⁵ and said to them: “Hear me, Levites! Now ^[a]sanctify yourselves, ^(A)sanctify the house of the Lord God of your fathers, and carry out the rubbish from the holy place.

⁶ So slaughter the Passover offerings, ^(A)consecrate yourselves, and prepare them for your brethren, that they may do according to the word of the Lord by the hand of Moses.”

^16 (A)Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? ¹⁷ If anyone ^[a]defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are.

⁹ And He said to me, “Go in, and see the wicked abominations which they are doing there.” ¹⁰ So I went in and saw, and there—every ^(A)sort of ^(B)creeping thing, abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, ^[a]portrayed all around on the walls. ¹¹ And there stood before them ^(C)seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel, and in their midst stood Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan. Each man had a censer in his hand, and a thick cloud of incense went up. ¹² Then He said to me, “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the room of his idols? For they say, ^(D)‘The Lord does not see us, the Lord has forsaken the land.’ ”

¹³ And He said to me, “Turn again, and you will see greater abominations that they are doing.” ¹⁴ So He brought me to the door of the north gate of the Lord’s house; and to my dismay, women were sitting there weeping for ^[b]Tammuz.

¹⁵ Then He said to me, “Have you seen this, O son of man? Turn again, you will see greater abominations than these.” ¹⁶ So He brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house; and there, at the door of the temple of the Lord, ^(E)between the porch and the altar, ^(F)were about twenty-five men ^(G)with their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east, and they were worshiping ^(H)the sun toward the east.

¹⁷ And He said to me, “Have you seen this, O son of man? Is it a trivial thing to the house of Judah to commit the abominations which they commit here? For they have ^(I)filled the land with violence; then they have returned to provoke Me to anger. Indeed they put the branch to their nose. ^18 (J)Therefore I also will act in fury. My ^(K)eye will not spare nor will I have pity; and though they ^(L)cry in My ears with a loud voice, I will not hear them.”

³ For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was still ^(A)young, he began to ^(B)seek the God of his father David; and in the twelfth year he began ^(C)to purge Judah and Jerusalem ^(D)of the ^[a]high places, the wooden images, the carved images, and the molded images. ^4 (E)They broke down the altars of the Baals in his presence, and the incense altars which were above them he cut down; and the wooden images, the carved images, and the molded images he broke in pieces, and made dust of them ^(F)and scattered it on the graves of those who had sacrificed to them. ⁵ He also ^(G)burned the bones of the priests on their ^(H)altars, and cleansed Judah and Jerusalem. ⁶ And so he did in the cities of Manasseh, Ephraim, and Simeon, as far as Naphtali and all around, with ^[b]axes. ⁷ When he had broken down the altars and the wooden images, had ^(I)beaten the carved images into powder, and cut down all the incense altars throughout all the land of Israel, he returned to Jerusalem.

Hilkiah Finds the Book of the Law^(J)

^8 (K)In the eighteenth year of his reign, when he had purged the land and the ^[c]temple, he sent ^(L)Shaphan the son of Azaliah, Maaseiah the ^(M)governor of the city, and Joah the son of Joahaz the recorder, to repair the house of the Lord his God.

¹² He said to them, “You are the heads of the fathers’ houses of the Levites; ^[a]sanctify yourselves, you and your brethren, that you may bring up the ark of the Lord God of Israel to the place I have prepared for it.

The Corinthians’ Repentance

7 Therefore,^(A) having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

³⁴ But the priests were too few, so that they could not skin all the burnt offerings; therefore ^(A)their brethren the Levites helped them until the work was ended and until the other priests had ^[a]sanctified themselves, ^(B)for the Levites were ^(C)more diligent in ^(D)sanctifying themselves than the priests.

¹⁵ And they gathered their brethren, ^(A)sanctified^[a] themselves, and went according to the commandment of the king, at the words of the Lord, ^(B)to cleanse the house of the Lord. ¹⁶ Then the priests went into the inner part of the house of the Lord to cleanse it, and brought out all the debris that they found in the temple of the Lord to the court of the house of the Lord. And the Levites took it out and carried it to the Brook ^(C)Kidron.