Archeologists announced that they had discovered evidence of the biblical story of the death of Josiah, the last great king of Judah, at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II. Historians say the story took place in 609 BCE at Megiddo in Northern Israel, known in Greek as Armageddon.
Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Haifa University – the longtime head of the Megiddo dig – and Dr. Assaf Kleiman of Ben-Gurion University reported their findings in January and February in the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament.
Most of the city had been researched in the 1920s, but excavations were carried out in the unexplored northwest corner of the site from 2016 to 2022. According to the report, a newly excavated building in Tel Megiddo held five rooms containing unexpectedly large amounts of low-quality Egyptian and Greek pottery, leading them to conclude that the pottery was garbage left over by Necho’s Egyptian forces, possibly accompanied by Greek mercenaries.
Petrographic studies confirmed that the pottery came from the Nile Valley or the Delta, so these were not locally produced imitations.
“This is not decorated fine tableware, so it’s very hard to argue that someone at Megiddo, a deportee or a surviving Israelite, all of a sudden acquired a taste for sub-par Egyptian pottery and decided to import it into his house,” Assaf Kleiman, co-researcher from the Haifa University, said.
Analysis of the artifacts suggested that the building was constructed around the mid-seventh Century BCE, leading researchers to conclude that the pottery was brought to Megiddo by Necho’s army and later abandoned. While there is no evidence pointing to the battle between Necho and Josiah, it does indicate a large presence of an Egyptian military force at the supposed time of that Biblical battle.
Necho II was a king of the 26th Dynasty (610–595 BCE). Necho II is most likely the Pharaoh Neco mentioned in the Bible in 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Jeremiah. According to 2 Kings 23, he engaged the Judean king, Josiah, the 16th King of Judah (640–609 BCE), and had him killed. The Judeans selected Jehoahaz to succeed his father, Josiah. Necho brought Jehoahaz back to Egypt as his prisoner, where Jehoahaz ended his days (2 Kings 23:31-34; 2 Chronicles 36:1–4).
Necho was on his way to aid the Assyrians in the northern Levant, and his army was marching through Judah. Josiah and his army met the Egyptians at a nearby mountain pass, where the two armies clashed at Megiddo.
Josiah instituted major religious reforms by removing official worship of gods other than the God of Israel and ordering the repair of the Temple. His death at Necho’s hands is linked with the fall of Jerusalem in 586, 25 years after his death, which marked the beginning of the Babylonian Exile.
Josiah is known only from biblical texts; no reference to him exists in other surviving texts of the period from Egypt or Babylon, and no clear archaeological evidence has ever been found. In 2019, a clay seal from the First Temple period bearing the inscription “Natan-Melech, servant of the king”, was found in the City of David. Natan Melech is mentioned in the book of II Kings as a servant of King Josiah.
