for ages, unnoticed and unheeded, if not unknown, the Book of the

י.(ספר התורה) Law

This Sepher hat Torah was in all probability, judging from the effects produced, a copy of what is now known as the Book of Deuteronomy, or, at the least, of that portion of it that contains the covenant and the blessings and curses.

Some Scriptural critics have insinuated that Hilkiah only found what he had himself hidden, and that the book now found was a clumsy forgery, which yet imposed upon the king and the people. The view would be hardly deserving of notice, owing to its extreme improbability, had it not been put forward by men of unquestioned ability. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Hilkiah and Shaphan and the prophets of Jehovah, the representatives and exponents of morality, and of morality as a part of religion, would be capable of such a fraud in the name of Jehovah, yet it is incredible that a fraud, that affected as this did so many and so diverse vested interests, should have been acquiesced in without resistance by those with whose long-established privileges it interfered. There was, as we shall see, a tacit resistance to the reformation, but no sign that the opponents of reform considered that they had been imposed on by a pretended document. The book evidently awakened old memories, and this was the secret of its power. Can we believe that, in the age of the highest bloom of Hebrew literature, there were not scribes among the opponents of Jehovah, as well as among His adherents, of sufficient literary ability to detect such a flagrant imposition as the critics would have us believe was practised upon them?

The effect upon the mind of the king was very great. He rent his clothes, and sent messengers to inquire of Jehovah concerning the words of the book; and, in spite of the words of doom, spoken in reply through the prophetess Huldah, he at once set about the work of reformation. This was, externally, thorough and sweeping. He removed all the abominations from the Temple and from Jerusalem and from the cities of Judah, going even outside the limits of his own kingdom, as far as Bethel and the cities of Samaria, upon the same

1 The absence of the article from

does not warrant the translation of the phrase as simply "a law book." It is the universal rule that the definiteness of the absolute noun extends to the construct noun with which it is connected. Thus to take an instance from this very passage is not to be translated "in a house of Jehovah," but, as the construct word is rendered desi nite by the word that it limits, "in the house of Jehovah."

errand. After this was done, the Passover was celebrated in Jerusalem, according "as it is written in the book of this Covenant," in a manner that had not been seen in all the days of the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah, nor since the days of the Judges. After this, Josiah's reign lasted for thirteen years, in which it is recorded of him that, "like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to Jehovah with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the laws of Moses; neither after him arose any like him" (II. Kings xxiii. 21-25). But his zeal led him into imprudently opposing Pharaoh Necho, King of Egypt, and he was slain at the battle of Megiddo; and after his death, although the worship of Jehovah continued, the abuses he had removed were in great measure brought back; and his reforms seem to have been forgotten except by the few faithful "servants of Jehovah," who kept their faith alive during the gloomy years of trouble and distress that followed, and who were to be the centre of life for the people in their captivity.

To gain a correct idea of the magnitude of the changes that the reform brought about, we must notice the length of time that the objectionable practices had been in existence. The "Grove," or Asherah figure, had been in the Temple of Jehovah certainly since the reign of Manasseh (II. Kings xxi. 3), at the very least reckoning twenty years, and possibly seventy-five; and the Asherah worship had been common in Judah since the reign of Rehoboam (B.C. 975-958), a period of three hundred and fifty years (I. Kings xiv. 23, xv. 13; II. Kings xviii. 4). The altars of Ahaz had been in the Temple over a hundred years (II. Kings xvi. 10-16). The worship of Baal was probably practised by the aboriginal Canaanite population of the land, but had been introduced from the neighboring kingdom of Israel as early as the reign of Jehoram, who married the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, and who reigned in Judah B.C. 893-885 (II. Kings viii. 16-18); and, like the worship of the Asherah, it seems never to have been eradicated, though the best of the kings did not encourage it, and at this time it seems to have lost somewhat of its ancient popularity. The Sodomites are mentioned in the reign of Rehoboam (I. Kings xiv. 24), and as having been taken away out of the land by Asa (I. Kings xv. 12), whose reformation, which was, like that of Josiah, short-lived, was like it conducted on the lines marked out in Deuteronomy. The worship of the sun, and of the host of heaven, was practised by Manasseh (II. Kings xxi. 3) and probably by Ahaz, and the horses and chariots of the sun are mentioned as

having been the gifts of the "kings of Judah" (II. Kings xxiii. 11), as if the practice had been of long continuance. The worship of Jehovah on the high places had been practised certainly since the days of the Judges, and there is no record of its having been condemned by any recognized authority until the reign of Hezekiah. The statement in II. Chron. xiv. 3, 5, and xvii. 6, in regard to Asa and Jehoshaphat, are contradicted not only by the express statements in Kings, but by other statements of the chronicler himself (cf. II. Chron. XV. 17; I. Kings xv. 14; II. Chron. xx. 33; I. Kings xxii. 43).

