, yeah, he’s pretty young for a king. But this is supposed to have happened—Hilkiah the high priest finds the Book of the Law in the 18th year of King Josiah. Okay, so he’s at least eligible to be in the college, whether or not the RAs are going to—

But this, all of this does seem like the act of a 26-year-old or someone who’s in his 20s. This doesn’t—

Yeah, yeah. Somebody who tears his clothes and says, “Woe is us. We’ve brought the judgment of God upon us. We need to reform everything.”

Yeah.

And—

Yeah, so then into 23. Yes. So now we’re in, now we’re in chapter 23. And, and he, he’s not gentle about how he, how he decides to reform things.

Mm.

He, he basically just brings out everybody and takes every, like, literally everyone.

If you’ve seen the professional. Everyone. Bring me everyone.

He basically, it says he went up to the house of the Lord. I assume that means a temple.

It does. And.

And with him went all the people of Judah, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests, the prophets and all the people. I think we’ve already said that. That’s a little, that’s bad writing right there. Both small and great. He read in their hearing all the words of the book. Oh, gosh. He wrote. He read them the whole book.

Yeah. Can you, can you imagine? You’re just, you know, you’re on your, your PlayStation or whatever, and somebody’s like, hey, the king needs us.

Everybody supposed to go.

He’s everyone. Yeah. And, and they go up there and they’re like, he’s reading to us.

We have to hear a book. Anyway, then he reads the book. And I guess as his justification for what he’s about to do, which is that he basically commands his priests to go into all of the temples and bring out all of the vessels for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven. Meaning, I guess the divine council. Is that what we’re talking about?

That’s part of it. In this time period, we’re talking about the end of the 7th century BCE we saw in Deuteronomy 4:19 the idea that the sun, the moon and the stars and all the host of heaven. So host of heaven literally is the celestial bodies that are up there in the sky. But they’re all seen as deities.

Right.

And we see this in Judges 5 with Sisera. The. The stars fought in their courses against Sisera. So they’re. They’re deities and they’re an army and God marshals the army and all this kind of stuff. And so what this is suggesting is that there were cultic objects that facilitated the worship of the host of heaven in the. In the Jerusalem Temple. And so the Taanach cult stand, which I think we’ve talked about before, one of the. At the very top of it, there’s an equine figure and a sun disc that is on the top of it with some. With some rays coming out from it. But that would be an example of a member of the host of heaven, although the sun would be identified with the head God would be identified with Adonai. So.

Right. So all of these artifacts, all of these various things that were used in worship of anyone other than Adonai.

Right.

Brought out, burned, destroyed, and. And their ashes carried to Bethel. I don’t know what. What that’s about.

Well, they’re going to. They’re destroying everything, the priests of the high places. So they’re also destroying all the other cult sites, which they’re calling high places bamot, which means all the other temples and the ashes they’re using to defile altars.

Okay.

Because they’re. They’re human. Well, they’re. They’re killing people as well. And the human remains are. Are.

Oh, that’s right.

Yeah.

It’s not just the things. It’s not just the vessels he ends up just killing. I mean, he deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained. Is deposed a euphemism here.

What verse are we. I’ll look at the.

This is verse five.

Yeah. Put an end to.

Okay.

Like, it’s based on the verbal root shabat. To cease, to rest. So cause to cease.

Okay.

The kemarim. So the komer would be. It’s a. It’s a type of priest.

Okay.

But. But considered an illegitimate priest. So not a Levitical priest. Oh, and. And if you want to tickle some Mormon ears here, the. This is always fun to do. Komer would be this type of priest. The type of priesthood held by these non-Levitical priests would be kemurah. That’s a.

That’s a. That’s a Mormon deep cut for all.

Yeah, that’s a deep cut for. Just for fun.

That’s a hill Dan’s gonna die on. Anyway.

Yeah. Takes. Takes the. The bones from the tombs and. And crushes them up and. And scatters them on the. The altars to defile them. The human remains would defile them, so they’re no longer usable and basically decommissioning and.

Yeah. So. So he is. He is going. He is just laying things to waste.

He.

He deposed the idolatrous priests with whom the kings, blah, blah, blah. Those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of heavens. He brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord outside Jerusalem to the Wadi Kidron. What? That’s a. Is that a river?

So wadi is like a riverbed that sometimes fills with water if there’s rain. So this is. This is the valley that’s on the east side of the Temple Mount.

Okay. And then he beat it to dust and threw the dust upon the graves of the common people. So. So he’s now desecrating graves of just regular people.

