What Book of the Law did Hilkiah find?

8 Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the secretary, “I have found the Book of the Law in the house of the LORD.” And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it.

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Before entering on the question of what it was which Hilkiah found, it may be well to notice briefly the circumstances of the time. Josiah had succeeded his father at the age of eight, and in the previous fifty-seven years the kingdom had twice over been deluged with all the abominations of idolatry. The greater proportion therefore of the inhabitants of Jerusalem would have had little chance of knowing the law and its requirements. The temple had been neglected, perhaps closed, during a large part of these years. If we may judge of what would be needed now by what had been found necessary in Hezekiah’s time (2 Chronicles 29:5-7) the holy place would have become foul with neglect, the doors shut up, the lamps unlit, no incense within, no sacrifices without the building.

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As for the book of the Law, whatever might have been its contents at this time, rolls containing it would certainly not be numerous. In the possession of the priests they might be expected to be found, but only here and there. The copy made (according to the Law) for the use of the king would most certainly have perished. We must lay aside, in thinking of this time, all our modern conceptions about books and about a number of copies. The priests, in the matter of services and sacrifices in the temple, taught the people by word of mouth what was proper in every part of the ceremonial, and much of the priestly training was traditional, passed on from one generation of priests to another. That an authoritative copy of the Law, whatever it may have comprised, would be supplied for preservation in the temple we certainly might expect, but after nearly sixty years of neglect of the temple and its services we can feel little surprise that neither Hilkiah nor his fellows were aware of its existence, and that Josiah knew concerning it only what had been taught him by the priests. The half-century previous to Josiah’s accession had been a period of utter darkness both for people, priests and king.

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Literally, the book of the Torah have I found. The definite form of the expression proves that what the high priest found was something already known; it was not a book, but the book of the Law. How little the critics are agreed as to the precise character and contents of the book in question is well shown by Thenius: “Neither the entire then existing Scripture (Sebastian Schmidt), nor the Pentateuch (Josephus, Clericus, Von Lengerke, Keil, Bähr,) nor the ordered collection of Mosaic laws contained in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers (Bertheau), nor the book of Exodus (Gramberg), nor the book of Deuteronomy (Reuss, Ewald, Hitzig) is to be understood by this expression.

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All these must have been brought into their present shape at a later time. What is meant is a collection of the statutes and ordinances of Moses,

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which has been worked up (verarbeitet) in the Pentateuch, and especially in Deuteronomy. This work is referred to by Jeremiah (Jeremiah 11:1-17),and was called “The Book of the Covenant” (2Kings 23:2). According to 2Chronicles 17:9 it already existed in the time of Jehoshaphat (comp. 2Kings 11:12, “the Testimony”); was probably preserved in the Ark (Deuteronomy 31:26), along with which in the reign of Manasseh it was put on one side. When after half a century of disuse it was found again by the high priest in going through the chambers of the Temple with a view to the intended repairs, in the Ark which, though cast aside, was still kept in the Temple, it appeared like something new, because it had been wholly forgotten (for a time), so that Shaphan could say: ‘Hilkiah has given me a book’ (2Kings 22:10).”

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In jewish tradition, the book found was the original copy that Moses wrote. And the reason they were all shocked, was because they found it scrolled to the section of curses, and viewed it as a bad sign.

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