Shaphan Ben Azaliah, Author of the Biblical Historical Saga

This study argues that the Judean scribe Shaphan ben Azaliah orchestrated a palace coup following the assassination of King Amon, enthroned the child Josiah, and engineered a sweeping political and cultic reform through the composition of the “Book of Instructions,” later known as Deuteronomy. Although this monoyahwist, Jerusalem-centered reform ultimately failed politically after Josiah’s death, the texts produced by Shaphan and his circle survived, reshaping biblical historiography and laying the foundations of the Deuteronomistic History. The study reinterprets the biblical canon as the enduring literary legacy of a failed but transformative reformist movement. 

Previously published in The Times of Israel. 

By Yigal Bin-Nun
Historian and Researcher
Tel Aviv University, Cohen Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas
December 2025

It appears that the scribe Shaphan, a prominent figure in the Judean administration, along with his supporters, was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate King Amon. Following this act, Shaphan effectively seized power, initiated a radical cultic reform, and placed an 8-year-old child on the throne. To support this ambitious political project, he composed a directive text known as the “Book of Instructions,” or the “Book of the Torah,” which would later come to be known as Deuteronomy.

            Shaphan’s family and his broader clan played a decisive role in the history of the Kingdom of Judah, from the reign of Manasseh to the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. Their involvement, both political and cultic, is essential to understanding the events of this period. Their influence extended from the political realm to the cultic domain, including the establishment of an extensive manuscript library. It is virtually impossible to interpret the major upheavals in Judah’s history without considering the pivotal role of the scribe Shaphan, his relatives, and his network.

            This group fiercely opposed the reign of Manasseh, who was supported by the Assyrian Empire, and was likely behind the assassination of his successor, King Amon. They also orchestrated the enthronement of a young boy, only 8 years old. A fundamental question remains: who was responsible for the education of this child-king during his formative years, and who shaped his political path? These facts can only be understood in light of the central role played by Shaphan ben Azaliah and his clan.

            Shaphan’s actions may thus be summarized as follows: taking advantage of Assyria’s gradual weakening and motivated by his opposition to Manasseh, he orchestrated the assassination of King Amon, carried out a discreet palace coup, and enthroned an obscure young boy introduced as Amon’s son. While awaiting the boy’s maturity, Shaphan prepared an ambitious political and cultic reform aimed at consolidating his personal authority within the royal household. Nothing in this process appears to have been left to chance.

Shaphan’s Seizure of Power and the Cultic Reform

It was in this context that Shaphan composed the “Book of Instructions,” later known as Deuteronomy—a project seemingly initiated during Amon’s reign. An analysis of its contents reveals the ideological goals of Shaphan and his circle, as well as the social and geographical origins of his family. The primary purpose of this document—one of the foundational pillars of the biblical canon—was to limit royal authority, restrict the power of priests and prophets, and above all, to centralize cultic authority in Jerusalem, in the hands of a “citizen” aristocracy allied with a group of scribes from the Shaphanic clan. In this sense, the young Josiah merely implemented the political program devised by Shaphan.

            Under Shaphan’s leadership, the group composed the first version of Deuteronomy and set about compiling the texts that now constitute the synchronized historical saga of the kings of Israel and Judah, shaped by their ideological vision. As a result, the history of events preceding the fall of Jerusalem has reached us through the lens of the Shaphanic scribes. Their reformist interpretation, recorded in the book of Kings, reflects not only their historical outlook but also a number of significant silences concerning dramatic episodes they deliberately avoided clarifying.

            Thus, Shaphan remains silent on the circumstances surrounding King Amon’s assassination, just as he offers no explanation for the death of his protégé, King Josiah, killed by the Egyptian king Necho. Can we ignore the link between Manasseh—Shaphan’s fierce opponent—and the assassination of his son Amon? Is it plausible that the “discovery” of the book of the Torah in 622 BCE was not orchestrated by Shaphan himself? Can we overlook the origins of the Shaphan family—rooted in the sanctuary of Shiloh in the kingdom of Israel—and its active role in the destruction of Bethel, the prestigious rival cultic center?

            Until the Egyptian military intervention—ostensibly to support Assyria against the rising Babylonian power—Shaphan’s plans met with relative success. He managed to establish a centralized cult, purged of idols, dedicated solely to Yahweh, without statues or altars outside Jerusalem. Through the institution of a single temple, he was able to control the cultic economy via the sanctuary’s priestly personnel. The principles of this reformed cult, articulated in the “Book of Instructions,” were presented as an ancient and prestigious text, laying down the religious and social norms of Judean society.

