Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, both that altar and the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and stamped it small to powder, and burned the grove.
Moreover the altar that was at Beth-el ... Not satisfied with the removal of every vestige of idolatry from his own dominions, this zealous iconoclast made a tour of inspection through the cities of Samaria and all the territory formerly occupied by the ten tribes, destroying the altars and temples of the high places, consigning the Asherim to the flames, putting to death [2 Kings 23:20, yizbach (H2076), he sacrificed; Septuagint, ethusiase (cf. 1 Kings 13:2)] the priests of the high places, and chewing his horror at idolatry by ransacking the sepulchres of idolatrous priests, and strewing the burnt ashes of their bones upon the altars before he demolished them. In narrating the proceedings of this stern iconoclast in the cities of Samaria, the sacred historian speaks of his destroying 'all the houses of the high places which the kings of Israel had made to provoke the Lord to anger.'
Whether Josiah interfered with the sauctuaries and altars which the pagan colonists had erected to their idols (see the notes at 2 Kings 17:29-31), we are not informed; but it is distinctly affirmed that his zeal as a theocratic sovereign was specially directed against "the high places" reared and consecrated by Israelite monarchs in all the Samaritan cities, as being indications of the same spirit of disloyalty to Yahweh which the policy of Jeroboam had inaugurated at Beth-el and at Dan. But the altar at Beth-el, which had been sumptuously and elaborately fitted up in the Egyptian style of architecture, and at which the worship of the golden calf was performed with a splendour that rivaled or surpassed the purer ritual celebrated at Jerusalem, was the special object of his abhorrence, both on account of its vicinity to his own kingdom and the outrage which its establishment, on a spot hallowed by the memory of the patriarch Jacob, inflicted on the feelings of all the pious in Judah. The royal sanctuary (Amos 7:13), therefore, with its altar, was overturned, and its huge stones scattered along the adjoining ravines (see Stanley, 'Sinai and Palestine,' p. 219).
The question naturally occurs, Did not Josiah, in thus purging the cities of Samaria of all idolatrous relics, transgress the limits of his proper jurisdiction? Was not the kingdom of Israel, since its conquest and the deportation of its people, a tributary province of Assyria? And must not the proceedings of the king of Judah within that territory have tended to provoke the resentment and vengeance of the Assyrian monarch as an insult to his authority, as well as daring sacrilege in his eyes? The answer is, that Assyria had at this time become so greatly reduced by internal commotions at home, and especially by the invasion and ultimate ascendency of the Scythians in the region of the Euphrates and Tigris, as to have neither power nor leisure to maintain an active and vigorous superintendence of its distant colonies.
For twenty-eight years, during which those barbarians maintained their successful usurpation, the political connection between Assyria and Palestine was virtually, though not actually, dissolved; and Josiah was thus left at liberty, without any risk of molestation or challenge from the Assyrian ruler and without any detriment to his possession, to carry out his thorough-going reforms by demolishing the altar at Beth-el, as well as by extending his measures for the extermination of all idolatrous edifices and symbols throughout the whole length and breadth of the land occupied by the tribes of Israel on the western side of the Jordan.
That altar and ... brake down ... and burned the grove. The altar and high place of Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:28; 1 Kings 12:31), with the Asherah and the worship of Astarte that had been gradually clustered around it, he razed, and consumed the fragments in the flames.