Josiah the Cult Killer

Dan McClellan Hezekiah was able to defend Jerusalem, and after a while, Sennacherib up and left, and later wrote that he trapped Hezekiah in his capital city like a bird in a cage, but ultimately couldn't take the city.

Dan Beecher Right. Couldn't get at the bird, but man, he was trapped there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. He rattled the cage a bit- ... and got upset and was like, "I'm not changing your newspaper."

Dan Beecher So take that, bird.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are good. It's funny, when I was prepping for this episode- Mm-hmm ... I thought it was a cool idea for a topic, and I was excited about delving into it and learning about it, and the more I learned about it, the more I was like- Oh, no.

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher "I don't know about talking about this in a time of Christian nationalism in our country."

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher It made me a little bit nervous. So I'm still excited about it.

Dan McClellan I still think it's a very interesting story from the Bible, and- But don't try what you're about to hear at home. Is that what you're trying to say?

Dan Beecher Yeah. Don't share this with any of your Christian nationalist friends. They'll think it is an instruction manual, and it's very much not.

Dan McClellan Thus, the interrogative nature of the title of this segment, which is...

Dan Beecher "Biblical Heroes?"

Dan McClellan Question mark?

Dan Beecher Yes. Yeah, that question mark is really important.

Dan McClellan That's a load-bearing question mark. It is a pregnant question mark. Thus, the rounded shape.

Dan Beecher Yes, indeed. Because we're going to be talking about Josiah- Mm-hmm ... a king who is talked about in both Kings and Chronicles because somehow Kings and Chronicles are the same thing. Are they the same thing?

Dan McClellan They're very different. However, Chronicles is basically taking Samuel and Kings and then some other stuff that we don't have, and rewriting it to tell most of the same stories, but in a different way.

Dan Beecher Yeah, that's weird.

Dan McClellan Yes, because it's coming much later.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay. Well, we're going to start, my main focus was on 2 Kings 23. 22 and 23, or? 22 and 23.

Dan McClellan Sure.

Dan Beecher Okay. But the rubber really hits the road in 23.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's where the exciting stuff happens.

Dan McClellan 22 is the pretense- ... for everything that happens in 23.

Dan Beecher So why don't we start there? Tell us a little bit about what's happening. Give us a little bit of background leading into 22.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And we'll go from there.

Dan McClellan So we're going to back up a little over a century to King Hezekiah, just to talk about the invasion of Sennacherib.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So when King Hezekiah comes to the throne, the nation of Judah is under vassalage to the Neo-Assyrian Kingdom. So they are paying them a tribute, they are sending soldiers when Assyria says, "Send soldiers," and Hezekiah decides that he doesn't like this, and he wants to ally with Egypt.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So he's going over to Egypt saying, "Can you help me throw off vassalage to the Assyrians? I'll pay tribute to you."

Dan Beecher "I'll be your vassal. That's much better."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And Assyria gets wind of this, and so we have Sennacherib, this Assyrian king, who decides he's going to invade. Scorched-earth campaign, starts in the north, destroys most of the Northern Kingdom, comes down south, destroys a bunch of major cities. Lachish, we've talked about Lachish a bit in the past. He destroys that city and memorializes that process on a bas-relief that covered numerous walls of his palace in Nineveh, and we have those reliefs. Well, the British Museum stole those reliefs- Yes ... and now they are on display.

Dan Beecher I just barely saw them a month ago.

Dan McClellan Oh, you did? You saw them.

Dan Beecher Okay. They were fantastic.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher When you and I do a tour into England, that's one of the things that we will show everybody.

Dan McClellan Yeah, definitely. And it's a fascinating portrayal of an Assyrian siege of a city. And we actually have the remains from the siege and can reconstruct the siege ramp and all that kind of stuff. And that became home base while trying to lay siege to Jerusalem. But they weren't able to take Jerusalem. Hezekiah was able to defend Jerusalem, and after a while, Sennacherib up and left, and later wrote that he trapped Hezekiah in his capital city like a bird in a cage, but ultimately couldn't take the city.

Dan Beecher Right. Couldn't get at the bird, but man, he was trapped there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. He rattled the cage a bit- ... and got upset and was like, "I'm not changing your newspaper. You're going to have to just pile up that crap."

