The Torah Scroll Found in Josiah's Days, His Reform and the Hiding of the Ark

Josiah became king at eight, after fifty-five years of Manasseh. By his eighteenth year he was purging the land of high places, and he sent Shaphan the scribe to arrange repairs to the Temple. Shaphan came back with news: the High Priest Hilkiah had found "the book of the Torah" in the House. He read it to the king, and Josiah tore his clothes.

He sent to the prophetess Huldah. The answer came in two halves: the evil written in this book will come upon this place—but because your heart was soft and you wept, your eyes will not see it.

The king assembled elders, priests, prophets and "all the people from small to great," read them the whole book aloud and made a covenant. He destroyed the high places, reached Bethel and burned the priests' bones on Jeroboam's altar exactly as foretold three centuries earlier, and kept a Passover such as had not been kept "since the days of the judges."

In that same period he told the Levites, "Put the Ark in the House." The Sages read this as an order to hide it: Josiah saw that the Temple was doomed and would not let the Ark go into captivity. With it, tradition says, were hidden the jar of manna, Aaron's staff and the anointing oil.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.