¹Then the king sent word, and they assembled all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem before him. ²And the king went up to the house of the Lord, as did every man of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests and the prophets and all the people, both small and great, and he read, with them hearing, all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord. ³And the king stood at the column, and he made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all his heart and with all his soul – to uphold the words of this covenant, which were written in this book. And all the people committed themselves to the covenant. ⁴And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest and the second rank priests and the doorkeepers to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the equipment made for Baal and for the phallic park and for every celestial body, and he burnt them outside Jerusalem in the cornfields of Kidron, and he took their ashes to Beth-El. ⁵And he put an end to the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed, and he burned incense on the idolatrous raised sites in the cities of Judah and the vicinity of Jerusalem, and he put an end to those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and to the moon and to the constellations of the zodiac and to every celestial body. ⁶And he brought the phallic image out of the house of the Lord, to outside Jerusalem, to the Kidron Brook, and he burnt it at the Kidron Brook, and he ground it to dust, and he threw its dust on the graves of the common people. ⁷And he demolished the houses of the male prostitutes which were in the precinct of the house of the Lord, where the women would weave canopies for the phallic image. ⁸And he brought all the priests from the cities of Judah, and he defiled the idolatrous raised sites where the priests burned incense, from Geba to Beersheba. And he demolished the idolatrous raised sites at the gates which were at the entrance of the Gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which was on a man's left at the city gate. ⁹But the priests of the idolatrous raised sites did not go up to the Lord's altar in Jerusalem, for instead they ate unleavened bread among their brothers. ¹⁰And he defiled Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom, so that no-one could make his son or his daughter pass through fire for Molech. ¹¹And he removed the horses which the kings of Judah had furnished for the sun, from the entrance to the house of the Lord to the office of Nathan-Melech the eunuch, which is in the suburbs, and he burnt the chariots of the sun with fire. ¹²And the king demolished the altars which were on the roof, by the upper room of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courtyards of the house of the Lord. Then he ran from there and threw their ashes on the Kidron Brook. ¹³And the king defiled the idolatrous raised sites which were facing Jerusalem, which are to the right of the Mount of Ruination, which Solomon king of Israel built to Astarte, the abomination of the Sidonians, and to Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and to Milcom, the abomination of the sons of Ammon. ¹⁴And he smashed the idolatrous statues, and he cut down the phallic parks, and he filled their place with men's bones. ¹⁵And he also demolished the altar which was in Beth-El, the idolatrous raised site which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who caused Israel to sin had made – both that altar and the raised site. And he burned the idolatrous raised site and ground it to dust, and he burned the phallic park. ¹⁶Then Josiah turned and saw the graves which were there in the mountain, and he sent a workforce and took the bones from the graves and burned them on the altar, and he defiled it, according to the word of the Lord which the man of God read – the man who read these things. ¹⁷And at one point he said, “What is this monument I see?” And the men of the city said to him, “The grave of the man of God who came from Judah and read these things which you have done concerning the altar of Beth-El.” ¹⁸And he said, “Leave him alone; let no man touch his bones.” So they spared his bones – the bones of the prophet who came from Samaria. ¹⁹And Josiah also removed all the houses of the idolatrous raised sites which were in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made, so as to cause provocation, and he dealt with them in the same way as all the operations which he carried out in Beth-El. ²⁰And on the altars he sacrificed all the priests of the idolatrous raised sites which were there, and he burned the human bones on them. Then he returned to Jerusalem. ²¹Then the king commanded all the people and said, “Celebrate the Passover to the Lord your God, as it is written in the book of this covenant.” ²²For Passover had not been celebrated like this since the days of the judges who judged Israel, not in all the days of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah. ²³But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah this Passover was celebrated to the Lord in Jerusalem. ²⁴And Josiah also eradicated the necromancers and the wizards and the amulets and the idols and all the abominations which had appeared in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, in order to establish the words of the law which were written in the book which Hilkiah the priest had found in the house of the Lord. ²⁵And there had not been any king like him before him, who returned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses, and after him there arose no-one like him. ²⁶But the Lord did not relent from his great and furious anger, because his anger had been kindled against Judah on account of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him. ²⁷And the Lord said, “I will also remove Judah from my presence, as I removed Israel, and I will reject this city which I chose – Jerusalem – and the house of which I said, ‘My name will be there.’ ” ²⁸And the rest of the affairs of Josiah, and everything he did, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah? ²⁹In his days, Pharaoh-Nechoh king of Egypt came up against the king of Assyria at the River Euphrates, and King Josiah went to confront him, but the king of Egypt killed Josiah in Megiddo when he saw him. ³⁰And his servants conveyed him by chariot, dead, from Megiddo, and they brought him to Jerusalem and buried him in his tomb. And the people of the land took Jehoahaz the son of Josiah, and they anointed him and made him king in place of his father. ³¹Jehoahaz was twenty-three years old when he started to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem for three months. And the name of his mother was Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah from Libnah. ³²And he did evil in the sight of the Lord, like everything that his fathers did. ³³And Pharaoh-Nechoh put him in bonds in Riblah, in the land of Hamath when he was reigning in Jerusalem. And he imposed a tax on the land of one hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold. ³⁴Then Pharaoh-Nechoh made Eliakim the son of Josiah king, in the place of Josiah his father, and he changed his name to Jehoiakim, and he took Jehoahaz, and he went to Egypt, and he died there. ³⁵And Jehoiakim gave the silver and the gold to Pharaoh, and he assessed the land so as to give the money according to Pharaoh's command. He exacted silver and gold from each man according to his assessment, from the people of the land, to give it to Pharaoh-Nechoh. ³⁶Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he started to reign, and he reigned for eleven years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Zebidah the daughter of Pedaiah from Rumah. ³⁷And he did what was wrong in the sight of the Lord, like everything that his fathers did.