Judah’s King Josiah (641 -609 BC) was a godly man whom 2 Kings 23:25 rates as Judah’s finest king.

Josiah inherited the throne at the age of 8 after the murder of his father, Amon. At the age of twenty, Josiah began asserting himself as ruler and initiated  religious reforms in Judah and even parts of Israel.  He benefited from the ministries of the prophetess Huldah and the prophets Zephaniah and Jeremiah. Josiah and Jeremiah were born about the same time, though Scripture does not record that the two ever met.

The Assyrian Empire, which had destroyed Israel, ravaged Judah during the reigns of Hezekiah and Manasseh, and subdued Egypt, fell into internal turmoil about two years after Josiah began his reforms and one year after Jeremiah answered God’s call to the prophetic ministry. The Empire fell apart when Nabopolassar freed Babylonia and Cimmerian and Scythian hordes stormed into the western portion of the empire. The Babylonians took the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, in 612 BC,  fulfilling the  prophecies of Zephaniah and Nahum.

Josiah’s reforms spared Judah from Assyria’s fate, however, and the power vacuum following the downfall of Assyria gave Judah a respite and a brief interlude of prosperity and freedom from paying tribute. Josiah began to take control of the former territory of Israel and may have had ambitions of building a new United Kingdom of Israel and Judah.

The power vacuum did not last long enough. Nabopolassar began to take control of the remnants of the Assyrian Empire and its former tributaries. Egypt had thrown off the Assyrian yoke within twenty years. Pharaoh Psammetichus I (Psamtik) rebuilt Egypt’s army and fleet. His son,Pharaoh Neco (609-593 BC), dispatched ships to circumnavigate Africa and set about reclaiming Egypt’s former territories in Palestine and Syria ahead of the Babylonians. His fleet landed troops at Gaza in Philistia, where Neco assembled a large army and proceeded to lead them north along the ancient coastal warpath, the Highway of the Sea.

Against the advice of his counselors, King Josiah decided to block Neco’s “peaceful” passage though the pass of Megiddo. The Egyptians overwhelmed Josiah’s force. Wounded in action, Josiah died in Jerusalem.

With Josiah’s death, the independence of Judah ended and it became a vassal first of Egypt and then, in 605 BC, of Babylonia until Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC.