Asahiah, went unto Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shallum the son of Tikvah, the son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe (now she dwelt in Jerusalem in the college); and they communed with her."[1]
The witch Huldah cursed like a trooper. Our army swore terribly in Flanders, but nothing like Huldah when the deputation waited upon her with the "Holy Bible, book divine." She cursed the place and she cursed the inhabitants, even with "all the curses that are written in the book." Quoth she, the wrath of the Lord is "kindled against this place, and shall not be quenched."[2] And all this fearful and unquenchable rage of Jehovah was to fall upon the generation alive when his book was found, not upon the generation who allowed the book to be lost. But we must constantly keep in mind that the Lord's ways are not as our ways, and that the Lord's justice is justice upside down.
One person, however, was to be exempt from the terrible curse; and this person was King Josiah. He had flattered the witch by sending the deputation re the Book to wait upon her. In the name of the Lord she prophesied of him: "Behold, therefore, I will gather thee unto thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered into thy grave in peace."[3] Now, in the very next chapter, the witch's prediction is falsified. Far from being gathered to his "grave in peace," Josiah was slain in battle at Megiddo, from which stricken field his servants brought his bloody remains and laid them in a sepulchre in Jerusalem.[4] So much for Huldah's skill as a prophetess; but, next to babes and sucklings, the Lord seems to have a weakness for impostors. And one impostor more or less with a finger in the pie of the finding of "the Book of the Law" was neither here nor there.
But the "Book of the Law" had not even yet done with its game of hide-and-seek. Its appearance in the temple was mysterious enough. If it had been there only for a short time, how did it come there and whence did it come? If it had been there for a long time, how
- ↑ [Erratum: 2 Kings xxiii.]