Most regular people. But if you go down a little further, he’s. He’s going through. And it says in verse 16, he turned and look. Looked up at the tomb of the man of God who had proclaimed these things. Then he said, what is that monument that I see? The people of the city told him it is the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and proclaimed these things that you have done against the altar at Bethel. He said, let him rest. So that he’s like, screw you. Screw you. Screw you. You’re cool.

This guy’s okay.

Screw you.

Yeah, this is. That’s my guy right there. Don’t do anything there. But, like, this is. It’s funny because as I talk to you now, I see that this is even worse than it was when I read it. Like, he is. He is going out of his way not just to sort of destroy the. The objects of the thing and. And also, like, kill some of the worshipers and the priests and whatever. But he is defiling not just. Not just their temples, but definitely their temples. Like, you know, he defiles the temple of Chemosh, the abomination of Moab. We’ve talked about Chemosh before. As a matter of fact, there’s kind of a. You know, you were talking about the vassalage earlier with Hezekiah and that. You know, we talked many, many months ago about a mirror image of that. Which is the. Which is when Moab threw off the vassalage of.

Of Israel.

Or Israel. Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, so which. Which feels very. Which felt very similar, but this. So basically, this is a. This is a massacre. This is a. This is horrifying. And, and he did like, he basically did it. He didn’t just start the job, he. He finished it.

Yeah, yeah, it was. He started the job and he finished the job and. Which was. Hezekiah was unable to do this. There are reforms that were said to have happened under Hezekiah which involved destroying the high places, but it says he didn’t put an end to the worship of. Of Asherah and Baal and stuff like that, but Josiah went whole hog and, and decided to. To put an end to everything. And, and, but there’s an interesting thing to note about the result of all this, because this is. The idea is, oh, we found the Book of the Law, which basically says you’re only supposed to worship one deity in one place using one priesthood. And so at the end of the day, when the dust settles and Josiah comes back home, he now reigns over a country where everyone who wants to worship a deity has to come to his temple, controlled by his priesthood in his city, to worship the one God of whom he is the only representative.

And this is why people talk about cult centralization. He’s basically consolidating all of the cultic power to himself and saying, I. I am in charge of all of it now, and you’re not allowed to do anything unless you come to me. Which is a big change.

A big change. And one. You know, it’s so interesting because like I said, when I think. I think a lot of. A lot of. And I, you know, as I was reading about this and looking at articles about this, there are a lot of believers, of Christians, of people who.

Take.

This story to be the story of a hero, which is why we called it, you know, the segment Biblical Heroes Question mark. Because from that pers. From the perspective of, well, you know, that Book of the Law was. Was correct. He just did what. What was good in the eyes of the Lord, as it says in the book.

Yeah.

I don’t know how I could see it that way. I don’t know how I could look at it and honestly see that as, as a. Like, even if you believe that these people are worshiping someone, that they shouldn’t be worshiping the. This act. This is a, a genocidal act. And it, and, and it is done.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And yeah, there’s. There’s not really another way. Well, I think when, when you look at all the data, honestly, there’s not really a way to understand it as anything other than a power grab. I mean, later generations are going to say, well, that was an attempt to restore a degree of faith that would protect Israel against its enemies. But it failed pretty quickly because within, within nine years of his death already the Babylonians are like, hey, those are pretty nice shoes you got on. Give them to me. And so things go south and people are like, well, it’s because they, they were doing all the bad stuff. And, and this is all, you know, post hoc rationalization. Right. And, and this kind of rationalization is common throughout ancient West Asia. We see it in you, you mentioned Moab, the Mesha inscription. They, in that inscription, they rationalize why Chemosh allowed Israel to subjugate Moab. They say that Chemosh was angry with his land.

Right.

Which is the exact same thing that you find in the books of, of Kings and Chronicles that Adonai is angry with their people and so is allowing. Is using Assyria and Babylon as an instrument to, to punish them and to, and to try to discipline them. So it, it’s all these post hoc rationalizations and this, and this centralization of power and, and most scholars say Josiah probably did some of this stuff, but, like, the majority of it is just rhetorical. This, it wasn’t this grand thing where everybody came out of their houses and he’s like, off to Bethel and everybody marched to Bethel and they murdered the priests and, and burned their bodies on the altars, and we’re like, back to Jerusalem. And they all go back to Jerusalem.

I would say king or not, anyone who’s tried to wrangle even 40 people to do the same thing. Everybody come out and listen to me read a book. No, I don’t think, I don’t think it’s going to work out that easily.

Yeah. So many narratives put far too much faith in the ability of, of intellectuals to control populations of people. Yeah. Like, I have, I have so many friends who are like, you think I’m trying to overturn your upbringing of your kids and turn them into Marxists. I can’t even get them to read a chapter from a textbook.

Right.

Like, I am not the puppet master controlling your children. And, and yeah, this kind of, this kind of thing just isn’t realistic. This notion that everybody was like, oh, I am pricked in my heart and I’ve had a change of heart. And now I, I recognize that we’ve got to appropriately worship the Lord, so I’m destroying my memorabilia or memorabilia I’m destroying my memorials to my mother.

Right.

Because that’s no longer acceptable.

Is there also, I guess I should ask how much. So you say that it probably didn’t happen this, this, on this grand a scale, but we do think that this did happen.

Yeah, to some degree. And I, and I, and, and there are scholars out there, like. So Susan Ackerman is a wonderful scholar who’s recently published a book called Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel. And she’s also published other stuff on priestesses and, and goddesses and how they were worshiped and stuff like that. And, and she has published work arguing that part of this was probably trying to destroy ancestral worship and also worship that was curated by women. So there would have been women who, who controlled or at least curated, guided the worship of Asherah. And so part of it would have been also to shut them down. And so to the degree that, that these reforms took power away from minoritized groups like marginalized priesthoods like priestesses, women, the worship of Asherah, the worship of ancestors, that’s probably more historical.

That makes a lot of sense, I think.

Yeah. And, and there probably was. There probably were Asherim, Asherah things in the temple. There are scholars who have argued that, I don’t know if you recall, all the things that were put into the Ark of the Covenant. The tablets of the law are one. The, the, the manna, a bowl of that was another. And then there was Aaron’s budding rod.

Oh, right.

Which bears striking resemblance to an Asherah pole.

Yeah.

And so there’s a. There’s a scholar named Raanan Eichler who has argued that the story of Aaron’s budding rod might be a post hoc rationalization of why there’s an Asherah in the Ark of the Covenant.

You circle the wagons and you firm up the boundaries, right? And you lean heavy into the identity markers which are now everything that Josiah wanted them to be. And so the, the concept of what it means to be Israel, what it means to be God’s people, what it means to worship Adonai went from Josiah’s potentially temporary reforms to this is the key to our survival as a people going into, and then coming back out of the exile. And so I think incidentally, what Josiah wanted became cemented into the very foundation of the identity of Judah and Israel and became the foundation of the later Jewish identity. And, and so I think it’s an interesting incidental observation that, that if the.

If the exile hadn’t happened, it may have been. It like it may not have gone this way and they would have gone back to Asherah worship and all these other things.

Maybe.

I think that’s fascinating. I think I. And it seems to me a very, a very strong possibility. I love it.

We have something like that going on in Egypt with Akhenaten when he comes to the throne and he’s suddenly like every. Hey, everybody’s Aten worship, worship Aten everybody. And, and you know, moves the capital and changes everything and there’s all these reforms and then he dies. And his son Tutankhamun was like, yeah, no, we’re gonna go back to the way things.

Don’t worry about it.

It’s fine. And so this temporary little, little glitch in, in Egyptian history. So who knows if, if that could have happened, something like that within a couple generations of Josiah, we’ll never know because the Babylonians came knocking at the door.

All right, well, that’s, that’s nuts. That’s very interesting. But we have another, another segment that we got to get to, so. All right, and, and it’s quasi related, but we’re going to, we’re going to do a segment that we’re going to call Artifacts and Fiction. And this segment of Artifacts and Fiction, Dan, is.

Yes, sir.

We’re gonna, we’re gonna head back to Hezekiah. Am I correct?

We’re gonna talk about Hezekiah because we mentioned that Sennacherib came through town and when he was in town, he was like, I don’t like the looks of those temples, let’s destroy them all. So there was this de facto cult centralization caused by the destruction of all these temples. And we have discovered some of them.

Oh, wow.

We have more than one temple from the first temple period that all indications are that these things were authorized by the central Judahite authorities in Jerusalem. One of them is in the southern desert, a place called Arad. It is in, in the Negev. It’s on the top of this. This hill that. It’s in the corner of a fortress that was built there. So if you look at the archaeological reports, they call, I believe they call it Stratum 10. But there’s a temple built into the corner of this fortress. And this temple was discovered in the 60s, and it was basically covered in about 6ft of soil of earth. And when they dug it out, they found a standing stone and they found a couple of incense altars just laying on their side in the Holy of Holies, and kind of down the steps of the Holy of Holies. And they weren’t destroyed.

They were just kind of turned over and covered in a bunch of earth. And, you know, the, the altar is there. They found a bunch of dishes, a bunch of implements. They found letters written on potsherds that are talking about the house of Adonai, that are talking about priestly families that are mentioned in the Bible, that are, that are talking about correspondences back and forth with Jerusalem. So this is a temple that is probably under, if not Hezekiah’s purview, maybe Hezekiah’s predecessors, Jotham or Ahaz or something like that. But this is an authorized temple.

But some other scholars came in and said usually when you destroy a cult site and you don’t want worship to go on there, you actually destroy the implements of worship. You destroy the divine images.

Yeah.

You don’t just gently lay them on their side and cover them up in soil.

You stay there. Don’t, don’t look around anymore.

Good night, sweet prince. And so the like. And, and we see another one of the other temples I’ll talk about. There’s an example of a divine image that was broken, and then the broken pieces were incorporated into the wall. And so that, that sound, that’s more like what you do when you are destroying somebody’s implements of worship. But here they were, they just were like, oh, go down. And. And one theory is that this was actually Hezekiah hiding the cult site because Sennacherib, because this is far in the south. Sennacherib starts in the north and comes south. Doesn’t make it all the way to the southern desert, to the Negev. But one theory is that Hezekiah was like, oh, let’s. He’s destroying cult sites, let’s decommission it, let’s dismantle things, let’s cover it up and maybe he will pass it by.

Put up a sign that says drive in movie or something. Yeah, throw them off the scent.

Yeah, Ain’t no divine images in here. And, and then for whatever reason, it was just never recovered. Another theory is that it was Sennacherib who came through and was like, bye bye temple. And just, was like, ah, just do it quick, whatever you got to do. And they were just.

Okay.

And they just dumped a bunch of earth on it and, and, and patted it down and, and we’re like, all right, moving on. So a few different possibilities what has happened to this temple. But we just, we found a bunch of fascinating stuff that corresponds in many ways with the way that temple worship in Jerusalem is described. You know, the, the construction of the tabernacle, what kind of implements are being used. And some of the, the implements that were discovered at this temple in Arad even had a little, a letter called a qof and then a kaf, which scratched into the corners of these, of these like dishes. And, and this would have meant Kodesh, or sanctified, consecrated for the priests. In other words, marking this as temple gear. You’re not allowed to use these dishes. These are for the priests in the temple, which is, you know, if you look in Exodus, you have the same thing was like supposed to be written on the, the headdress of the high priest and things like that.

So it’s close. It’s following very closely on the way that worship and temple worship is prescribed in the Bible. But it’s not the Jerusalem temple. It’s an entirely separate temple where they worshiped Adonai, the God of Israel, with divine images. Specifically standing stone, which is in the, in the Hebrew Bible. If you look in the Old Testament, it will call him a pillar. That’s a matzevah. The plural is matzevot. That’s a standing stone. That’s what we have there. And then about less than 10 years ago, there was another one of these discovered in just a little northwest of Jerusalem. If you take the main highway heading west out of the north end of Jerusalem, there’s a part where you come around the top of some hills and you go down a little valley and. And then the freeway goes back up the other side of the valley. And at the bottom of that valley under the freeway, they, whenever they need to build something, they always have to.

In Israel, they always. In Palestine, they always go in and do a little excavation, right. Just to see if there’s anything that needs to be preserved. And doing this, they were like, oh, son of a. All right, fine. Normally they go, okay, do what you got to do, but you got six months. And then we’re. We’re the bulldozers are, are turning on and they discovered a temple. And it’s a place. They call it Tel Motza, but it is same kind of story. It is a First Temple period temple. And they discovered. They didn’t discover the holy of holies. As far as I know. They have not uncovered a holy of holies that’s discernible, that has a bunch of stuff in it. But they did discover some pits where they threw discarded or maybe not yet discarded implements and instruments and objects.

And some of them have headdresses on them that make some archaeologists think this might be a deity of some kind. And they, this is where they found one a what looks like a standing stone. And the only part of it that we found is broken off. And it shows two. Two legs with some feet sticking in the same direction. But this looks very close to the smiting pose that the Semitic storm deity would be represented in. So somebody like Baal or Adonai, right. Is. Was at one point probably represented on a standing stone. And we have other standing stones that have Baal represented in this way in the smiting pose, which means usually turn sideways kind of that Egyptian. Both feet pointed in the same direction. And then they have one hand up where they’re holding a mace or something like that.

But about to smite somebody.

Yeah, we’ve got the. Got my smiting pants on and. And it was broken and just used as raw material for building part of the wall of the temple.

Oh, wow.

