I described the religious revolution that overcame the Jewish world in the seventh century BC, and which I compared explicitly to a reformation of the sort we know very well from Early Modern Europe.
The resemblances between the two eras, as portrayed by a scholar like Baruch Halpern, are often striking. Halpern, indeed, repeatedly and explicitly draws Reformation-era analogies. Noting Martin Lutherâ??s fondness for the prophet Jeremiah, he suggests that this affinity was quite natural. â??[Jeremiah] stands to the cultic establishment of pre-Josianic Jerusalem much as Luther stood to the Catholic Church of his dayâ? (48). Similarly, Halpern suggests that â??Josiahâ??s iconoclasm was Cromwellian in scope, directed against any plastic art that could remotely be construed as culticâ? (411).
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