Josiah extends destruction to Bethel and northern shrines

Bethel's altar is broken, and a named grave is spared

Josiah also breaks down the altar at Bethel and the high place which Jeroboam son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made. He burns the high place, stamps it to powder, and burns the grove. Turning, he sees sepulchres in the mount, takes bones out of them, and burns them upon the altar, polluting it, according to the word of the LORD which the man of God proclaimed who cried against that altar in Jeroboam's day.

He asks what title he sees. The men of the city say it is the sepulchre of the man of God who came from Judah and proclaimed these things. Josiah says, Let him alone; let no man move his bones. They leave his bones, with the bones of the prophet that came out of Samaria. Fulfillment and selective honor sit beside bone-burning. The old word is kept. Grave desecration is still desecration, not a rite to imitate.

Samaria's high-place priests are killed on their altars

All the houses of the high places in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made, Josiah takes away, doing to them as he had done at Bethel. He slays all the priests of the high places that were there upon the altars, and burns men's bones upon them, and returns to Jerusalem.

Reform has become lethal north of Judah's border. Fulfillment of an old Bethel oracle does not authorize killing clergy, conquering neighbors, persecuting Samaritans, or treating northern shrines as a free-fire zone. The northern kingdom is already gone; the people still living among those sites are not a faceless obstacle. Josiah's zeal remains the book's zeal, not a modern warrant.