Dan Beecher So take that, bird.

Dan McClellan And we have material remains from this event. So there was a tunnel that was carved under the City of David that you can walk through to this day. I find it a quite unnerving experience. I have done it multiple times, and I have found it quite unnerving. But that was dug so that they would have access to a spring that was outside the city. They would have secret access to this water. But anyway, the result of this is that pretty much all of the main cult sites, all the main places where people went to worship, if they were not worshiping privately in their own home or in little local shrines around the corner or something like that, they had to go to temples or larger cult centers, and these were all destroyed, all except for the Temple in Jerusalem. And so, you have what some scholars call a de facto cult centralization.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Where just incidentally, there only happens to be one main cult center where we can go. And Hezekiah was king when all this happens. And then you have two other kings after Hezekiah, Manasseh and Ammon, and then we get to Josiah, who reigns between around 639 to 609 BCE. And there are scholars, and I'm one of them, who think that after Hezekiah's reign, the next two kings tried to restore the cultic sites and the cultic practices that were going on in these cities prior to the invasion of Sennacherib. And then we get to Josiah and things change.

Dan Beecher Things go different.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher I think it's important to point out that when we're talking about these sort of cult places to worship, we're not just talking about worshiping a single god.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher I think that the image that most people have about sort of biblical times is that God's people, as sort of presented in the Bible- Mm-hmm ... we worship our one God, and that's all there is, and as long as you're one of our people, that's all you do.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher If they're even aware that other gods exist in the Bible, there's no sense that other Judeans would have any other ideas but to worship that single God in whatever correct way you would do it. But what's about to happen, what Josiah is about to do, make it clear, first of all, that that wasn't the case at all.

Dan McClellan Yeah. When we look at the facts on the ground, they tell a much different story, and what we get in the Bible is kind of a sanitized, idealized set of propagandistic stories.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And they're trying to assert, "Well, this is the way it is." And in reality, these texts are actually coming from a later time period and are looking back and saying, "We're going to tell you the story of our forefathers, but in a way that serves our interests." And that's one of the hard things to tease apart. Biblical scholars look at the archeology, they look at the text, they look at human nature and how these things work, and they've got to try to tease apart what seems likely to be historical versus what seems likely to be a retelling that is ahistorical precisely because it serves the structuring of power of someone later down the road.

Dan Beecher So that's- Right. It's the old adage that history is written by the victors, right?

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher It's this idea that however it turned out, that's going to be written as the correct way for it to have turned out.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's how that's going to be written, at least if it worked out well for the people who are currently in power.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And when I was growing up learning about early American history, we were taught that George Washington was this larger than life figure who was a champion for all these different virtues and ideals. And in the paintings that we see that are in legislative buildings around the country, he's literally a god- Yeah ... in a lot of the ways that he's represented.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And we get the cannot tell a lie stories, and we have all these ideologies, these ideas about how Washington was and the people around him. And if you go actually look at the history and how scholars reconstruct his life and things, dude had some major, major issues.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so we do the same thing. We tell the stories in a way that serves the image that we want to evoke- Right ... of what we are supposed to be as a people. And they were doing the same thing back then, only I think it's even more transparently propaganda in some of these stories.

Dan Beecher Let me just paint a picture, and you tell me how off base I am.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Because the image that I get, even from just reading this bit written by the victors, as we say, and written in a propagandistic way to serve a specific agenda- Mm-hmm ... I still, when I read it, and I don't go into it with the same eyes that I would've had when I was a believer. When I was a believer, I would've seen this very differently. But when I look at it now, I see it as there were a bunch of people who, worship was sort of spread out more.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And you have a society where, yes, you can worship Adonai, and you can probably go to the Asherah shrines, and there's talk of women who are, what is it, knitting or weaving?

Dan McClellan Yeah, weaving.

Dan Beecher Yeah, they're making things for Asherah or in honor of Asherah, and then there are other people who are worshiping Baal. But everybody seems to be getting along well.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher Society seems to be working, and that's just like many other places in the world at that time. You could worship multiple gods, and different gods had different uses for you. Is that about what we're looking at?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And you've also got a bunch of social levels at which this is going on, because- Hmm ... in your house, you might have an ancestral shrine. You've got, and this goes all the way back into Neolithic time periods where we've got your Jericho skull, where they've used clay and seashells to put flesh back on a skull, and that sits on the mantel, and that's Uncle Dave.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan And you bring him out on his birthday, and you have a festival, or you have a meal, and he's at the table. That kind of stuff is a tale as old as time. And you have something similar going on probably in early Israel, where you might have a standing stone that represents one of your ancestors, and you share a meal with it. You pour one out for the homies in front- Yeah ... of the standing stone. There are just numerous different ways that you can privately, in your own home, engage in ancestor worship. And you might seek their aid. You might, in one way or another, invoke their blessing on your family, on a new marriage, on so and so won't give me my tools back, so you might ask the ancestor to curse them with really bad something. So it can go on privately. It can go on within your little village. Maybe you got a little hamlet. You got a dozen homes, and maybe there's one ancestor, the great-great-grandfather who established the town. Maybe his standing stone and that of his wife is at the entrance to the town. We have discovered a bunch of this. And so you've got a local cult of some kind going on. Maybe you're worshiping Asherah because you're in a women's group, some kind of guild of weavers or of pot makers or something like that, and you have either Asherah or some other deity who's supposed to bless you for doing this kind of thing. Maybe you get together, and you, in some way or another, worship that goddess. There are a bunch of different levels on which the worship is going on as well.

Dan Beecher And so- I mean, this kind of thing still happens. This is not- Yeah ... different from trying to pray to saints or to, people do go to their ancestors and ask for help from their grandmothers who's looking out over them.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher This is still happening. It's very clear. You've talked about this from a cognitive science of religion perspective- Mm-hmm ... as just something that's very human to do.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Very natural to seek out connection with the people who've gone before, particularly if they've had significant impact on your life, or you sense in some way that you need help, and you think they're best equipped to provide that help. That's perfectly natural, and yeah, that's almost certainly what was going on in early Israel. We have found inscriptions, funerary inscriptions, so "Blessed be so and so by Adonai and his Asherah," which seems to suggest that both are sources of blessing in one way or another, and probably sources of different kinds of blessings. El was the patriarchal high deity you went to if you wanted, who was benevolent, and you went to beseech for help in certain situations. Adonai was the storm deity that you might beseech if you needed rain for your crops, or you needed some kind of blessing of fertility.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "My wife has a difficult pregnancy. We want to make sure that this baby makes it," or "That my wife survives the delivery," or stuff like that. So you would go to different deities for this kind of stuff, and we have evidence of people going to different deities and just generically seeking some kind of divine agency. There are artifacts we call Judean pillar figurines, which are small, maybe six to eight-inch high figurines that have a little base, and it looks like the bottom half of it is just a cylinder that widens a little bit to a base. But the top half is, usually, there's a face of a woman, either pinched to create eye sockets and a nose, or there can be a molded female face, and then there are usually arms holding up breasts. And these have been found, hundreds and hundreds of these have been found all around Jerusalem and Judah. And we think they're probably just generic, we're seeking some kind of agency out there to help heal somebody who might be sick or to protect somebody. You might line them up around your bed or something, or your- Hmm ... kid's bed if they have a really high fever, to ward off the demons or something like that. So there's an awful lot of that kind of stuff going on in this time period, and nobody seems to have concern with it. Yeah, it seems like- You don't have any very negative references to this.

Dan Beecher All of this is going fine. Everybody's getting along.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And then someone finds a book.

Dan McClellan Which is, isn't this always the way? So talk about- A book suddenly appears.

Dan Beecher Talk about that- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan a little bit. So it's about this kid named Atreyu, and no.

Dan Beecher Atreyu!

Dan McClellan Artax!

Dan Beecher All right, go on.

Dan McClellan And so, the high priest comes to the King Josiah one day and says, "So I found a book. It was in the temple, and turns out we've been doing everything wrong." And Josiah tears his clothes, and they take the book to Huldah the prophetess who lived in the college, which is how the King James Version reads, which I always thought was hilarious. I did a little cartoon showing some high priests at a dorm room, knocking on a door and stuff. Huldah opens the door, and she's like, "If the RA catches you here, I'm going to get in a lot of trouble." But, and then they read the book and they go, "Oh, crap. We're in a lot of trouble. We've been doing everything wrong."

