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Chapter 34 begins the record of the reign of this king. He became king when he was 8 years old and reigned for 31 years. He made great attempts to remove Idolatry from Judah. He begin a series of repairs to the Temple where he found the Book if Deuteronomy that had been lost since the time of Samuel, about 550 years before. He declared his intentions to keep the Law and made a covenant with God to do so.
When Josiah was 16 years old, in the eighth year of his reign, he began to search of the God of his ancestor, David. For four years he made an effort to clean up Judah and Jerusalem. He destroyed the pagan altars especially the alters of Baal. He burned the bones of the pagan priests upon their own altars. Then he went to the cities in Manasseh, Ephraim, Simeon and even Naphtali and did the same thing there.
During the 18 years of his reign he cleaned up the Temple, he appointed city officials in Jerusalem and he set up a collection system for the Temple to finance the repairs that the previous kings had destroyed. The Levites supervised the repairs.
On day when Hilkiah was at the Temple supervising the repairs, he found an old scroll. It turned out to be a copy of one of the books of Moses, the Book of Deuteronomy. The scroll was taken to the king along with the report of the progress on the repairs to the Temple. When the King read the scroll he ripped his cloths in despair and he summoned his assistants and sent them to the Temple to pray and plead with the Lord for forgiveness.
The men went to Huldah, the Prophet, the wife of Shallum, and when she heard of the king's trouble, she told them to go to him and tell him that the Lord said, "Because you have humbled yourself and are sorry for the sins of Judah, I will not destroy the city and it's people until after your death," So they went back and told the king what the Lord had said.
When King Josiah heard what the Lord had said, he called all the Elders of Judah and the Priests and Levites and all the people great and small and they assembled at the Temple. There the king made a pledge unto the Lord to follow His commandments with all his heart and soul and to do as it was written in the scroll. Then he required everyone in Jerusalem to subscribe to this pack and all of them did.
So Josiah through out the remainder of his lifetime served Jehovah, the God of his ancestors.
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