The Book in the Cupboard, and the Long Road to Babylon

Now this is the end of the kings, and it does not end well. The northern kingdom went first. King after king walked in the way of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who made Israel sin, and God sent prophet after prophet to warn them, year after year, for two hundred years. And they would not listen; they made their necks stiffer than their fathers had. And in the end the army of Assyria came up and besieged the city of Samaria for three years and took it, and carried the ten tribes away out of their own land to somewhere else — and they did not come home. Only Judah was left, all by itself. And Judah watched it happen next door, and did the same things anyway.

But there was one more bright morning first, and it began with a little boy on a throne. Josiah was eight years old when he became king of Judah — eight, with the crown too big for him. And he grew up and did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and walked in the way of David his father, and did not turn aside to the right or to the left. When he was a young man he decided to repair the house of the Lord, which had been standing neglected for a very long time. So carpenters and builders and stonemasons went to work in it. And while they were clearing it out, the high priest came to the king’s secretary with something in his hands, and said, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.” They found the book of the law — in the house of the Lord. It had been lost in God’s own house. Nobody had read it for so long that when the secretary carried it in and read it out loud to the king, the king had never heard it before in his life. And when Josiah heard the words of the book, he tore his clothes. He knew at once how far his country had gone from it, and he was frightened. And he said, “Go and ask the Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, about the words of this book that has been found. For the anger of the Lord against us must be great, because our fathers did not listen to the words of this book.” So they went to a prophetess named Huldah, who lived in the second quarter of Jerusalem, and she sent the king an answer with two halves to it. The first half: yes, everything written in that book is going to happen to this place, because the people have left me. And the second half: “But say this to the king of Judah, who sent you to ask: because your heart was soft, and you humbled yourself before the Lord, and tore your clothes and wept in front of me — I have heard you, says the Lord. You will go to your grave in peace, and your eyes will not see all the trouble I am bringing on this place.”

And Josiah, who now knew it was too late to save his country, spent the rest of his life doing right anyway. He called the whole nation up to the house of the Lord — everybody, from the least to the greatest — and stood there and read the whole book out loud to them from beginning to end. And then he stood by the pillar and promised in front of God to keep it with his whole heart and his whole soul; and all the people stood up with him in that promise. And then he cleaned out the country. He had the things that had been made for Baal carried out of God’s house and burned. He pulled down the altars on the rooftops and the shrines on the hills, and stopped the priests who burned incense to the sun and the moon and the stars. He wrecked the horrible place in the valley outside Jerusalem where people had burned their own children to Molech, so that it could never be used again. He even went north to Bethel and tore down the altar Jeroboam had built, with its golden calf, hundreds of years before. And then he kept the Passover — a proper one, out of the book, the way it was written. And there had not been a Passover like it in Jerusalem since the days of the judges. Not one, in all the years of all the kings. There was never a king like Josiah, before or after: he turned to the Lord with his whole heart and his whole soul and his whole strength. And when he died, Judah went straight back to everything he had cleared away, in one generation.

And then it came. It took about twenty years, under four bad kings, and it happened the way these things do happen — through ordinary armies and ordinary politics. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, came up against Jerusalem and camped around it and built a wall of siege all the way round, and nothing could go in or out. The city held on for a year and a half, and inside it the food ran out and people starved. And then the wall was broken open, and the king of Judah ran for it in the night and was caught out on the plains near Jericho, and they took him to the king of Babylon, who killed his sons in front of him and then put out his eyes and took him to Babylon in chains. And a month later the captain of the guard came into Jerusalem and burned it — the palace, the houses, and the house of the Lord that Solomon had built. They broke up the two great bronze pillars and the bronze sea that stood on the twelve oxen, and carried the bronze away; and they took the gold and silver dishes and the fire pans, everything, off to Babylon. And they took the people away. Not all of them — the poorest were left behind to look after the vines and the fields — but the rest went, walking hundreds of miles into a foreign country, past burned towns, away from the land God had brought their great-great-grandparents into with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Everything that had been given away, given away: the land, the city, the house, the king.

Thirty-seven years later, in Babylon, there was still a king of Judah alive — an old man named Jehoiachin, who had been shut up in a prison there since he was a young one. And a new king came to the throne of Babylon, and for no reason anybody could see, he sent for him and brought him out of the prison house, and spoke kindly to him, and took away his prison clothes and gave him a seat at his own table for the rest of his life, and food every day, all his days. Everything else was gone. God’s promise to David was not. And out there among the people walking into Babylon there were prophets. And what those prophets said, all through the years by the rivers of that foreign country, was: you are going home.