2 Kings 23:26

GOD'S PUNISHMENT OF THE CHOSEN PEOPLE NOT AVERTED

"Notwithstanding, Jehovah turned not from his great wrath, wherewith his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations wherewith Manasseh had provoked him. And Jehovah said, I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel, and I will cast off this city which I have chosen, even Jerusalem, and the house of which the Lord said, My name shall be there."

In the reign of Manasseh Judah had gone past the terminal day of the grace of God, the point of no return. It must have come as a definite shock to the devout souls in Judah that the extensive reforms of Josiah had, in no sense, averted the dreadful punishment which the nation so richly deserved. The people had not in their hearts accepted Josiah's reforms. Not even Josiah's wicked sons honored them, and, in the general sense, no one else did so. Judah had become just as fundamentally wicked as Northern Israel ever was, and the eternal justice of God demanded the same punishment for Judah that had been executed upon Israel, namely, destruction, defeat, deportation and removal from the land that God had given to their fathers.

The snide critical comment that, "The Deuteronomic compiler blamed Manasseh for the disaster (that overcame Judah),"[26] is incorrect. Although Manasseh alone is mentioned in this passage, it was merely because he was the most recent and most flagrant violator of the sacred covenant. Hosea spelled out the wickedness of the Chosen People extensively in Hosea 9, a wickedness that reached some kind of a climax in the days of Manasseh, but which, in fact, was an uninterrupted chain of evil reaching all the way back to the wilderness wanderings.

There is another ridiculous position of the advocates of the "D" document myth, namely, their allegation that "the Deuteronomic editor" could not understand why Josiah's reforms did not turn away God's wrath from Judah, a position dearly discernible in Snaith's remark above. LaSor pointed out the error in that false assumption. "There is little point in supposing that `the editor' could not understand why God's wrath was not turned away by Josiah's reforms, and that he then added 2 Kings 23:26,27, fixing the blame on Manasseh."[27] That mythical "Deuteronomic compiler" must have been the prime dunce of the entire 7th-century B.C. if he could have held any such alleged views. "The great 8th-century prophets had spoken, and Jeremiah and Zephaniah were even then speaking; and if we remove from their prophecies all of the warnings like these here, there would be little left."[28] Dentan also accepted the myth that "The Deuteronomists had supposed that Josiah's reign marked the beginning of a golden age."[29] This, of course, could have been true only if those so-called "`Deuteronomists" had never heard of the writings of any of the major or minor prophets of the O.T. Therefore, the mythical "Deuteronomists" is simply an impossible creation of the imagination of critics.