The Book They Forgot They Had

Josiah was eight years old when he became king. By the time our scene opens he is twenty-six, and he has decided to repair the temple. It is, at first, a building project. He sends Shaphan the scribe down to the house of the LORD to pay the workmen, count out the silver, hire the carpenters and the masons. Honest, ordinary administration.

And in the middle of clearing out the temple to fix it, Hilkiah the high priest says, almost in passing, “I have found the Book of the Law in the house of the LORD.” Read that slowly. The high priest is announcing the discovery of God’s word inside God’s own temple — as a surprise. The scroll had not been read aloud in living memory. Manasseh and Amon, Josiah’s grandfather and father, had reigned fifty-seven years between them and filled Jerusalem with altars to other gods. The Law had not been banned. It had simply been misplaced. The building still stood; the sacrifices, in some form, still went on; and the book that told them who they were had slid behind the furniture of religion.

Notice the order of events. Josiah sets out to fix the structure, and instead the structure yields up the thing that fixes him. He came to repair a building and was repaired by a book.

A friend of mine inherited his grandmother’s house after she died. For months he meant to clear it out and never quite did. One winter afternoon, sorting the bookcase to decide what to keep, he pulled down her family Bible — the big one, with the gold edges gone gray. He had seen it on that shelf his whole life. He had never once opened it.

Inside the cover, in her hand, was a list: every birth, every marriage, every death in four generations, his own name among them. And tucked between two pages, a folded letter she had written to whoever found it, telling them she loved them and asking them to read what she had underlined.

He sat on the floor of that emptying house and wept. The book had been in arm’s reach for thirty years. The words had been there the whole time. Nothing about the letter changed the day he found it. What changed was that he finally opened it and read.

That is Josiah’s morning exactly. The scroll did not become true the day it was found. It had been true, and ignored, the entire time. Finding it only meant that, at last, someone read it aloud and let it land.

Great-grandson of Hezekiah, grandson of the idolatrous Manasseh, Josiah became king of Judah at eight years old around 640 BC. In the eighteenth year of his reign, a temple repair turned up a forgotten scroll of the Law. Josiah heard it, tore his robes, sought God through the prophetess Huldah, purged Judah of idols, and led the nation into renewed covenant — keeping a Passover unlike any since the days of the judges. Scripture says no king before or after him turned to the LORD so completely.