Dan Beecher And Josiah, because he's the most righteous man to ever live, decides, "Well, we got to make things right." And Josiah, if Chronicles is to be believed, I don't remember if it said it in Kings, but Josiah was a kid. According to Chronicles, he came to power at age eight, and by the time this stuff was happening, he was like 16 to 20.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, in 2 Kings 22, it says, "Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign. He reigned 31 years in Jerusalem."

Dan Beecher Yeah, okay.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so yeah, he's pretty young for a king.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But, this is supposed to have happened, the finding, Hilkiah, the high priest, finds the Book of the Law in the 18th year of King Josiah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, he at least is eligible to be in the college.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Whether or not the RAs are going to kick him out is a different story.

Dan Beecher But all of this does seem like the act of a 26-year-old or someone who's in his 20s. Just doesn't- Yeah.

Dan McClellan Somebody who tears his clothes and says, "Woe is us. We've brought the judgment of God upon us. We need to reform everything."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And yeah. So then- That's where we get into 23.

Dan Beecher Yes. So now we're in chapter 23, and he's not gentle about- No ... how he decides to reform things.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher He basically just brings out everybody, and takes literally everyone.

Dan McClellan If you've seen "The Professional" "Everyone!" "Bring me everyone."

Dan Beecher It says he went up to the house of the Lord, I assume that means the temple.

Dan McClellan It does.

Dan Beecher And with him went all the people of Judah, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests, the prophets, and all the people. I think we've already said that. That's bad writing right there. "Both small and great. He read in their hearing all the words of the book." Oh, gosh. He read them the whole book?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Can you imagine, you're on your PlayStation or whatever, and somebody's like, "Hey, the king needs us."

Dan Beecher We're all supposed to go. Everybody, he- I'm on my lunch break ...

Dan McClellan screams everyone.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And they go up there and they're like, "He's reading to us?"

Dan Beecher "We have to hear a book?" Anyway, then he reads the book, and I guess as his justification for what he's about to do- Mm-hmm ... which is that he basically commands his priests to go into all of the temples and bring out all of the vessels for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Meaning, I guess the divine council, is that what we're talking about?

Dan McClellan That's part of it. In this time period, we're talking about the end of the 7th century BCE. We saw in Deuteronomy 4:19 the idea that the sun, the moon, and the stars, and all the host of heaven. So, host of heaven literally is the celestial bodies that are up there in the sky.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan But they're all seen as deities.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And we see this in Judges 5 with Sisera, the stars fought in their courses against Sisera.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan So, they're deities, and they're an army, and God marshals the army and all this kind of stuff. And so, what this is suggesting is that there were cultic objects that facilitated the worship of the host of heaven in the Jerusalem Temple. And so, the Tanak cult stand, which I think we've talked about before, at the very top of it, there's an equine figure and a sun disk- Hmm ... that is on the top of it with some rays coming out from it. But that would be an example of a member of the host of heaven, although the sun would be identified with the head god, would be identified with Adonai.

Dan Beecher Right. So, all of these artifacts, all of these various things that were used in worship of anyone other than Adonai- Right ... brought out, burned, destroyed, and their ashes carried to Bethel. I don't know what that's about.

Dan McClellan Well, they're destroying everything, the priests of the high places. So, they're also destroying all the other cult sites, which they're calling- Right ... high places, bamot, which means all the other temples.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And the ashes they're using to defile altars.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Well, they're killing people as well, and the human remains are - Oh, that's right.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's not just the things, it's not just the vessels. He ends up just killing... He deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained. Is deposed a euphemism here?

Dan McClellan What verse are we? I'll look at the Hebrew.

Dan Beecher This is verse five.

Dan McClellan Yeah, put an end to.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It's based on the verbal root, shavat, to cease, to rest. So, cause to cease- Okay ...

Dan Beecher the kemarim.

Dan McClellan So, the komer, it's a type of priest.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But considered an illegitimate priest, so not a Levitical priest. Oh, and if you want to tickle some Mormon ears here, this is always fun to do. Komer would be this type of priest. The type of priesthood held by these non-Levitical priests would be kemorah.

