Commentary - 2 Kings 23:28-30

Bird's-eye view

This brief, almost abrupt, account of the death of King Josiah is one of the more jarring transitions in the Old Testament. After a glorious chapter detailing the most thorough reformation in Judah's history, led by a king whose heart was tender and wholly devoted to the Lord, the story comes to a sudden and violent end. This is not how we write our stories. The good guy, the great reformer, is supposed to die peacefully in his bed at a ripe old age, not cut down in his prime on a battlefield by a foreign king he had no business fighting. But this is precisely the point. The Bible is not a collection of morality tales with tidy endings; it is the unvarnished history of God's dealings with a sinful and complicated people. Josiah's death is a hard providence, and hard providences demand robust theology.

The event serves multiple purposes in the divine narrative. First, it demonstrates the unswerving reality of God's covenant lawsuit against Judah. Josiah's personal righteousness and zealous reforms were pleasing to God, and they delayed the judgment, but they could not ultimately turn aside the accumulated wrath that generations of high-handed rebellion had stored up. The nation as a corporate body was ripe for judgment, and the removal of the righteous king was the final preparatory step. Second, it is a stark lesson in the folly of even the best of men. As the parallel account in 2 Chronicles 35 makes clear, Josiah was warned by Neco, who claimed to be on God's errand, but Josiah presumptuously went out to fight anyway. A good man acting outside his God-given station is still a man in folly. Finally, the succession of the wicked Jehoahaz shows how quickly a nation can revert to its true character once the restraining influence of a godly leader is removed, further justifying the impending exile.

Outline

Context In 2 Kings

This passage marks a crucial turning point. The entire book of 2 Kings has been tracing the parallel decline of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, a story of almost relentless apostasy punctuated by brief moments of revival. The northern kingdom of Israel has already been carried off into Assyrian captivity. Judah has teetered on the brink, with wicked kings like Manasseh pushing the nation past a covenantal point of no return (2 Kings 21:10-15). The reign of Josiah, detailed in chapters 22 and 23, is the final, glorious flash of light before the darkness of the Babylonian exile. He rediscovers the Book of the Law, humbles himself before God, and purges the land of idolatry with unparalleled zeal. God explicitly tells him that because of his repentance, the prophesied disaster will not happen in his day (2 Kings 22:19-20). The verses that follow our text immediately plunge Judah back into wickedness under Josiah's successors, leading directly to the Babylonian invasions and the destruction of Jerusalem. Thus, Josiah's death is the hinge on which the fate of the nation swings from a temporary stay of execution to final judgment.

Key Issues

A Righteous King and a Hard Providence

When we encounter a story like this, our modern therapeutic sensibilities want to soften the blow. We want to find a way to make it less jarring, to explain away the apparent contradiction of a good king meeting a bad end. But Scripture does not allow us that comfort. The God of the Bible is sovereign over all things, which means He is sovereign over the flight of the arrow at Megiddo just as much as He was sovereign over the finding of the law in the Temple. This is what we call a hard providence. It is an event that does not fit neatly into our preconceived notions of how a good and loving God ought to run the world. But our job is not to make God's actions fit our expectations; our job is to make our theology fit His revelation.

God had promised Josiah that he would be gathered to his grave in peace (2 Kings 22:20). And yet he dies violently in battle. Is this a contradiction? Not at all. The "peace" God promised was peace from seeing the covenantal horrors that were about to befall Jerusalem. He was spared the sight of the city he loved being burned, the Temple he purified being desecrated, and the people he led being slaughtered or dragged away in chains. His death, however violent, was an act of mercy that ushered him into the true peace of God's presence before the national judgment fell. God's promises are always true, but they are fulfilled on His terms and in His time. He is a good and gracious author, and He never wrote a story that didn't resolve. We must learn to trust the author, especially when we cannot make sense of the plot twist in the current chapter.

Verse by Verse Commentary

28 Now the rest of the acts of Josiah and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?

This is the standard formula used by the author of Kings to conclude the reign of a monarch. It serves as a historical footnote, pointing the reader to a more exhaustive official record, which we no longer possess. But in this context, it feels startlingly abrupt. After the long and detailed account of Josiah's sweeping reforms, we expect more. But the Holy Spirit is a master storyteller, and the abruptness is part of the point. The earthly story of this great king is over. The curtain falls, mid-act as it were, because the central character of this history is not Josiah, but Yahweh. The focus is shifting from the temporary reprieve under a righteous king to the impending judgment from a righteous God.

