For. — Now.
In the eighth year. — The specifications of time in this verse are peculiar to the chronicler.
While he was yet young. — Being about sixteen.
He began to seek. — 2 Chronicles 17:3-4; 1 Chronicles 13:3.
And in the twelfth year. — When, perhaps, he began to govern alone.
He began to purge. — It is not said that the whole work was completed in the twelfth year; indeed, 2 Chronicles 34:33 implies the contrary. But the writer having begun the story of the destruction of idolatrous objects, naturally continues it to its close, though that properly belongs to Josiah’s eighteenth year (2 Kings 22:3, compared with 2 Kings 23:4 seq.). It is not, therefore, clear (as Thenius asserts) that the chronicler has put the extirpation of idolatry first, simply to show that the pious king needed no special prompting to such a course; or that, as Noldeke supposes, the writer meant to clear this highly-extolled king from the reproach of having quietly put up with the abomination for full eighteen years.
The high places. — 2 Kings 23:5; 2 Kings 23:8-9; 2 Kings 23:13.
The groves. — The Asherim (2 Kings 23:4; 2 Kings 6:7; 2 Kings 6:14). There was an Asherah in the Temple, as well as in the high places which Solomon built for Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom. The carved and molten images are not mentioned in the parallel passage, which, however, gives a much clearer and more original description of the different kinds of idolatry abolished by Josiah. (The Syriac has, “he began to root out the altars, and idols, and leopards, and chapels, and collars, and bells, and all the trees which they made for the idols.”)