King Josiah’s Exciting Discovery
King Josiah’s Biblical discovery in the Temple at Jerusalem is exciting, but for a somewhat
different reason than ordinarily thought.
To see what was truly exciting here, focus on who can read what
when:
“And Hilkiah the high priest said to
Shaphan the secretary, ‘I have found the book of the law in the house of the
LORD.’ And Hilkiah gave the book to
Shaphan, and he read it. …Then
Shaphan the secretary told the king, ‘Hilkiah the priest has given me a
book’. And Shaphan read it before
the king.” II Kings 22: 8,
10
“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 he read in their hearing all the
words of the book of the covenant which had been found in the house of the
LORD.” II Kings 23:
2
Note that upon the discovery of what
traditionally is sometimes viewed as being the long-lost Book of Deuteronomy,
neither the priest Hilkiah, nor King Josiah, could read what had been
discovered. Only the scribe Shaphan
could read the original. Yet not
too long thereafter, King Josiah reads the text to the assembled multitude of
Jerusalem and Judah.
This may be a key to figuring out the great
antiquity of certain parts of the Torah.
Only the scribe Shaphan could read the original. That’s the single most important part of
the story. If, as seems likely,
there is at least a grain of historical truth to this story, then it appears
that Jewish wisemen in the 7th century BCE thought, probably
accurately, that at least parts of the Torah had originally been written using a
writing system that would be very easy to decipher for a person like King
Josiah’s scribe, who occasionally corresponded with Assyria or Babylonia, but
that would be impossible to decipher by literate people such as the high priest
of Jerusalem and King Josiah, who were very well-versed in alphabetical Hebrew
writing but who did not personally read the originals of correspondence sent
from Assyria or Babylonia. The
authors of II Kings and Chronicles highly praise King Josiah and his high priest
of Jerusalem, and those two individuals are portrayed as being highly literate,
yet those two individuals are nevertheless portrayed here as not being able to
read a single word of the original of the sacred writing that was found in the
Temple, which could only be read by King Josiah’s scribe (who on occasion
corresponded with Assyria and Babylonia as a key part of his official
duties). It’s the writing system,
you see, that’s the key here. The
language and vocabulary of the ancient sacred text that King Josiah claimed to
have found in the Temple would have been familiar to King Josiah
and his high priest. But by sharp
contrast, the writing system that was used in this ancient sacred text was
utterly indecipherable by King Josiah and his high priest, even though it was
eminently readable upon first sight by King Josiah’s
scribe.
That aspect of the story opens the door to
discovering how incredibly old certain parts of the Torah may be. II Kings is in effect telling us how
certain of the oldest parts of the Torah (not necessarily Deuteronomy) had
originally been written down, if we just pay close attention to what II Kings
tells us as to who could read what when.
Jim
Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois
