Now, according to Finkelstein and Asherman in The Bible Unearthed, it was during Josiah's reign that literacy reached a sufficient pinnacle in backwater Judah that a major literary undertaking like the Old Testament was finally possible. And that's what they theorize occurred. While Josiah was trying on teddies, (my words, not Finkelstein's and Asherman's- they say nothing about Josiah wearing women's lingerie), his scribes rescued minor tribal chieftain David from obscurity, dusted him off, rehabilitated him and hugely exaggerated his significance, all so the Judahites could have their own ethnic hero with which to appropriate Israelite history. Judah was now Israel. Or was it the other way around? No matter, Judah was now in power. And they wanted their king, actually their drag queen, to be irrefutably descended from a grand and glorious dynasty and history, whether true or contrived. Don't you just love politics?
All of this was done in order to centralize political power at the Jerusalem temple, which was in the capital of Judah, and thereby repudiate the legitimacy of the Israelite temple in Shechem, which had been the power center in the old rival nation of Israel. Another nail in the political coffin of Israel!
Josiah was deemed the new messiah of the Israelites since Isaiah's saviour hadn't worked out. According to Finkelstein and Siblerman, Josiah's scribes took great care to portray him as being comparable to many heroes of the Israelites: like Moses, by having him conduct a significant passover with both nations of Judah and Israel; like Joshua, by reporting his conquest (most likely exaggerated) of neighboring lands; like David, by writing of his goal to "reunite" the two Israelite kingdoms of Judah and Israel (even though Israel was now reduced to a minor Assyrian colony); and like Solomon, by recording his ordination of the ostensibly Solomon-built Jerusalem temple as the sole place of Yahweh worship, also his renovation of the temple and his acting as royal caretaker of it.
This is a fascinating political phenomenon: here we have a cross-dressing king hiding behind a fanatically repressive regime with a PR apparatus, the likes of which would make Madison Avenue salivate, making him appear to be a combination of every pious religious hero that had been invented up to that point. Wow!
Now this is fun. After all those brilliantly diabolical political machinations, in a minor footnote of history all the Yahweh supremacists' schemes were obliterated when, as an insignificant player in a major battle between two competing empires, Egypt and the encroaching Babylonia, Josiah was unceremoniously slain by Pharaoh Necho. Necho stuck Josiah's impaled head into the battlefield with a pair of red lace panties on top of it. If there's a god, how could he let that happen? Gee, maybe it's all just random, historical chance!