29 In his days Pharaoh Neco king of Egypt went up to the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates. And King Josiah went to meet him, and when Pharaoh Neco saw him he put him to death at Megiddo.

Here is the hard providence in stark, unadorned language. The geopolitical situation is complex; the Assyrian empire is crumbling, and the Babylonians are rising. Pharaoh Neco is marching north, likely to aid the remnants of the Assyrians against the ascendant Babylonians, in order to maintain a buffer state between Egypt and this new Mesopotamian power. Josiah, for reasons the text here does not specify, decides to intercept him. The Chronicler fills in the crucial detail: Neco warns Josiah off, claiming a divine commission for his campaign, saying "God is with me" (2 Chron. 35:21). Josiah refuses to listen. He was a righteous king, but here he was acting as a political meddler. He was stepping into a quarrel that was not his, and he was doing so against a direct, albeit strangely delivered, warning. God is not a tribal deity; He can and does speak and work through pagan kings like Neco, just as He later used Nebuchadnezzar as His "servant." Josiah's piety did not give him a blank check to do as he pleased. He went to meet Neco, and the result was swift and final: he was put to death. The location, Megiddo, is pregnant with historical significance as a place of decisive battles. For Josiah, it was the place of his own decisive and fatal error.

30 And his servants drove his body in a chariot from Megiddo and brought him to Jerusalem and buried him in his own tomb. Then the people of the land took Jehoahaz the son of Josiah and anointed him and made him king in place of his father.

The tragic scene is described with a certain pathos. The mighty reformer king is now a corpse being transported home. He is buried with honor, but the honor cannot mask the disaster. The kingdom is now without its righteous head. And what happens next is telling. The "people of the land," a phrase that often refers to the leading citizens or landowners, act quickly to establish a successor. They anoint Jehoahaz, who was not the firstborn, indicating a political choice. And as we learn in the very next verses, their choice was a wicked one. The reformation had been profound, but it was largely top-down. It had been the work of the king, but it had not transformed the heart of the people or their leaders. As soon as Josiah is gone, the nation snaps back to its default setting of rebellion. The death of the king revealed the true spiritual state of the kingdom, and in so doing, it sealed its fate. The final obstacle to God's judgment had been removed, not by the hand of a pagan king, but by the sovereign will of God.

Application

The story of Josiah's end is a bucket of cold water for any sentimental or triumphalistic view of the Christian life. It teaches us several hard but necessary truths. First, God's purposes are inscrutable and His sovereignty is absolute. Good men sometimes die in ways that make no sense to us. Our trust cannot be in outcomes, but only in the character of the God who ordains all outcomes. We must learn to thank God for the hard providences, believing that He is working all things together for good, even when it looks like the exact opposite.

Second, we must beware of pious presumption. Josiah was one of the greatest kings in Judah's history, but he was not infallible. His zeal for God's law did not exempt him from the wisdom of knowing his own limitations and station. He stepped out of his lane, ignored a warning, and paid the ultimate price. We too can be zealous for good things, for reformation in our churches or righteousness in our nation, but if we pursue those things in our own strength, with a spirit of self-reliance, we are courting disaster. Our righteousness is only righteousness when it is clothed in humility and submission to God's revealed will.

Finally, this passage reminds us that while individual faithfulness is precious to God, it does not exist in a vacuum. Josiah's righteousness delayed judgment, but it could not erase the corporate, covenantal guilt of his nation. We live in a world that is shot through with corporate realities, for good and for ill. We are part of families, churches, and nations that have histories and trajectories. Our calling is to be faithful in our place, like Josiah, but to recognize that the ultimate fate of nations rests in the hands of a sovereign God. Our only hope, and the only hope for this world, is not a better king or a more thorough reformation, but the true and perfect King, Jesus Christ. He was the truly righteous one who was cut down, not for His own folly, but for ours. His death was the ultimate hard providence, an event that looked like a catastrophic defeat but was, in reality, God's greatest victory, securing a redemption that no human failure could ever thwart.