What MUST have happened is of less consequence to know than what actually took place.  Noldeke relies solely upon the statement of 2Kings xviii.4, 22, that Hezekiah abolished the high places and altars of Jehovah, and said to Judah and Jerusalem, “Before this altar shall ye worship in Jerusalem.”  With reference to that statement doubts have already been raised above.  How startling was the effect produced at a later date by the similar ordinance of Josiah!  Is it likely then that the other, although the earlier, should have passed off so quietly and have left so little mark that the reinforcement of it, after an interval of seventy or eighty years, is not in the least brought into connection with it, but in every respect figures as a new first step upon a path until then absolutely untrodden?  Note too how casual is the allusion to a matter which is elsewhere the chief and most favoured theme of the Book of Kings!  And there is besides all this the serious difficulty, also already referred to above, that the man from whom Hezekiah must, from the nature of the case, have received the impulse to his reformatory movement, the prophet Isaiah, in one of his latest discourses expressly insists on a cleansing merely of the local sanctuaries from molten and graven images, that is to say, does not desire their complete removal.  So much at least is certain that, if the alleged fact at present under discussion amounts to anything at all 1

********************************** 1.  Little importance is to be attached to 2Kings xviii.22.  The narrative of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem is not a contemporary one, as appears generally from the entirely indefinite character of the statements about the sudden withdrawal of the Assyrians and its causes, and particularly from xix.7, 36, 37.  For in this passage the meaning certainly is that Sennacherib was assassinated soon after the unsuccessful expedition of 701, but in point of fact he actually reigned until 684 or 681 (Smith, Assyrian Eponym Canon, pp. 90, 170).  Thus the narrator writes not twenty years merely after the event, but so long after it as to make possible the elision of those twenty years:  probably he is already under the influence of Deuteronomy. 2Kings xviii.4 is certainly of greater weight than 2Kings xviii.22.  But although highly authentic statements have been preserved to us in the epitome of the Book of Kings, they have all, nevertheless, been subjected not merely to the selection, but also to the revision of the Deuteronomic redactor, and it may very well be that the author thought himself justified in giving his subject a generalised treatment, according to which the cleansing (of the temple at Jerusalem in the first instance) from idols, urged by Isaiah and carried out by Hezekiah, was changed into an abolition of the Bamoth with their Macceboth and Asherim.  It is well known how indifferent later writers are to distinctions of time and degree in the heresy of unlawful worship; they always go