There has always been something unsettling to me about
connecting Deuteronomy with the Josianic Reforms. First of all, the Book of
Deuteronomy does not present itself as a “scroll” but rather is quite
dramatically presented as an oral speech of Moses. The book begins, “These are the
words that Moses spoke” (Deut 1:1). More than this, Deuteronomy focuses
on the figure of Moses as the lawgiver. The book begins and ends with Moses. It
starts with Moses giving a farewell speech as Israel is about to cross over the
Jordan into the Promised Land. Moses’ speech concludes in chapter 27, and then
the book as a whole concludes with the story of Moses’ death. The Book of
Deuteronomy is all about the figure of Moses, but the scroll that is found by
Hilkiah is not associated with Moses at all. This seems like a huge
omission—that is, if the scribes telling the story intended us to think that
this scroll was related to the Book of Deuteronomy in its final form. In fact,
the later priestly scribes who compiled the Book of Chronicles (probably in the
fourth century BCE) thought the omission of Moses from the story of Josiah’s
Reform had to be remedied. So in their account written during the Persian
period, they make the connection quite clearly: “the priest Hilkiah found the
scroll of the Torah of the Lord given through Moses” (2 Chr 34:14). But
that note is not in the Book of Kings. Kings never attributes the scroll that
was found to Moses. It is called “the scroll of the Torah” and “the scroll of
the Covenant,” but it is never suggested that Moses was in any way responsible
for the scroll. The critical figure in the finding of the scroll is only the
priest Hilkiah and then the scribe Shaphan, who gets the scroll from Hilkiah
and reads it. This alone should suggest that we should look for priestly
influences for the Josianic Reform, and this is just what Monroe found in her
analysis. More specifically, the Josianic Reform addresses issues of defilement
as articulated in the “Holiness Code,” a section of the Book of Leviticus (chs.
17–26).
concerned with centralization of worship in Jerusalem.
This idea is perhaps part of the legacy of reading Josiah’s Reforms through the
lens of Deuteronomy, and in this case, Deuteronomy 12 (or “the Law of
Centralization”). However, centralization is not really central to the Josianic
Reforms. Rather, centralization was likely an aspect of the earlier reform under
King Hezekiah, which was mentioned in just one biblical verse stating that
Hezekiah “removed the high places” (2 Kgs 18:4). Archaeological excavations
support this understanding of Hezekiah’s Reform. Several Judean temples and
shrines outside of Jerusalem come to an abrupt end in the archaeological record
in the late eighth century BCE. The late eighth century was about the
centralization of Jerusalem—demographically, politically, and religiously.
There likely continued to be a push toward centralization of Jerusalem in the
seventh century, but that was not when it began.
Josiah’s Reform was more concerned with a religious
ideology about purity. For example, there is an interesting tension between the
priests in the countryside whose shrines are defiled and the Jerusalem priestly
hierarchy. But in the end the priests from various towns were allowed a place
in religious worship: “The priests from the high places did not sacrifice at
the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but still ate unleavened bread with their
fellow priests” (2 Kgs 23:9). The Am Ha’aretz scribal community was
allied with the rural priests and Levites. An alliance between the rural
priestly community, the Levites, and the elders comes together to support the
young king Josiah. The scribal community updates the Book of Kings as well as
the Book of Deuteronomy, and they collect the priestly traditions known as the
“Holiness Code.” (William M. Schniedewind, Who Really Wrote the Bible: The
Story of the Scribes [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024], 146-47)