Who was the best king?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The Deuteronomistic Historian bestows the royal incomparability formula on two different Judahite kings within six chapters. Of Hezekiah, 2 Kings 18:5: "He trusted in the LORD God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him." Of Josiah, 2 Kings 23:25: "like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the LORD with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him." Each formula is doubly exclusive — none before, none after — so each, read on its own terms, makes its king the singular and unrepeatable best in the entire Judahite line. Two unique maxima cannot both stand.

The apologetic harmonization, represented by Walter Kaiser and (cautiously) by Iain Provan, distinguishes the evaluative axes. Hezekiah's incomparability clause attaches to trust — "he trusted in the LORD" — while Josiah's attaches to Torah-fidelity, "according to all the law of Moses," expressed in the Deuteronomic triad of heart, soul, and might (Deuteronomy 6:5). On this reading the two kings are unsurpassed in different respects: Hezekiah in trust, Josiah in covenant obedience, and the superlatives do not collide because they measure different things. The reading has real textual footing, since the two verses are indeed differently scoped grammatically — each "none like him" clause is grammatically tethered to a particular virtue.

But the qualification is reader-supplied at the decisive point. The incomparability assertion itself — "none like him before or after" — is stated absolutely in both verses; the limitation to a single virtue is an inference imported to relieve the clash, not a restriction the text marks as exclusive. Marvin Sweeney and Choon-Leong Seow both observe that the formulae are too closely parallel to be comfortably partitioned this way, and Provan, ordinarily a conservative reader, concedes in his commentary that the parallel is awkward and likely reflects different hands.

The source-critical explanation accounts for the doubling more economically. Since Martin Noth's foundational thesis of a single Deuteronomistic History, Frank Cross's double-redaction hypothesis (developed by Richard Nelson) has held that the History was edited in two main stages: a pre-exilic, Josianic edition (Dtr1) that built toward Josiah as the climactic ideal king who fulfilled the Deuteronomic program, and an exilic revision (Dtr2) that had to reckon with the catastrophe Josiah's reforms did not avert — Judah fell anyway. On this model the Josiah incomparability formula belongs to the Josianic edition's celebration of its hero, while the Hezekiah formula reflects a redactional layer elevating the earlier reformer-king whose trust delivered Jerusalem from Sennacherib (2 Kings 19). The two unqualified superlatives are vestiges of two editorial programs with two ideal kings, preserved side by side in the final text without harmonization.

The upshot is that the formulae are not best read as carefully coordinated praise of two complementary virtues but as the residue of a composite history that could not decide between its two model monarchs.

Where the critical reading lands: a genuine tension at the plain-reading level; the qualified-superlative defense is possible but text-unmarked, and the doubling is more economically explained by the double redaction of the Deuteronomistic History, which honored both Hezekiah and Josiah as the incomparable king.