2 Kings 23:15-24

Complete Jewish Bible

¹⁵ He smashed the altar that was at Beit-El and the high place made by Yarov‘am the son of N’vat, who caused Isra’el to sin. Yes, he smashed that altar and the high place; he burned the high place, stamped the ashes to powder, and burned up the asherah. ¹⁶ Then, as Yoshiyahu was turning around, he noticed the burial caves that were there on the mountain; so he sent and had the bones taken out of the burial caves and burned them on the altar, thus desecrating it, in keeping with the word of Adonai which the man of God had proclaimed, foretelling that these things would happen. ¹⁷ Then he asked, “This monument here that I’m looking at, what is it?” The men of the city told him, “It marks the burial cave of the man of God who came from Y’hudah and foretold the very things you have done to the altar of Beit-El.” ¹⁸ He replied, “Let him be; no one is to move his bones.” So they left his bones undisturbed, along with the bones of the prophet who had come from Shomron.

¹⁹ Yoshiyahu also removed all the shrines of the high places in the cities of Shomron, which the kings of Isra’el had made in order to provoke [Adonai] to anger, and treated them the same as in Beit-El. ²⁰ He put to death all the priests of those high places on the altars there, then burned human bones on them. Finally he returned to Yerushalayim.

²¹ The king issued this order to all the people: “Observe Pesach to Adonai your God, as written in this scroll of the covenant.” ²² For Pesach had not been so observed since the days when the judges ruled Isra’el — not during the times of any of the kings of Isra’el or of the kings of Y’hudah. ²³ But in the eighteenth year of King Yoshiyahu this Pesach was observed to Adonai in Yerushalayim.

²⁴ Yoshiyahu got rid of the mediums and the people using spirit guides, as well as the household gods, the idols and all the disgusting things spotted anywhere in Y’hudah and Yerushalayim. He did this in order to establish the words of the Torah written in the scroll Hilkiyahu the cohen had found in the house of Adonai.