Josiah's Reforms

23 ^(A)Then the king sent, and all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem were gathered to him. ² And the king went up to the house of the Lord, and with him all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the priests and the prophets, all the people, both small and great. And ^(B)he read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant ^(C)that had been found in the house of the Lord. ³ And the king stood ^(D)by the pillar and ^(E)made a covenant before the Lord, ^(F)to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people joined in the covenant.

³ For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet a boy, he began to seek the God of David his father, and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the ^(A)Asherim, and the carved and the metal images. ⁴ And they chopped down the altars of the Baals in his presence, and he cut down the ^(B)incense altars that stood above them. And he broke in pieces the ^(C)Asherim and the carved and the metal images, and he made dust of them and ^(D)scattered it over the graves of those who had sacrificed to them. ^5 (E)He also burned the bones of the priests on their altars and cleansed Judah and Jerusalem. ⁶ And in the ^(F)cities of Manasseh, Ephraim, and Simeon, and as far as Naphtali, in their ruins^[a] all around, ⁷ he broke down the altars and beat the ^(G)Asherim and the images ^(H)into powder and cut down all the incense altars throughout all the land of Israel. Then he returned to Jerusalem.