            Yet this ideological and political edifice was shaken by the arrival of Necho, king of Egypt, which derailed the Shaphanic ambitions. Josiah, enthroned by Shaphan, was killed in a humiliating manner. Shaphan’s silence regarding the motives for this assassination is particularly suspicious. It is even conceivable that the anti-Egyptian passages in the Pentateuch were written in response to this sudden loss. This tragedy significantly impacted Shaphan’s standing within the Judean aristocracy. Josiah—glorified and likened to the conqueror Joshua bin Nun, expected to annex the Israelite territories into the Kingdom of Judah—died humiliatingly and without apparent reason, after being summoned by the Egyptian king to meet him at Megiddo.

            A striking detail: the prophet Jeremiah, a close associate of Shaphan, urged the people not to mourn the king’s death. Under the last kings of Judah, Jehoiakim and Zedekiah—both presented as sons of Josiah—Shaphan’s family lost much of its political influence. Jerusalem’s elite split into two factions: one advocating rebellion against Babylon and the refusal to pay tribute; the other, more moderate, prudently supported submission despite the heavy taxes.

            Shaphan and his allies, including Jeremiah—who shared his Shilonite cultic origins—and his scribe Baruch, opposed any attempt to revolt against the Babylonian Empire. They authored the first version of Deuteronomy, planned its discovery, and organized its public reading. They established a new covenant, no longer between king and people, as in ancient tradition, but between Yahweh and the Judean nation, excluding any other deity or form of worship.

            They advocated for strict centralization of worship in Jerusalem, supported Josiah in the destruction of the altar at Bethel—a political and cultic rival to Shiloh’s tradition—and abolished peripheral sanctuaries in the prestigious cities of Lachish, Beer-Sheba, and Arad, along with the altars and stelae dedicated to Yahweh and his consort Asherah. They also constructed an idealized image of the conquering Joshua, modeled after Josiah and inspired by the imperial Assyrian figures of Sargon and Ashurbanipal. The book of Joshua thus portrays Israel’s entry into Canaan as a lightning war designed to glorify Judean sovereignty.

            The book of Deuteronomy fundamentally redefined the roles of the kingdom’s key power figures—the king, the priest, and the prophet—by significantly limiting their respective prerogatives. The scribes of the Shaphanite clan undertook a revision of existing biblical texts, inserting interpretations aligned with their ideological vision, while preserving the original source. To legitimize their political project, they established a direct link between Josiah and King David, founder of the royal dynasty, at the cost of erasing any mention of a dynastic rupture between David and Josiah.

            Shaphan and his supporters, referred to in the texts as “the people of the land,” played a crucial role in the political formation of the young Josiah. They composed texts that vehemently condemned the sanctuary of Bethel and defamed the figure of King Jeroboam ben Nebat, who had preferred the sanctuary of Bethel over that of Shiloh, the ancient cultic center of the priests. They even went so far as to anachronistically assign responsibility for the fall of Jerusalem to Kings Manasseh and Jehoiakim—Israelite rulers who had been installed on the throne of Judah with the support of Assyria and later Egypt.

            It is highly likely that Shaphan’s anti-Assyrian policy played a decisive role in the assassination of King Amon and the enthronement of the young Josiah, presented as his legitimate son. Shaphan and his family, like the prophet Jeremiah—himself from Anatoth and Shiloh—opposed any alliance with Egypt, instead favoring strategic submission to Babylon. At the same time, it is possible that certain factions within the palace saw the shifting geopolitical context as an opportunity to suspend imperial tribute payments, thereby nurturing nationalist aspirations that ultimately proved reckless and counterproductive.

            The figure of Shaphan is essential for any attempt to understand the enigmatic texts of biblical historiography, both during the monarchic period and in the post-monarchic era. One can reconstruct the portrait of this influential scribe and his family, who orchestrated the “discovery” of the Book while rewriting earlier texts to conceal dynastic ruptures in the Kingdom of Judah. They conceived a political and cultic reform based on a minimalist monoyahwist cult, which they sought to present as a return to ancient origins—claiming that this exclusive worship of Yahweh had always existed. Their greatest achievement was harmonizing the literary texts of their time into a prestigious and coherent historical saga for the reader.

            It is important to note that Shaphan was not originally from the Kingdom of Judah, but rather from Israel, more precisely from the region of Ephraim. It is probable that his grandfather, Meshullam, migrated to Jerusalem after the fall of Samaria—the capital of the Kingdom of Israel—during the reign of Manasseh. Shaphan’s family maintained connections with the priests Eli and Samuel of Shiloh. Like Jeremiah, their ancestors had left Shiloh for Nob, then Anatoth, before finally settling in Jerusalem.