Dan Beecher That's a Mormon deep cut for all of you.

Dan McClellan Yeah, that's a deep cut, just for fun.

Dan Beecher That's a hill Dan's going to die on.

Dan McClellan Anyway- But yeah, takes the bones from the tombs- Uh-huh ... and crushes them up and scatters them- Yeah ... on the altars to defile them. The human remains would defile them, so they're no longer usable, and basically decommissioning and invalidating everything.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So, he is just laying things to waste.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher He deposed the idolatrous priests with whom the kings, blah, blah, blah. "Those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of heavens, he brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord outside Jerusalem, to the Wadi Kidron." Is that a river?

Dan McClellan So, wadi is like a riverbed that sometimes fills with water if there's rain.

Dan Beecher Okay, yeah.

Dan McClellan So, this is the valley that's on the east side of the Temple Mount.

Dan Beecher Okay. "And then he beat it to dust, and threw the dust upon the graves of the common people." So, he's now desecrating graves of just regular people?

Dan McClellan Most regular people, but if you go down a little further, he's going through, and it says in verse 16, "He turned and looked up at the tomb of the man of God who had proclaimed these things. Then he said, 'What is that monument that I see?' The people of the city told him, 'It is the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and proclaimed these things that you have done against the altar at Bethel.' He said, 'Let him rest.'" So, he's like, "Screw you, screw you, screw you.

Dan Beecher You're cool- This guy's okay ...

Dan McClellan and screw you."

Dan Beecher Yeah. That's my guy right there.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Don't do anything there. It's funny because as I talk to you now, I see that this is even worse than it was when I read it. He is going out of his way not just to sort of destroy the objects of the thing, and also kill some of the worshipers and the priests and whatever, but he is defiling not just their temples, but definitely their temples. He defiles the temple of Chemosh, the abomination of Moab. We've talked about Chemosh before. As a matter of fact, you were talking about the vassalage earlier with Hezekiah, and that we talked many months ago about a mirror image of that, which is when Moab threw off the vassalage of Israel.

Dan McClellan Judah.

Dan Beecher Or Judah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Anyway, which felt very similar. So basically, this is a massacre.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher This is horrifying. And, he basically did it. He didn't just start the job. He finished it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. He started the job, and he finished the job. Hezekiah was unable to do this. There are reforms that were said to have happened under Hezekiah, which involved destroying the high places, but it says he didn't put an end to the worship of Asherah, and Baal, and stuff like that. But Josiah went whole hog and decided to put an end to everything. But there's an interesting thing to note about the result of all this, because the idea is, oh, we found the Book of the Law, which basically says you're only supposed to worship one deity in one place using one priesthood. And so, at the end of the day, when the dust settles and Josiah comes back home, he now reigns over a country where everyone who wants to worship a deity has to come to his temple, controlled by his priesthood, in his city, to worship the one God of whom he is the only representative. And this is why people talk about cult centralization. He's basically consolidating all of the cultic power to himself- Right ... and saying, "I am in charge of all of it now, and you're not allowed to do anything unless you come to me," which is a big change.

Dan Beecher A big change, and it's so interesting because, like I said, I think a lot of-- As I was reading about this and looking at articles about this, there are a lot of believers, of Christians, of people who take this story to be the story of a hero, which is why we called the segment Biblical Heroes, question mark.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Because from the perspective of, well, that Book of the Law was correct. He just did what was good in the eyes of the Lord, as it says in the book.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I don't know how I could see it that way. I don't know how I could look at it and honestly see that as a-- Even if you believe that these people are worshiping someone that they shouldn't be worshiping, this is a genocidal act.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And it is done in the pursuit of, as you say, an immense power grab.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Absolutely.

Dan McClellan And, yeah, there's not really another way. I think when you look at all the data, honestly, there's not really a way to understand it as anything other than a power grab. Later generations are going to say, "Well, that was an attempt to restore a degree of faith that would protect Israel against its enemies," but it failed pretty quickly.

Dan Beecher That's true.

