Prayer of Manasseh
The Prayer of Manasseh is the apocrypha’s version of a royal mea culpa – fifteen verses of contrition from Judah’s most notorious idolater, suddenly discovering remorse in exile. Written in Greek sometime between the 2nd century BCE and 1st century CE, it fills the narrative gap left by 2 Chronicles 33, where Manasseh repents but no actual prayer is recorded. The result is a lush, penitential monologue that sounds like Psalm 51 rewritten by someone who’s been through a Babylonian rehab program. It’s apocryphal because it’s late, anonymous, and far too theologically polished to have come from the man who once sacrificed his own sons to the fires of Molech, but its survival in the apocryphal liturgy proves that even the worst kings can get a post‑exilie PR makeover.
This was my writeup on 2 Chronicles 33: “Manasseh’s turn, and in this seeming pendulum back and forth, starting at age twelve, he reverses everything his father Hezekiah did. Leading the people into idol worship, sorcery, divination, building altars to Baal, etc., etc. God decides that Manasseh is the worst of all time, and has the Syrians return, capture him, and take him to prison. There he repents, gets released, returns to Judah, restores everything his dad did, and continues to reign for 55 years. His son Amon takes over at age 22, and in the two short years of his reign, reverses once again everything back to idolatry. His own courtiers assassinate him. They’re all a bit tired of this back and forth.”
And, my writeup on Psalm 51: “An act of confession of sins by David to the prophet Nathan, along with a plea to be pardoned for his past sins based on his acknowledgement of them. This psalm is ofttimes seen as a major impetus behind the Catholic practice of confession. And, it also fits with the Jewish version – once a year on Yom Kippur.”
- Verses 1-15. The Prayer of Manasseh is basically the Monty Python “Oh Lord, You Are So Big” sketch played with a straight face: fifteen verses of cosmic flattery where the disgraced king, fresh from sacrificing his own sons, suddenly discovers the art of groveling and unleashes a thesaurus of divine attributes; merciful, mighty, eternal, forgiving; until the whole thing sounds less like repentance and more like a nervous schoolboy buttering up the headmaster. It’s penitential literature turned parody, a late‑Second Temple PR stunt that rehabilitates Judah’s worst monarch by drowning him in adjectives, proving that even apocrypha can collapse into unintentional comedy when the rhetoric of contrition starts to look like a sketch about God’s “bigness.”