most sinful monarch ever to rule Judah and hails instead Hezekiah as the great king. The Bible Unearthed suggests that the priesthood and populace outside Jerusalem may well have held the opposite opinion—that Hezekiah's imposition of monolatry was blasphemous, and the disasters that befell the country during his reign had been punishment from the gods. Josiah and the birth of the Bible As recorded in the Book of Kings, Manasseh's grandson, Josiah, enacted a large religious reform soon after he became king; he ordered renovations to the Jerusalem Temple, during which the High Priest 'found' a scroll of the law, which insisted on monotheism with sacrifice centralised at a single temple—that in Jerusalem. Finkelstein and Silberman note that most scholars regard the core of Deuteronomy as being the "scroll of the law" in question, and regard it as having been written not long before it was 'found', rather than being an ancient missing scroll as characterised in the Bible; Deuteronomy is strikingly similar to early 7th century Assyrian vassal-treaties, in which are set out the rights and obligations of a vassal state (in this case Judah) to their sovereign (in this case, Yahweh). Josiah imposed this scroll as the new religious orthodoxy, and, like Hezekiah before him, destroyed the old cult centres; Josiah even went so far as to slaughter the priests of these shrines, burn their bodies, and bury their bones in the tombs near them, upon the old altars. The sudden collapse of the Assyrian Empire in the last decades of the 7th century BCE offered an opportunity for Josiah to expand Judah's territory into the former kingdom of Israel, abandoned by the Assyrians. It was now that the author of Deuteronomy, working in Josiah's court, reworked older legends, texts, and histories into a single national history; with the message that it had been the non-Deuteronomic practices of the Israelites that had led to their downfalls, and implied that Joshua, as well as David in some respects, was a foreshadowing of what Josiah could achieve. Archaeology suggests that Josiah was initially successful, extending his territory northwards towards Bethel, a cult-centre of the kingdom of Israel; however he then rode out to meet the Egyptian Pharaoh—Necho—at Meggido. Necho had been merely 'passing through', leading an army to join the Assyrian civil war on the side of the Assyrian (rather than Babylonian) faction, but Josiah was killed; the circumstances of