Manasseh

Manasseh was a king of Judah, son of Hezekiah, whose reign is remembered in Scripture chiefly for idolatry, for leading Judah into sin, and for the innocent blood he shed. The biblical text says he “did wickedly above all that the Amorites did” and “made Judah to sin with his idols” (2 Kings 21:11), and that he “shed innocent blood very much, until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another” (2 Kings 21:16). Jeremiah later names him, as “Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, king of Judah,” among the reasons for Judah’s judgment (Jeremiah 15:4). The name appears in Greek form as Manasses.

The account in 2 Kings treats his reign as a turning point with consequences that outlasted him. The text says he made altars in the two courts of Yahweh’s house, which Josiah later broke down and cast into the brook Kidron (2 Kings 23:12), and it says that Yahweh did not turn from his fierce anger “because of all the provocation with which Manasseh had provoked him” (2 Kings 23:26). Judah’s removal from its land is likewise attributed to “the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he did” (2 Kings 24:3). This account records no repentance.

The account in 2 Chronicles covers the same evil and adds a further sequence. It says Manasseh “seduced Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that they did more evil than did the nations whom Yahweh destroyed before the children of Israel” (2 Chronicles 33:9), and that Yahweh spoke to him and to his people, “but they didn’t listen” (2 Chronicles 33:10). It then says the captains of the Assyrian army took him in chains and fetters and carried him to Babylon (2 Chronicles 33:11), that he prayed and was entreated, and that he was brought again to Jerusalem, “Then Manasseh knew that Yahweh was God” (2 Chronicles 33:13). The Chronicler refers his readers to a record of Manasseh’s prayer and of the seers who spoke to him in Yahweh’s name (2 Chronicles 33:18), and contrasts his son Amon, who “didn’t humble himself before Yahweh, as Manasseh his father had humbled himself” (2 Chronicles 33:23).

Christian traditions read this difference in emphasis in more than one way. One way to read it is that the two accounts select and frame material for different purposes, 2 Kings pressing the corporate consequences of royal sin and 2 Chronicles pressing the possibility of repentance; another is to treat the Chronicler’s report as supplying events 2 Kings passed over. A related difference concerns the prayer mentioned in 2 Chronicles 33:18: a Greek text called the Prayer of Manasseh is counted among the deuterocanonical or apocryphal books in Eastern Orthodox and some other traditions, is printed in an appendix in some Catholic editions, and is generally excluded from Protestant canons. Traditions also differ over whether Manasseh’s late repentance mitigated the national judgment pronounced in 2 Kings and Jeremiah.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.