Dan McClellan Because within nine years of his death, already the Babylonians are like, "Hey, those are pretty nice shoes you got on. Give them to me."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, things go south and people are like, "Well, it's because they were doing all the bad stuff." And, this is all post hoc rationalization.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And this kind of rationalization is common throughout ancient West Asia. We see it in, you mentioned Moab, the Mesha Inscription. In that inscription, they rationalize why Chemosh allowed Israel to subjugate Moab. They say that Chemosh was angry with his land.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which is the exact same thing that you find in the Books of Kings and Chronicles, that Adonai is angry with their people, and so is allowing, is using Assyria and Babylon as an instrument to punish them and to try to discipline them. So, it's all these post hoc rationalizations, and this centralization of power. And most scholars say Josiah probably did some of this stuff, but the majority of it is just rhetorical.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan It wasn't this grand thing where everybody came out of their houses and he's like, "Off to Bethel," and everybody marched to Bethel, and they murdered the priests, and burned their bodies on the altars and were like, "Back to Jerusalem," and they all go back to Jerusalem.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I would say king or not, anyone who's tried to wrangle even 40 people to do the same thing- Yeah ... "Everybody come out and listen to me read a book."

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher I don't think it's going to work out that easily.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So many narratives put far too much faith in the ability of intellectuals to control populations of people.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I have so many friends who are like, "You think I'm trying to overturn your upbringing of your kids and turn them into Marxists? I can't even get them to read a chapter from a textbook."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I am not the puppet master- Yeah ... controlling your children. And, yeah, this kind of thing just isn't realistic, this notion that everybody was like, "Oh, I am pricked in my heart, and I've had a change of heart, and now I recognize that we've got to appropriately worship the Lord. So, I'm destroying my memorials to my mother- Right ... because that's no longer acceptable."

Dan Beecher Is there also, I guess I should ask, so you say that it probably didn't happen on this grand a scale.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher But we do think that this did happen.

Dan McClellan Yeah, to some degree. And there are scholars out there, so Susan Ackerman is a wonderful scholar who recently published a book called "Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel." And she's also published other stuff on priestesses and goddesses, and how they were worshiped and stuff like that. And she has published work arguing that part of this was probably trying to destroy ancestral worship, and also worship that was curated by women.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So, there would've been women who controlled, or at least curated, guided the worship of Asherah, and so part of it would've been also to shut them down.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, to the degree that these reforms took power away from minoritized groups, like marginalized priesthoods, like priestesses, women, the worship of Asherah, the worship of ancestors, that's probably more historical.

Dan Beecher That makes a lot of sense, I think.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And there probably were Asherim, Asherah things in the temple. There are scholars who have argued that, I don't know if you recall all the things that were put into the Ark of the Covenant.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan The tablets of the law are one, the manna, a bowl of that was another, and then there was Aaron's budding rod- Oh, right ... which bears striking resemblance to an Asherah pole.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so there's a scholar named Ronna Eichler, who has argued that the story of Aaron's budding rod might be a post hoc rationalization of why there's an Asherah in the Ark of the Covenant. So, that is a possible explanation of that, but it wouldn't surprise me or many other scholars if there were these things in the temple, because like I said, we've got these inscriptions that talk about Adonai and his Asherah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan We have multiple of them. So, it's not unlikely that that kind of thing was going on, and this was an attempt to say, "Nope, my one deity." And I think there's an interesting coincidence here. This is the ideology that, the identity that kind of starts to get put together right as the exile happens. And when they go into exile, what do you do when suddenly your social group is wrenched out of your land and put in another land, and you've got to survive? You circle the wagons, and you firm up the boundaries- Right ... and you lean heavy into the identity markers, which are now everything that Josiah wanted them to be. And so, the concept of what it means to be Israel, what it means to be God's people, what it means to worship Adonai, went from Josiah's potentially temporary reforms to, "This is the key to our survival as a people," going into and then coming back out of the exile. And so I think, incidentally, what Josiah wanted became cemented into the very foundation of the identity of Judah and Israel, and became the foundation of the later Jewish identity. And so I think it's an interesting incidental observation.

Dan Beecher That if the exile hadn't happened, it may not have gone this way, and they might have gone back to Asherah worship and all these other things.

Dan McClellan Maybe.

Dan Beecher I think that's fascinating, and it seems to me a very strong possibility. I love it.

