Godly and characteristics of King Josiah
King Amon’s successor was the eight-year-old son of Josiah, who reigned for thirty-one years. The bible says about him: He did what was right in the sight of the Lord, walked in of his father David, and did not deviate either to the right or to the left (2 Kings 22: 2).
In the eighth year of his rulership, while still a boy, he began to turn to the Lord. In the twelfth year of his ruling, he began to cleanse Judah and Jerusalem from the heights and groves in which idolatry performed. He destroyed the carved and cast idols, destroyed the altars to Baal. King Josiah did not just cleanse Judah and Jerusalem. He tore down altars and dedicated trees, and crushed idols to dust, and crushed all the statues throughout the land of Israel, and returned to Jerusalem (2 Chr 34:7).
In the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah, the high priest Hilkiah found the book of the Law of the Lord in the temple. When the king heard the words of the Law, he tore his clothes. He gave a command to the high priest Hilkiah and others: ask the Lord for me and for those who remained with Israel and for Judas about the words of this found book, because the anger of the Lord is excellent, which burned upon us because our fathers did not keep the terms of the Lord to act according to everything written in this book(2 Chronicles 34, 21).
Hilkiah, on behalf of the king, turned to the prophetess, who lived in Jerusalem. She predicted in the name of God the calamities that will befall the country because the rulers and people left the service of God and worshipped idols. When the king told about this, he gathered all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem and went to the house of the Lord. There the king read aloud to all those present all the words of the book of the covenant, found by Hilkiah in the temple.
After this, Josiah made a covenant before the Lord followed the Lord and kept His commandments and His revelations and His statutes, with all his heart and soul (2 Chr 34, 31). For the rest of his life, King Josiah served the Lord faithfully.
The pious king did not live to see the national calamity that the Lord spoke about through Huldah. The prophecy of Josiah came true in 609. Pharaoh Necho walked through Palestine against the Babylonian king Josiah, with an army, to meet him and fight at Megiddo. Josiah fell in battle. All Judea and Jerusalem mourned his death.
