The Religious Renaissance of King Josiah

The rabbis say (Sanhedrin 102b) that Manasseh would erase God's name for Torah scrolls and replace it with idolatrous names. Therefore, one of the kohanim feared that if Moshe's Torah scroll were to come into the king's hands, Manasseh would remove the divine names and replace them. He hid the scroll in a chamber between the walls. In Josiah's initial period, when he returned to God...the kohanim failed to find the scroll. But when they came to repair the house, Hilkiah found it between the walls and it was like finding a treasure; as such he said, "I have found the Torah scroll"...It would not have generated such fright had it not been the Torah scroll that was penned by Moshe's holy hands, directly from God.

והיה שם בך לעד, the written Torah, reposing in the Holy Ark is witness that I have predicted and warned against your abandoning G’d and His Torah. This is why I arranged for this testimony to be preserved in a place accessible even to the High Priest only once a year on the Day of Atonement. This original copy of the written Torah will, if need be, prove that all that is written in all the Torah scrolls later and accessible to all the people all the time was a true copy of the Torah Moses had received from G’d at Mount Sinai. It will serve as proof that the Torah scrolls in circulation among the Torah scholars and the righteous people who commissioned copies for their private libraries, are all true to the original and do not contain additions or omissions.
It would appear, however, that the Torah scroll found by the High Priest Chilkiyah (Kings II 22,8) was the very one which Moses had handed over to the priests who carried the Ark across the river Jordan which we referred to earlier. It contained only the passage dealing with the legislation pertaining to the king. It was this scroll in which Joshua wrote (added) the renewal of G’d’s covenant with the people which took place at Shechem. This was the record of Israel’s renewed undertaking to serve the Lord. Compare Kings II 22,13 where King Yoshiyahu refers to this scroll containing matters not contained in Moses’ original Torah scroll, as Joshua had written part of this scroll after the covenant’s renewal in Shechem. The King had become painfully aware how far the people had strayed from their solemn undertaking.

(4) Then the king ordered the high priest Hilkiah, the priests of the second rank, and the guards of the threshold to bring out of the Temple of the LORD all the objects made for Baal and Asherah and all the host of heaven. He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and he removed the ashes to Bethel. (5) He suppressed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed to make offerings^-e at the shrines in the towns of Judah and in the environs of Jerusalem, and those who made offerings to Baal, to the sun and moon and constellations—all the host of heaven. (6) He brought out the [image of] Asherah from the House of the LORD to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem, and burned it in the Kidron Valley; he beat it to dust and scattered its dust over the burial ground of the common people.

(7) He tore down the cubicles of the male prostitutes in the House of the LORD, at the place where the women wove coverings for Asherah. (8) He brought all the priests from the towns of Judah [to Jerusalem] and defiled the shrines where the priests had been making offerings—from Geba to Beer-sheba. He also demolished the shrines of the gates, which were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua, the city prefect—which were on a person’s left [as he entered] the city gate.^-d (9) The priests of the shrines, however, did not ascend the altar of the LORD in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread along with their kinsmen.^-f (10) He also defiled Topheth, which is in the Valley of Ben-hinnom, so that no one might consign his son or daughter to the fire of Molech. (11) He did away with the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, at the entrance^-g of the House of the LORD, near the chamber of the eunuch Nathan-melech, which was in the precincts. He burned the chariots of the sun.

(12) And the king tore down the altars made by the kings of Judah on the roof by the upper chamber of Ahaz, and the altars made by Manasseh in the two courts of the House of the LORD. He removed them quickly from there^-h and scattered their rubble in the Kidron Valley. (13) The king also defiled the shrines facing Jerusalem, to the south of the Mount of the Destroyer,^-i which King Solomon of Israel had built for Ashtoreth, the abomination of the Sidonians, for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom, the detestable thing of the Ammonites. (14) He shattered their pillars and cut down their sacred posts and covered their sites with human bones.