Prayer of Manasseh

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A king is led to Babylon in chains, with a hook in his nose, and there, at the bottom of his fortunes, he breaks. The second book of Chronicles, which tells this, is the only book of the Hebrew scriptures that grants Manasseh of Judah a reprieve: humbled in his captivity, he prays, God hears him, and he is brought home to his throne. The historian then does a curious thing. He says the words of that prayer were set down — written, he reports, among the records of the seers, and among the chronicles of the kings — and he does not give them. A book that names a text it will not quote leaves an opening shaped exactly like a prayer. The Prayer of Manasseh is what was eventually written into that opening: a brief penitential prayer of about fifteen verses, composed in Greek, in the mouth of the king at the moment Chronicles falls silent.

Manasseh, Repentant Sinner from the Old Testament — Karel van Mander the Elder, 1596 (J. Paul Getty Museum), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The choice of speaker is the whole point. In the books of Kings, Manasseh is the worst monarch the southern kingdom produced — the son of the reforming Hezekiah who rebuilt the high places his father had pulled down, raised altars to foreign gods inside the Temple itself, passed his own son through fire, and filled Jerusalem with innocent blood from one end to the other. Kings offers him no repentance and no pardon; his reign is the long crime for which, that account holds, the exile is finally exacted. Chronicles alone bends the line, inserting the captivity, the prayer, and the restoration that Kings never mentions. The Prayer takes its stand inside that bent line. It does not soften the king. It makes his guilt its first premise and asks what is left to a man who has nothing to plead.

The Hezekiah–Manasseh–Amon lunette on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; the slumped figure at right is read as Manasseh in remorse — Michelangelo, c. 1511–1512, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The posture of the prayer

The text is almost without narrative; it is all attitude. It opens by naming the God it addresses — the God of the fathers, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and of their upright seed — and then climbs through the divine attributes: maker of heaven and earth, the one who chained the sea with a word, before whose power all things tremble. The grandeur is not ornament. It is the measure against which the speaker sets himself, so that the confession, when it comes, falls from a great height. He has sinned, he says, beyond the number of the sands of the sea; his transgressions are multiplied, he is bowed down with an iron weight, and he is not worthy to lift his eyes to heaven. The single gesture the prayer permits him is interior: he bends, in its phrase, the knee of the heart.

Between the praise and the plea sits the prayer’s one piece of argument. God, it says, appointed repentance not for the righteous — not for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who did not sin — but for sinners, of whom the speaker is chief; mercy was made for exactly the case he presents. This is the hinge the whole text turns on. The patriarchs need no forgiveness and so are not the object of the divine clemency; repentance is, by its own design, a thing built for the guilty. Having established that, the king can ask. He does not bargain or excuse; he asks to be forgiven and not destroyed, and ends in praise, as the doxologies of the period required. The prayer’s force is in its economy. It stages contrition as a self-emptying — a man with no merit, no offering, and no defense, holding up the sin itself as the only thing he has to bring.

The shape is liturgical, not narrative, and that shape governs the reading. There is no scene of Babylon, no chain, no restoration — none of the circumstantial matter Chronicles gives. The prayer assumes the story rather than retelling it, which is why it can be detached from the king’s biography and used by anyone: a penitential pattern with a famous name attached, rather than a chapter of his history. The movement is the classic one of the penitential psalm — invocation, confession, petition, doxology — compressed to its essentials and held at the pitch of a man who believes he has run out of standing to address God at all. The distance between the opening hymn to the maker of heaven and earth and the closing admission that the speaker dares not look up is the entire drama. Nothing is narrated; a soul simply lowers itself, by degrees, to the ground.

A Greek prayer for a Hebrew king

The king is from the seventh century before the Common Era; the prayer is not. Its Greek is fluent and idiomatic, steeped in the vocabulary of the Greek scriptures, and shows no sign of standing behind a Hebrew or Aramaic source — no Hebrew original is attested, and the case for one having existed is weak. Its theology of repentance, its catalog of divine attributes, its formal doxology, and its sharp distinction between the sinless patriarchs and the sinners who need mercy all belong to the religious world of Second Temple Judaism rather than to the age of the monarchy. Scholarship places the composition in the last two centuries before the Common Era or the first century after, by a Hellenized Jewish writer or, some hold, an early Christian hand; the earliest hard evidence for the text is third-century, which fixes only the latest possible date. What the author produced is not a forgery in any ordinary sense but a filling-in: a writer of the Greek-speaking diaspora supplied, in the genre and the language of his own moment, the prayer that Chronicles had advertised and withheld. The device — the revered ancient figure given the words a later piety thought he must have spoken — is the common method of the period’s pseudepigrapha, the same impulse that put psalms in the mouth of Solomon and a testament in the mouth of Moses.

A text carried by the church

Whatever its origin, the Prayer of Manasseh survived in Christian hands alone. No copy was kept in Jewish tradition; every line of its transmission runs through the church, and through the church’s liturgy in particular. Its earliest appearance is in the third-century church manual known as the Didascalia Apostolorum, where it is quoted entire — fittingly, as the very example of how a grave sinner may be received back — and where its Syriac form already depends on a Greek text. From the Didascalia it passed into the fourth-century compilation called the Apostolic Constitutions, which absorbed the older manual and carried the prayer with it. In the great Greek Bibles it travels not inside the Old Testament but in a supplement: it stands among the Odes or canticles — the scriptural songs gathered for worship — appended after the Psalter, and it is found there in the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, one of the oldest near- complete Greek Bibles, as well as in later Odes manuscripts. Its home, in other words, was always the prayer book before it was ever a candidate for the canon. A text used to absolve penitents is hard to discard even when its credentials are in doubt, and that liturgical usefulness is what kept it copied.

