¹⁴ He broke the pillars in pieces, cut down the sacred poles,^[a] and covered the sites with human bones.^(A)

⁵ But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles,^[a] and burn their idols with fire.^(A)

²⁴ you shall not bow down to their gods or serve them or follow their practices, but you shall utterly demolish them and break their pillars in pieces.^(A)

¹⁶ As Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the mount, and he sent and took the bones out of the tombs and burned them on the altar and defiled it, according to the word of the Lord that the man of God proclaimed when Jeroboam stood by the altar at the festival; he turned and looked up at the tomb of the man of God who had proclaimed these things.^[a](A)

²⁷ “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of uncleanness. ²⁸ So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

¹² Seven months the house of Israel shall spend burying them, in order to cleanse the land. ¹³ All the people of the land shall bury them, and it will bring them honor on the day that I show my glory, says the Lord God.^{(A) 14} They will set apart men to pass through the land regularly and bury any invaders^[a] who remain on the face of the land, so as to cleanse it; for seven months they shall make their search.^{(B) 15} As the searchers^[b] pass through the land, anyone who sees a human bone shall set up a sign by it until the buriers have buried it in the Valley of Hamon-gog.^{[c] 16} (A city Hamonah^[d] is there also.) Thus they shall cleanse the land.

8 At that time, says the Lord, the bones of the kings of Judah, the bones of its officials, the bones of the priests, the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs,^{(A) 2} and they shall be spread before the sun and the moon and all the host of heaven, which they have loved and served, which they have followed, and which they have inquired of and worshiped, and they shall not be gathered or buried; they shall be like dung on the surface of the ground.^(B)

³ For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was still a boy, he began to seek the God of his ancestor David, and in the twelfth year he began to cleanse Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the sacred poles,^[a] and the carved and the cast images.^{(A) 4} In his presence they pulled down the altars of the Baals; he demolished the incense altars that stood above them. He broke down the sacred poles^[b] and the carved and the cast images; he made dust of them and scattered it over the graves of those who had sacrificed to them.^(B)