Lawbreakers have a direct interest in getting rid of lawbooks, just as
shopkeepers who use short yardsticks and light weights are not anxious
the standards should be easily accessible. If we do not make God's law
our guide, we shall wish to put it out of sight, that it may not be
our accuser. What more sad or certain sign of evil can there be than
that we had rather not 'hear what God the Lord will speak'?

The straightforward story of our passage gives a most natural
explanation of the find. Hilkiah was likely to have had dark corners
cleared out in preparation for repairs and in storing the
subscriptions, and many a mislaid thing would turn up. If it be
possible that the book of the Law should have been neglected (and the
religious corruption of the last hundred years makes that only too
certain), its discovery in some dusty recess is very intelligible, and
would not have been doubted but for the exigencies of a theory.
'Reading between the lines' is fascinating, but risky; for the reader
is very likely unconsciously to do what Hilkiah is said to have
done--namely, to invent what he thinks he finds.

Accepting the narrative as it stands, we may see in it a striking
instance of the indestructibleness of God's Word. His law is
imperishable, and its written embodiment seems as if it, too, had a
charmed life. When we consider the perils attending the transmission
of ancient manuscripts, the necessary scarcity of copies before the
invention of printing, the scattering of the Jewish people, it does
appear as if a divine hand had guarded the venerable book. How came
this strange people, who never kept their Law, to swim through all
their troubles, like Caesar with his commentaries between his teeth,
bearing aloft and dry, the Word which they obeyed so badly? 'Write it
... in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever.'