They, they found it upside down and broken and, you know, basically mortared into the wall of the temple. So there’s. They’re still trying to figure out exactly what was going on in this temple. But this was like, this is closer to Jerusalem than Bethlehem is. If I, if, if I recall correctly, if my spatial memory is. Is accurate. And this would have been active at the same time that the first temple was active in Jerusalem. So there’s no way that thing was operative without Jerusalem’s approval.

Right.

And this would have been around the time period of Hezekiah, I think.

You know, I just googled the Tel Motza temple, and I think the most impressive part about it, I don’t know how those ancient Hebrews were able to build that giant freeway over top of it, but that’s really, that’s a powerful. That’s, that’s really impressive. So the, it is interesting. Like, literally, like they’ve clearly, they just raised up the freeway and just built right over it.

Yeah, yeah. And the initial excavations took place before they. The, the freeway was there, which is why you’ll see some aerial photography of the temple and, and, you know, outlines of the wall and everything like that and, and some pillars out front. So again, very much in the style of the Jerusalem Temple, but they were like, hey, we got to get this highway in. And so they were like, just build it over top. Yeah. And, and so now you gotta, you’ve got to exit the highway. I have not been to this temple. I hope at some point to visit that, that temple. I hope at some point for things to calm down enough so that it is, it is appropriate to, to visit. Right. And there is not so much threat to people’s lives there, but the, the excavations are ongoing. And so, yeah, this is, this is another datum that kind of complicates the narrative that you shared earlier, that everybody just knew there was one temple, there was one nation, there was one God. It doesn’t seem like that was the case until we have initially Sennacherib, kind of forcing upon people this de facto cult centralization.

And in my opinion, the next two kings were probably like, all right, let’s get back to, to worship and all over the place. And then Josiah was looked around and kind of went, I don’t know, I kind of like everybody having to come down here to, to my neck of the woods to bring money and to bring goods and to bring offerings. You know, it kind of rings my bell. So, hey, maybe we should discover a book.

Yeah.

And, and by the way, most scholars think that this story is a pretense for the introduction of the book of Deuteronomy , at least a very early stage of the book of Deuteronomy , if not the earliest layer, one of the early layers that is then later added onto and supplemented by the generations that came after.

Okay, well, since you say that, now I’ve got to help have you walk me through a little timeline here, because obviously Deuteronomy, the book, precedes Second Kings.

Yeah. By, by like 700 years.

Yeah. So I, so when a. I also want to know when was Second Kings written? Like how long after Josiah’s reign was Second Kings written? Like how, how long of a. How, how backward looking was this? And then, and then. Yeah. Where does Deuteronomy fit into that? Why, why is Deuteronomy suddenly.

So the, the books of Samuel and Kings are probably cobbled together from the royal annals that were being kept from probably the 9th or 8th century BCE down. But there were editors who were gathering things together. And so the books of Samuel and Kings are probably mainly Deuteronomistic, meaning it was probably the scribal school that was associated with the development of Josiah’s propaganda that began to gather these annals together and string them together in this narrative that talks about the Northern Kingdom. And the Northern Kingdom fell and they were wicked and then there was righteous Hezekiah, and then there was bad Manasseh and bad Amon, and then there was super righteous Josiah. And so they’re probably coming shortly after and they’re telling stories about what happened before, but telling those stories in a way that makes the Northern Kingdom out to be the bad guys and make any.

And that makes any king that supported worship of other deities, like Asherah, supported worship at other temples, supported worship using inappropriate methods or, or instruments, they’re the bad guys. And then all the kings that were supported or maybe anticipated Josiah’s reforms, they were the good guys, which was mainly Hezekiah and Josiah. Okay, so the folks who are responsible for putting together Samuel and Kings are probably also responsible for bringing together the early stages of Deuteronomy. But that was being supplemented and added onto and redacted and edited probably for another 200 years after Josiah died, before things were, were brought together with the priestly layer and other non priestly material. So it’s, it’s phenomenally complex. There’s a wonderful book by Thomas Romer called the so called Deuteronomistic History that I believe was published in 2009 or 2008, 2010, that.

No, it would have to be 2008 or 2009 because I read it when I was at Oxford in 2009 and 2010. But it was. That’s a wonderful discussion of how people think the, the Deuteronomistic history which includes books of Samuel and Kings came together.

Okay, well, there you go. I, I find this all fascinating. I love it. I think it’s interesting I and you and I are gonna I, I might have you talk me through a couple more things in in the in the after party for our patrons because I, I’m, I, I’m still in the weeds about a few things about what Deuteronomistic actually is referring to what that means.

Right.

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