2 Kings 22:8 - Exposition

And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the Law in the house of the Lord. There has been great difference of opinion as to what it was which Hilkiah had found. Ewald believes it to have been the Book of Deuteronomy, which had, he thinks, been composed some thirty or forty years before in Egypt by a Jewish exile, and had found its way, by a sort of chance , into Palestine, where "some priest " had placed a copy of it in the temple. Thenius suggests "a collection of the laws and ordinances of Moses, which was afterwards worked up into the Pentateuch;" Bertheau, "the three middle books of the Pentateuch, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers;" Gramberg, "Exodus by itself." But there seem to be no sufficient grounds for questioning the ancient opinion—that of Josephus, and of the Jews generally—that it was a copy of the entire Pentateuch.. The words, סֵפֶר הַתּוֹרָה , "the book of the Law," are really sufficient to decide the point; since, as Keil says, they "cannot mean anything else, either grammatically or historically, than the Mosaic book of the Law (the Pentateuch), which is so designated, as is generally admitted, in the Chronicles and the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah." The same conclusion follows from the expression, "the book of the covenant" ( סֵפֶר הַּבְּרִית ), in 2 Kings 23:2 , and also from 2 Kings 23:24 , 2 Kings 23:25 , and 2 Chronicles 34:14 . Whether or no the copy was the actual original deposited in the ark of the covenant by Moses ( Deuteronomy 31:26 ), as Keil believes, is doubtful. As Egyptian manuscripts which are from three to four thousand years old still exist in good condition, there can be no reason why a manuscript of Moses' time should not have been found and have been legible in Josiah's. But, if not the actual handwriting of Moses, it was probably its lineal descendant—the copy made for the temple service, and kept ordinarily "in the side of the ark"—which may well have been lost in the time of Manasseh or Amen, and which was now happily "found." And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it. We need not suppose that Shaphan read the whole. But he read enough to show him how important the work was, and how necessary it was to make it known to the king.