A leaf of the Codex Alexandrinus, the fifth-century Greek Bible that carries the Prayer of Manasseh among the Odes appended after the Psalter — British Library, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The route the prayer traveled is worth marking, because it inverts the usual order. Most disputed scriptures begin as candidates for the canon and are later demoted to liturgical or devotional use; this one was a liturgical text first and became a question of canon only afterward, when readers found it standing in their Bibles and asked what it was doing there. It entered the manuscript tradition through a manual of church discipline and a book of canticles, the two least canonical of contexts, and from there worked its way toward the edges of the biblical books without ever being voted in. The Latin churches that received it inherited it, in effect, by accident of copying — the prayer was simply there, at the back of the Greek codices the scribes were working from — and the long argument over its status was an attempt, after the fact, to decide what to do with a guest who had already moved in.

The divided canon

When the question of canon was pressed, the Prayer of Manasseh came out on different sides of different lines, and the lines hardened over centuries. In the Latin West, Jerome — translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew and recognizing as Scripture only what stood in the Hebrew Bible — gave it no place in the Vulgate proper. It drifted, all the same, into the back of Latin Bibles, copied as an appendix beside the books of Esdras that the Western canon had likewise declined to receive. The Council of Trent, defining the Roman canon in 1546, confirmed the exclusion: the prayer was not numbered among the sacred books. But it was not simply dropped. In the revised Vulgate issued under Clement VIII in 1592, the Prayer of Manasseh, together with the third and fourth books of Esdras, was gathered into an appendix printed after the New Testament — set apart from Scripture, yet preserved, in the edition’s own reasoning, lest these writings perish altogether. The Reformers reached a kindred verdict by another route: Martin Luther and those who followed him gathered the prayer among the Apocrypha — useful and edifying, they held, but not the rule of faith — and as such it stands in the apocryphal section of the early English Bibles, the King James among them.

The Eastern reckoning runs the other way. In the Greek Orthodox tradition and in several of the Oriental Orthodox churches the prayer is held as Scripture, kept in its old place among the Odes after the Psalter, and read in worship. It is one of the texts whose canonical standing maps the fault line between Greek East and Latin West with unusual clarity: the same fifteen verses are holy writ in Constantinople, a printed appendix in Rome, and an instructive non-canonical relic in Wittenberg and London — three judgments on one short prayer, each rendered by a tradition certain of its own ground.

The logic of repentance

Across every one of those rulings the prayer holds a single posture, and it is the posture that explains why it was written for this king and no other. The biblical Manasseh is the limit case of guilt: the idolater who defiled the Temple, the king under whom, the historians say, the nation’s doom was sealed. Idolatry on that scale is precisely what the prayer does not name explicitly and does not need to — the reader supplies it, because the speaker is already known. To put a model confession in his mouth is to argue, by the strongest available example, that no record of sin is beyond the reach of mercy. If the man who filled Jerusalem with blood can bend the knee of his heart and be heard, the door is shut against no one. That is why the church found the text so serviceable in its liturgy of penitence: it furnishes the words for a contrition that claims nothing, a sinner’s appeal stripped to its irreducible core. The prayer makes a doctrine of its own extremity. It chooses the worst conceivable suppliant so that the promise of forgiveness will have no exception left to plead.

Text and scholarship

The Prayer of Manasseh sits among the writings that hover at the margin of the biblical collections, the same company as the Psalms of Solomon, the Assumption of Moses, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs — works preserved by Christian scribes at the edge of the canon without quite belonging to it, and gathered by modern scholarship under the headings of the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.

The text re-entered modern study in the great compendium edited by R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1913), where the Prayer received an introduction and translation in the second volume of pseudepigrapha; that two-volume work is hosted in this library at /library/apocrypha/charles-apot/ and remains a public-domain point of entry. The standard mid-century treatment of the Western apocrypha as a whole, Bruce M. Metzger’s An Introduction to the Apocrypha (Oxford University Press, 1957), sets the prayer in its canonical history and explains how a text never received as Scripture in the Latin tradition came to be printed at the back of the Vulgate. The fullest modern English introduction and translation is James H. Charlesworth’s, in his edited collection The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (volume 2, Expansions of the “Old Testament” and Legends, Doubleday, 1985), which lays out the dating, the absence of a Hebrew witness, and the transmission through the Didascalia and the Greek Odes. A concise scholarly orientation, with bibliography, is maintained by the Society for Old Testament Study at https://www.sots.ac.uk/wiki/prayer-of-manasseh/, and the older but still cited Jewish Encyclopedia article surveys the question of a possible Semitic background and the prayer’s reception at https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10344-manasseh-prayer-of. The scholarly consensus across these treatments is narrow and stable: a Greek composition of the late Second Temple or early Roman period, of Jewish or early Christian authorship, transmitted entirely through the church, and built to fill the gap that Chronicles left open.

Manasseh ruled, in the Books of Kings, for fifty-five years, longer than any king of Judah, and earned in those pages the verdict that he had done more evil than the nations God drove out before Israel. The fifteen verses fitted to him long afterward became that verdict’s counterweight — read in Constantinople as canon, printed in Rome as appendix, kept in the Protestant apocrypha as counsel — because a confession spoken by the least deserving suppliant in the record is the one no committee on the books could quite bring itself to throw away.

→ In the library: Charles — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913)

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