            Faithful to this tradition, Shaphan opposed the Israelite kings who favored the sanctuary of Bethel over that of Shiloh. The ancestral tradition of the Shaphanides was rooted in the Exodus narrative and the Levites—not in the Patriarchs, the Judges of Canaan, the figure of Jacob, and certainly not in the sanctuary of Bethel. The Shaphanides rejected the priestly supremacy bestowed upon temple priests at the expense of the Levites who served them. For them, the true hero of the Exodus was Moses—not the priest Aaron and his sacerdotal lineage, who dominated the Jerusalem temple.

            Their religious tradition was attached to Yahweh, a god of the desert who came from Seir, Edom, and Midian—not to the god El, a more ancient deity venerated in Canaan and broader western Asia. Through their literary and editorial efforts, the Shaphanite school succeeded in establishing Yahweh as the supreme deity, gradually absorbing the attributes of El through a subtle process of syncretism.

Political Failure and Textual Survival of the Reform

The idea of transforming the vassal covenant between Judah and empire into a theological covenant between Yahweh and His people materialized in the composition of the “Book of the Law.” However, following Josiah’s assassination in 609 BCE, the attempt to impose a monoyahwist reform by force ended in utter failure, lasting no more than thirteen years at best. Upon his death, his successors quickly abandoned the reform. This raises the question of whether the reform encountered opposition from a population deeply attached to its customary polytheism, thus casting doubt on the apparent triumph of the reformers as portrayed in the texts.

            It is difficult to imagine that the people of Judah—who had for generations venerated numerous deities such as Asherah, Baal, Dagan, as well as stelae and bamot (high places)—would have accepted such a radical reform without resistance. Did they actively resist the central authorities who sought to abolish their ancestral religious practices?

            The tragic end of Josiah, reported evasively by his scribe Shaphan, remains shrouded in a troubling silence. It seems unlikely that Josiah led a military campaign to conquer Bethel and annex it to Judah. At most, he may have entered the sanctuary and defiled the altar. Had an actual conquest taken place, Shaphan would undoubtedly have celebrated it in writing. Similarly, it is implausible that the inhabitants of Bethel—located in Israelite territory—would have allowed Josiah to destroy their sanctuary without a fight.

            Moreover, the Judeans—whose cults had been repressed by the king’s reforms—were unlikely to have mourned Josiah’s death, especially as he died far from his homeland. It is equally improbable that the Egyptian king Necho would have ordered the death of a king who posed no real threat to him. It is more plausible that the populations of Israel and Judah, embittered by the violent destruction of their cultic sites, protested Josiah’s reforms and may have even solicited Egyptian intervention to punish their own king.

            While Shaphan’s reform failed politically and cultically, the texts produced in that context survived due to their preservation in written form. Not only was Deuteronomy transmitted and widely disseminated, but the editorial work on the biblical historical saga remains one of the Shaphanides’ greatest legacies. These authors compiled the texts they had at hand, crafting a sweeping epic that spans from the creation of the world to the release of King Jehoiachin from Babylonian captivity.

            They incorporated divergent—and at times contradictory—narratives drawn from traditions that often clashed with their own perspectives, yet they refrained from erasing inconsistencies. Guided by a kind of irrational conservative instinct, they did not dare to eliminate the polytheistic content embedded in these accounts, nor did they deeply alter the rival cultic traditions they nonetheless deemed unacceptable. In this sense, their compilation goes far beyond the mere sum of its parts: it constitutes a work of unprecedented richness.

            This monumental project unfolded in several successive phases. Its authors were undoubtedly affiliated with the reformist movement, opposed to prevailing polytheism, though their program ultimately failed. From this effort emerged what is now known as the Deuteronomistic History, which not only survived the collapse of the kingdom but came to dominate the narrative framework of the post-monarchic era. Over time, earlier cultic practices and traditions fell into oblivion, while the reformist text shaped collective memory. Even today, academic research remains more influenced by the reformers’ ideology than by the political and religious realities that preceded their interventions.

            The translation of the biblical texts into Greek, carried out in Alexandria, further contributed to the emergence of monotheistic religions, amplifying the influence of this reformist worldview.

            It is essential to restore the value of the original texts that opposed this reformist ideology, in order to reconstruct the features of the surrounding polytheism practiced in both kingdoms—even after the reform’s failure. To assess the full extent of the reformist revisions, it is imperative to classify texts according to their ideological orientation and literary genre, while distinguishing between oral traditions—almost impossible to date—and elaborated textual accounts. The apparent contradictions within the texts often reflect geographic and theological tensions: the Exodus tradition versus the Patriarchal one; Jacob the Israelite versus Abraham the Judean; Moses versus Aaron’s priestly cult; the Shiloh tradition versus that of Bethel; and more broadly, the Israelite versus the Judean tradition. Such a critical reading requires a methodology that combines literary genre analysis with a distinction between primary sources and later reformist or priestly revisions.

Reference 

Bin-Nun, Y. קיצור תולדות יהוה [A Brief History of Yahweh]. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2017.