Prayer of Manasseh

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The Prayer of Manasseh is a brief penitential prayer of about fifteen verses, composed in Greek and placed in the mouth of Manasseh, king of Judah, as the words of his repentance during captivity in Babylon. It is one of the shorter items of the Old Testament apocrypha, and among the most concentrated: an address to God as maker and judge, a confession that the speaker’s sins outnumber the sands of the sea, and a plea for mercy from one who counts himself unworthy to lift his eyes.

The prayer answers a gap in the biblical narrative. The second book of Chronicles tells that Manasseh — remembered as the most idolatrous of Judah’s kings — was carried in chains to Babylon, humbled himself, prayed, and was restored; it adds that his prayer was written down, but does not give it. The text supplies what that narrative names and withholds. Scholarship treats it as a later composition, most likely of the last two centuries before the Common Era or the first century after, written by a Hellenized Jewish or early Christian author rather than by the king himself; the elegance of its Greek and its theology of repentance place it well after Manasseh’s own age. No Hebrew original is attested, and whether one ever existed is unsettled.

Its transmission runs through Christian rather than Jewish channels. The prayer appears in the third-century Didascalia and in the church order known as the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, and survives among the Odes appended to the Psalter in manuscripts of the Greek Bible, including the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus. Jerome left it out of the Vulgate proper; it later circulated as an appendix to Latin Bibles alongside the books of Esdras the Western canon also declined to receive. The Council of Trent confirmed that placement for Roman Catholics — printed, but outside the canon — while the Reformers gathered it among the Apocrypha. The Eastern Orthodox and several Oriental churches hold it as Scripture, and it has long served liturgically as a canticle of repentance.

What the prayer holds, across these divisions, is a single posture: the sinner who has nothing to offer but the admission of having sinned, and who appeals to mercy precisely as the one thing left. The tradition placed those words in the mouth of its worst king on purpose — if repentance reached him, the implication ran, it reached anyone. That is the logic the text leaves standing, whether read as canon or as apocryphon.

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

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