ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the entwined story of Huldah and Josiah is about the tension between a localizing paganism and an emerging universalism in Israel's religion. Huldah's story almost seems to interrupt the Bible's narrative of an ancient men's movement. Huldah speaks words of condemnation and comfort to a king and his courtiers and then disappears from the text. She does not change the tone of the story by 'feminising' or softening it. The story regains its focus on men and their monumental and fateful deeds. But Huldah's mere presence as a woman is surprising. A pagan reading that refuses to change the story can be quite clear that Huldah's tale challenges her later interpreters. Few of them like the way that the story makes no fuss about her prophesying. They offer increasingly strange solutions to prevent Huldah encouraging other women to think that they might do what she and men did.
