For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David his father: and in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the groves, and the carved images, and the molten images.
In the eighth year of his reign. This was the 16th year of his age; and as the kings of Judah were considered minors until they had completed their 13th year, it was three years after he had attained majority. He had very early manifested the piety and excellent dispositions of his character. In the 12th year of his reign, but the 20th year of his age, he began to take a lively interest in the purgation of his kingdom from all the monuments of idolatry which, in his father's short reign, had been erected. [All the different forms of idol-worship are grouped together in this passage; for with habª`aaliym, the Baalim, and hachamaaniym (H2553), images of the sun, which stood upon their altars, are associated haa-'Asheeriym (H842), statues of Astarte, hapªciliym (H6456), the hewn or carved stones, and hamaceekowt (H4541), molten images.]
At a later period, his increasing zeal for securing the purity of divine worship led him to superintend the work of demolition in various parts of his dominions. The course of the narrative in this passage is somewhat different from that followed in the Book of Kings; for the historian, having made allusion to the early manifestation of Josiah's zeal, goes on with a full detail of all the measures this good king adopted for the extirpation of idolatry; whereas the author of the Book of Kings sets out with the cleansing of the temple, immediately previous to the celebration of the Passover, and embraces that occasion to give a general description of Josiah's policy for freeing the land from idolatrous pollution.
The exact chronological order is not followed either in Kings or Chronicles. But it is clearly recorded in both that the abolition of idolatry began in the twelfth and was completed in the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign. Notwithstanding Josiah's undoubted sincerity and zeal, and the people's apparent compliance with the king's orders, he could not extinguish a strongly-rooted attachment to idolatries introduced in the early part of Manasseh's reign. This latent predilection appears unmistakably developed in the subsequent reigns, and the divine decree for the removal of Judah, as well as Israel, into captivity, was irrevocably passed.