Deuteronomy 6:5
3 Pay attention, Israel, and be careful to do this so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in number—as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, said to you, you will have a land flowing with milk and honey. 4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! 5 You must love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your whole being, and all your strength. 6 These words I am commanding you today must be kept in mind, 7 and you must teach them to your children and speak of them as you sit in your house, as you walk along the road, as you lie down, and as you get up.
2 Kings 23:25
23 But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah’s reign, such a Passover of the Lord was observed in Jerusalem. 24 Josiah also got rid of the ritual pits used to conjure up spirits, the magicians, personal idols, disgusting images, and all the detestable idols that had appeared in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem. In this way he carried out the terms of the law recorded on the scroll that Hilkiah the priest had discovered in the Lord’s temple. 25 No king before or after repented before the Lord as he did, with his whole heart, soul, and being in accordance with the whole law of Moses. 26 Yet the Lord’s great anger against Judah did not subside; he was still infuriated by all the things Manasseh had done. 27 The Lord announced, “I will also spurn Judah, just as I spurned Israel. I will reject this city that I chose—both Jerusalem and the temple, about which I said, ‘I will live there.’”
Notes and References
"... To some extent the northern traditions seen in Deuteronomy reinforced the older focus by Judeans on Jerusalem. Josiah and his people read Deuteronomy’s call for centralized worship at a northern sanctuary as a mere prelude to God’s ultimate choice of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the northern traditions also brought major changes to Judah’s scriptures, changes prompted by Assyrian trauma. Josiah began a shift from a typical Near Eastern focus on royal traditions to a new Judean focus on nonroyal legal traditions, particularly Deuteronomy, now functioning as the “scroll of the covenant.” Even the biblical books of 1–2 Kings, focused as they are on the kings of Israel and Judah, were shaped by Josiah’s scribes so they evaluated the kings of Israel and Judah on one criterion: whether they did or did not fulfill the Deuteronomic call for centralization of the cult in Jerusalem. Indeed, an earlier edition of those books probably concluded well before the current end of 2 Kings. That Josianic edition ended with a verse saying that Josiah did a better job than any other king at obeying the law of Deuteronomy (2 Kings 23:25; compare Deuteronomy 17:14–20) ..."
Carr, David McLain Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins (p. 64) Yale University Press, 2014
"... The words 'none arose like him' are applied to only two people in the Bible: Moses and Josiah. The conclusion of Deuteronomy is: 'And there did not arise a prophet again in Israel like Moses ...' The closing comment on Josiah is: '... and none arose like him after him ...' There arose no prophet like Moses; there arose no king like Josiah ... In Deuteronomy Moses tells the people, 'Love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.' Only one person in the Hebrew Bible is described as fulfilling this: Josiah. The Deuteronomist says that Josiah was 'a king who returned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might.' This threefold expression occurs nowhere in the Old Testament but in these two places ..."
Friedman, Richard Elliott Who Wrote the Bible? (pp. 111-112) Harper San Francisco, 1997