Dan McClellan We have something like that going on in Egypt with Akhenaten when he comes to the throne, and he's suddenly like, "Everybody, everybody's Aten. Worship Aten, everybody." And moves the capital and changes everything, and there are all these reforms. And then he dies, and his son, Tutankhamen, was like, "Yeah, no, we're going to go back to the way things- Don't worry about it ...

Dan Beecher worked before.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It's fine.

Dan McClellan So, this temporary little glitch in- Yeah ... Egyptian history. So, who knows if that could have happened, something like that within a couple generations of Josiah. We'll never know because the Babylonians came a-knocking at the door.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, that's nuts. That's very interesting. But we have another segment that we got to get to.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher And it's quasi-related, but we're going to do a segment that we're going to call Artifacts & Fiction. And this segment of Artifacts & Fiction, Dan, is- Yes, sir ... we're going to head back to Hezekiah. Am I correct?

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan We're going to talk about Hezekiah because we mentioned that Sennacherib came through town, and when he was in town, he was like, "I don't like the looks of those temples. Let's destroy them all." So, there was this de facto cult centralization caused by the destruction of all these temples. And we have discovered some of them.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan So, we have more than one temple from the First Temple period that all indications are that these things were authorized by the central Judahite authorities in Jerusalem. One of them is in the southern desert, a place called Arad. It is in the Negev. It's on the top of this hill. It's in the corner of a fortress that was built there. So, if you look at the archeological reports, I believe they call it Stratum X. But there's a temple built into the corner of this fortress, and this temple was discovered in the '60s, and it was basically covered in about six feet of soil, of earth. And when they dug it out, they found a standing stone, and they found a couple of incense altars just laying on their side in the Holy of Holies and kind of down the steps of the Holy of Holies. And they weren't destroyed. They were just kind of turned over and covered in a bunch of earth. And the altar is there. They found a bunch of dishes, a bunch of implements. They found letters written on potsherds that are talking about the House of Adonai, that are talking about priestly families that are mentioned in the Bible, that are talking about correspondences back and forth with Jerusalem. So, this is a temple that is probably under, if not Hezekiah's purview, maybe Hezekiah's predecessors, Jotham or Ahaz or something like that. But this is an authorized temple, and then somewhere around 700 BCE, somewhere around the reign of Hezekiah, suddenly it just stops, and it gets buried in six feet of earth. And so the archeologists who excavated this temple were like, "This is one of the high places that fell victim to Hezekiah's reforms." And that makes perfect sense if you take those reforms as historical. But some other scholars came in and said, "Usually, when you destroy a cult site and you don't want worship to go on there, you actually destroy the implements of worship. You destroy the divine images."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You don't just gently lay them on their side- ... and cover them up in soil.

Dan Beecher You stay there.

Dan McClellan Don't- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher look around anymore.

Dan McClellan You- Good night, sweet prince. And we see in one of the other temples I'll talk about, there's an example of a divine image that was broken, and then the broken pieces were incorporated into the wall.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan And so that's more like what you do when you are destroying somebody's implements of worship.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan But here, they just were like, "Ooh, go down." And one theory is that this was actually Hezekiah hiding the cult site because Sennacherib, because this is far in the south. Sennacherib starts in the north and comes south.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Doesn't make it all the way to the southern desert, to the Negev. But one theory is that Hezekiah was like, "Oh, he's destroying cult sites. Let's decommission it. Let's dismantle things. Let's cover it up, and maybe he will pass it by."

Dan Beecher Put up a sign that says drive-in movie or something, just so that- Yeah ... throw him off the scent.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Ain't no divine images in here. And then for whatever reason, it was just never recovered. Another theory is that it was Sennacherib who came through and was like, "Bye-bye temple," and just was like, "Ah, just do it quick, whatever you got to do." And they were just like, "Okay, mm," and then just dumped a bunch of earth on it and patted it down and were like, "All right, moving on." So, a few different possibilities- Yeah ... what has happened to this temple. But we found a bunch of fascinating stuff that corresponds, in many ways, with the way that temple worship in Jerusalem is described. The construction of the tabernacle, what kind of implements are being used, and some of the The implements that were discovered at this temple in Arad even had a little, a letter called a Qoph and then a Kaph, which scratched into the corners of these like dishes. And this would've meant, "Qodesh l'Kohanim," or "Sanctified, consecrated for the priests." In other words, marking this as temple gear. You're not allowed to use these dishes. These are for the priests in the temple. Which is, if you look in Exodus, you have the same thing was supposed to be written on the headdress of the high priest and things like that. So it's following very closely on the way that worship and temple worship is prescribed in the Bible, but it's not the Jerusalem Temple, it's an entirely separate temple where they worshiped Adonai, the God of Israel, with divine images, specifically a standing stone, which is in the Hebrew Bible, if you look in the Old Testament, it will call him a pillar.

