Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Under new management, Your Majesty: Thine. John Berryman I “And the king went up to the house of the Lord, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great; and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord. And the king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord, and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all their heart and all their soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people stood to the covenant.” A great awakening took place in the kingdom of Judah in the seventh century BCE, or so the king intended it to be. Josiah was the sixteenth king of the kingdom of Judah, which included Jerusalem, the rump state that remained in the wake of the secession of the ten tribes after the death of Solomon. He ruled for thirty-one years, from 640 to 609. Three centuries earlier, not long after the disintegration of the Davidic kingdom, his birth had been foretold by a strange unnamed prophet, who predicted (“O altar! O altar!”) that Josiah would be a great reformer. The Bible records — there are two accounts, in 2Kings and 2Chronicles — that he came to the throne at the tender age of eight, and eight years later, “when he was still a lad,” the young monarch began to “seek after the God of his forefather David.” It appears that there followed four years of intense spiritual work, because it is reported that Josiah began the religious reform of his kingdom in the twelfth year of his reign. The Josian reformation, his rappel a l’ordre, proceeded in stages. It is a dramatic tale. It began with a ferocious campaign against idolatry, which involved the physical destruction of pagan statues and altars not only in his realm but also beyond — a “purification” of the entire land of Israel. (The recent weakening of the Assyrian power to the north emboldened the Judean king to extend his campaign beyond his borders.) He also uprooted Israelite places of worship, with the objective of what historians like to call the centralization of the cult — the re-establishment of Jerusalem, and more specifically the Temple, as the only legitimate site of Jewish priestly rites and Jewish sacrifice. In his twenty-eighth year on the throne, in accordance with his plan, Josiah began a massive renovation of the Temple. It was during this project that lightning struck. As often happens on construction sites, an antiquity was found — in this instance, an old scroll. It was the book of Deuteronomy, which was Moses’ valedictory summation of the Biblical commandments and his ethical testament to his people. When the scroll was read to the king, he rent his garments and cried out in anguish at how much had been forgotten. He then summoned the population of Judah, high and low, to the Temple and read the ancient scroll to them, and announced a new covenant, a grand restoration, which was then marked by a spectacular Passover celebration at the Temple. Judging by the scriptural accounts, which is all the evidence that we have for these events, it was an electrifying moment. Zeal was in the air. The shocking element of this tale is that Deuteronomy, fully a fifth of the divine revelation at Sinai, the climax of the Torah, was unknown in Israel. How much more of the tradition had been lost — or more accurately, shunned and neglected and indifferently consigned to oblivion? Idolatry, and the cruelty of some of its practices, was widespread. Josiah was himself preceded and succeeded by idolatrous kings. When one reads the Hebrew verses carefully, it becomes clear that the emotion that overwhelmed Josiah when he heard Moses’ farewell address for the first time was not so much guilt as panic. For if Deuteronomy was unknown to the Jews of the time, then so were many of the fundamentals of