Canter Bridge

The Chronicler of Israel/Judah is often faulted for a tendentious and rigid view of his nation’s history. To be fair, one resorts to brief summaries of any complex reality when a word count is in the mix. And an ancient manuscript imposes hard-wired volume limits on any writer.

Read sympathetically, neither of the two great biblical histories of Israel requires the conclusion that their authors were beady-eyed ideologues.

By this measure, when he treats Judah’s great king Josiah, the Chronicler grows positively expansive.

Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign, and he reigned thirty-one years in Jerusalem. And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and walked in the ways of David his father; and he did not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet a boy, he began to seek the God of David his father, and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the Asherim, and the carved and the metal images. (2 Chronicles 34:1–3 ESV)

Something happened—something that almost never happens—to the young king Josiah when enormous responsibility fell upon his shoulders at an age when he should have been playing at sticks with the neighbor boys. At the beginning of a prodigious career as the nation’s reforming ruler, he displayed the nature of a prodigy. Think Mozart on that first symphony. Malala Yousafzai  at twelve, Pakistani blogger and schoolgirl, shot through the length of her face when the Taliban stopped her bus to turn her into a dead lesson. They failed. Mike Trout facing Major League heat at 19, bashing some of it out of the park.

I’d find a thousand dollars—somewhere, somehow—if it would buy me a peek into Josiah’s life between eight and twelve. Between crowning and seeking. What did he see, eyes open deep into the night? What did he make of the regents whispering into his ears? What moved him finally, son of a murdered tyrant, to seek YHWH’s purposes for errant Judah? Where does twelve-year-old courage come from? What is the source of wisdom beyond years?

Josiah would grow up to be one of his people’s great heroes. He did not begin as such.

He was just a boy. Yet promise lurked in those pondering young eyes deep in the night, still open and wakeful while stewards of smaller hopes snored a room away.