Dan Beecher That's a matzevah. The plural is matzevots.

Dan McClellan That's a standing stone. That's what we have there. And then about less than 10 years ago, there was another one of these discovered, in just a little northwest of Jerusalem. If you take the main highway heading west out of the north end of Jerusalem, there's a part where you come around the top of some hills and you go down a little valley, and then the freeway goes back up the other side of the valley. And at the bottom of that valley, under the freeway, whenever they need to build something, in Israel, in Palestine, they always go in and do a little excavation- Right ... just to see if there's anything that needs to be preserved.

Dan Beecher And doing this, they were like- And if there is, they go, "Ah, son of a...

Dan McClellan All right, fine." Well, normally they go, "Okay, do what you got to do, but you got six months, and then- Right ... the bulldozers are turning on." And they discovered a temple, and it's a place, they call it Tel Motza. But it is same kind of story. It is a First Temple period temple. They didn't discover the Holy of Holies. As far as I know, they have not uncovered a Holy of Holies that's discernible that has a bunch of stuff in it. But they did discover some pits where they threw discarded or maybe, not yet discarded, implements and instruments and objects. So there are a bunch of little clay figurines and things like that. They have figurines of horses, and human heads, and some of them have headdresses on them that make some archeologists think this might be a deity of some kind. And this is where they found what looks like a standing stone. And the only part of it that we found is broken off, and it shows two legs with some feet sticking in the same direction. But this looks very close to the smiting pose that the Semitic storm deity would be represented in. So somebody like Baal or Adonai- Right ... was at one point probably represented on a standing stone. And we have other standing stones that have Baal represented in this way, in the smiting pose, which means usually turned sideways, kind of that Egyptian, both feet pointed in the same direction. Mm-hmm. And then they have one hand up where they're holding a mace or something like that.

Dan Beecher Okay. But- About to smite somebody.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Got my smiting pants on. And it was broken and just used as raw material for building part of the wall of the temple.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan So they found it upside down and broken and basically mortared into the wall of the temple. So they're still trying to figure out exactly what was going on in this temple, but this is closer to Jerusalem than Bethlehem is, if I recall correctly, if my spatial memory is accurate. And this would've been active at the same time that the First Temple was active in Jerusalem, so there's no way that thing was operative without Jerusalem's approval.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And this would've been around the time period of Hezekiah.

Dan Beecher I just Googled the Tel Motza temple.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher And I think the most impressive part about it, I don't know how those ancient Hebrews were able to build that giant freeway over top of it. But that's really impressive. So the- It is interesting. Literally, they just raised up the freeway and just built right over it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the initial excavations took place before the freeway was there, which is why you'll see some aerial photography of the temple and outlines of the wall and everything like that, and some pillars out front. So again, very much in the style of the Jerusalem Temple, but they were like, "Hey, we got to get this highway in." And so they were like, "Just build it over top."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so now you've got to exit the highway. I have not been to this temple. I hope at some point to visit that temple. I hope at some point for things to calm down enough so that it is appropriate to visit- Right ... and there is not so much threat to people's lives there. But the excavations are ongoing. And so yeah, this is another datum that kind of complicates the narrative that you shared earlier, that everybody just knew there was one temple, there was one nation, there was one god.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It doesn't seem like that was the case until we have initially Sennacherib kind of forcing upon people this de facto cult centralization. And in my opinion, the next two kings were probably like, "All right, let's get back to worshiping all over the place." And then Josiah looked around and kind of went, "I don't know. I kind of like everybody having to come down here to- Right ... to my neck of the woods to bring money, and to bring goods, and to bring offerings. It kind of rings my bell, so, hey, maybe we should discover a book."