The worship upon various high places seems to have been allowed and approved by the religious leaders of the people (I. Kings iii. 2). It was certainly practised by Samuel (I. Sam. ix. 12, 13, 14, 19, 25; x. 8; xi. 14, 15, et al.), by David (II. Sam. xxiv. 18–25), and even by Solomon (I. Kings iii. 3, 4); and these high places were never removed, according to the testimony of the Book of Kings, until the reign of Hezekiah, and were restored again immediately after his death. Their removal was at that time evidently a very unpopular measure, and we find Rabshakeh, the general of Sennacherib, making use of it as an argument to induce the people of Jerusalem to rebel against Hezekiah and make submission to his master (I. Kings xviii. 22, 25; II. Chron. xxxii. 10-12; Is. xxxvi. 7).1

The high places of Chemosh, Ashtoreth, and Milcom had been standing in the midst of the people since the days of Solomon, some

It would be beyond the purpose of this article to go to any great length into the question of the worship upon the high places. The considerations mentioned seem to conclusively prove the continued existence of the practice from the earliest times. A very ancient law (Ex. xx. 24-26) gave directions as to the way in which altars were to be made, and the prohibitions in Deut. xii. might easily have been understood to apply only to those high places which had been defiled by idolatrous worship. In the unsettled period of the Judges, attendance at a central sanctuary must at times have been impossible, though from I. Sam. i. 3, we see that it was practised. When the ark was in the hands of the Philistines, the sanctuary had lost its most sacred symbol, and it was not until the reign of David that anything like a central sanctuary again appears. It was most natural, then, that, notwithstanding the commands recorded in Deut. xii. had been given before the people crossed the Jordan, they should have been forgotten. Talmudic writers affirm that the law upon this subject did not apply until the Temple was built at Jerusalem. Even then the law could not have been generally or commonly known, as we find no sign that Jehoiada the priest, who was supreme during the minority of Joash, ever attempted to put down the worship, although he brought about the restoration of the Temple at Jerusalem and a revival of the worship and service of Jehovah (II. Kings xi., xii). V. article "Höhe," in Richm's Handwörterbuch d. Biblischen Altertums.

four hundred years, as long a time as from the discovery of America until the present day; but they seem to have been regarded as foreign chapels, which did not particularly concern the people of the land. Hence we may see that what Josiah did, in removing all these so long established institutions, was little short of an entire revolution, and was effected against the will of a very influential portion of the people, if not of an actual numerical majority. Jehovah was indeed the national God, but Baal and Asherah were the favorite divinities of a large part of the people, and had been the divinities of the Canaanites, the original inhabitants of the land, from whom the children of Israel had adopted many beliefs and customs. The Temple at Jerusalem was, indeed, recognized as the special throne of Jehovah, but the people were accustomed to their sacrifices in their own towns, or at the neighboring sanctuaries, and did not willingly yield to the demand of the more earnest worshippers of Jehovah, that the central sanctuary should be the only place where sacrifice should be offered. Accordingly, we find that when the movement lost the support and prestige of the royal power, it collapsed, and was not able to accomplish its purposes until the rigorous process of natural selection had picked out from the mass of the captive Judæans those few who were willing to return to their own land, and to establish there the commonwealth of Jehovah, and to live in obedience to His laws. The majority of the people either perished, or, like the ten tribes of Israel, were content to remain in the land of their exile, and to a great extent conformed to heathenism; but the few, in whose hearts the leaven of the true faith in Jehovah and His righteousness had worked, returned, and established for the first time, in the full sense of the term, a commonwealth based expressly upon the detailed requirements of the Law of Moses.

In the prophecy of Zephaniah we find recorded several facts that will assist us to a fuller understanding of this period, some of which are not directly stated elsewhere. In ch. i. 4-6 we read: "I will also stretch out my hand upon Judah and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and I will cut off (1) the remnant of Baal from this place, and (2) the name of the Chemarim with (3) the priests, and (4) them that worship the host of heaven upon the housetops, and them (5) that worship and swear allegiance to Jehovah, and (or yet) swear by Malcham (i.q., Milcom, Molech), and (6) those that are turned back from Jehovah, and (7) those who have not sought Jehovah, nor inquired for him."

Here we see that (1) vengeance is proclaimed against the remnant

of Baal (cf. II. Kings xxiii. 4), an expression which, though sometimes considered to indicate that this form of idolatry was not the leading or principal one, as in Israel under Ahab, but was an old worship which yet had some adherents in Jerusalem, yet more probably indicates that at the time of the prophet's utterance, in spite of Josiah's strongest measures, there were still left some remnant who remained faithful to their idolatrous worship. (2) The Chemarim are mentioned in II. Kings xxiii. 5 as being the priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah and in the places round about Jerusalem. The word is an Aramaic one, and is, in Syriac, the common one for priest. In Hebrew it is used always in a bad sense of priests of a religion other than that of Jehovah. Cf. Hosea x. 5 (cf. per contra Keil in loco ). They are here clearly distinguished from (3) the Cohanim, by whom are meant the Levitical priests of the high places, who were degraded from their office, yet allowed to eat of the hallowed food of the Sanctuary (II. Kings xxiii. 8, 9). These were worshippers of Jehovah; the Chemarim, on the other hand, were probably priests of images. Both Chemarim and Cohanim are threatened with destruction. (4) Those who worship the "host of heaven" are also denounced (cf. II. Kings xxiii. 4, 5, 11). (5) "Those who swear allegiance to Jehovah, yet swear by Malcham" (their king). In the Hebrew there is an evident contrast between the expression "swear to") and "swear by" (y), and the entire force of the passage is lost if we omit to distinguish between them, as in done in the A. V. The persons denounced under this title are evidently priests of Jehovah, who, in spite of their pretended allegiance to Him, are, in reality, believers in and worshippers or Molech. (It is possible also to consider the passage as referring to those who made their king's () will the measure of their devotion, who, in order to please Josiah, had taken the covenant with Jehovah, but who were ready to apostasize should that be the pleasure of his successors. Such men have existed in all ages of the world, and were plentiful at the period under consideration, as is shown both by what Josiah was able to accomplish and also by what he failed to do.) (6, 7) The next two classes include all opponents of Jehovah among the people, viz., those who have been His worshippers, and who have forsaken Him, and those who have always

The word literally means dark robed, clad in mourning, thus contrasting strongly with the white robes of the Levitical Priests and the gorgeous vestments of the High Priest.