Prayer of Manasseh

Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, reigned as king of Judah for fifty-five years — the longest reign of any Davidic monarch and, by the accounting of 2 Kings 21, the most wicked. He rebuilt the high places his father had destroyed, erected altars to Baal, made a carved image of Asherah and placed it in the Temple, sacrificed his own son by fire, practiced divination and sorcery, and shed so much innocent blood that 2 Kings 21:16 says he "filled Jerusalem from one end to another." The Rabbinic tradition later credited Manasseh with martyring the prophet Isaiah by sawing him in two, a tradition echoed in Hebrews 11:37. The canonical account in 2 Chronicles 33:10-17 records, without elaboration, that when Manasseh was taken captive by the Assyrians — bound with bronze shackles and brought to Babylon — he "humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and prayed unto him: and he was entreated of him, and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom." The Chronicler explicitly notes that Manasseh's prayer exists: "Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, and his prayer unto his God, and the words of the seers that spake to him in the name of the LORD God of Israel, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel" (2 Chronicles 33:18). He also mentions "the prayer of Manasseh" specifically in verse 19, referring to a written source. The canonical Books of Kings make no mention of any repentance at all. The Prayer of Manasseh as we possess it is a Jewish composition, likely composed in Hebrew or Aramaic between the second century BC and the first century AD, and subsequently translated into Greek. It survives in full in the Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum (third century AD), where it appears embedded in a discussion of repentance for bishops. It was included in some manuscripts of the Septuagint as an appendix to the Psalms, and it appears in the Vulgate in the section called the "Odes" — a collection of biblical canticles appended to the Psalter. The prayer's canonical status has been a point of division across Christian traditions. The Roman Catholic Church, at the Council of Trent in 1546, defined the Deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch) as canonical, but the Prayer of Manasseh was not among them and remains outside the Catholic canon, though it appears in an appendix to the Clementine Vulgate. The Eastern Orthodox Church accepts a broader canon that includes the Prayer of Manasseh among the Anagignoskomena — books considered profitable for reading even if their canonical status is secondary. The Anglican Church treated it as acceptable for edification but not for establishing doctrine. Protestant traditions generally classify it as Apocrypha in the sense of non-canonical but historically valuable. Despite its uncertain canonical standing, the Prayer of Manasseh has exercised enormous liturgical influence in Eastern Christianity. It is read in the Eastern Orthodox service of Great Compline, the longest and most penitential of the daily prayer offices, particularly during Great Lent. The prayer thus reaches practicing Orthodox Christians on a regular liturgical basis, its words part of the annual rhythm of fasting and repentance. The prayer's theological power derives from its extreme case. Manasseh was not a minor sinner requesting forgiveness for ordinary transgressions. He was, by the biblical record, a perpetrator of child sacrifice, systematic idolatry, political murder, and the defilement of the Temple of God itself. If the prayer is genuine — or even if it represents a serious theological imagination of what such a man might have prayed — it constitutes one of the boldest claims in all of ancient literature about the reach of divine mercy. The prayer explicitly addresses this extremity: God is said to have "appointed repentance unto sinners, that they may be saved," and the speaker claims to have sinned "above the number of the sands of the sea." The phrase "the God of them that repent" (verse 13 in the traditional numbering) is among the prayer's most theologically pregnant lines. It is not merely that God is a God who can forgive the repentant; it is that the capacity for repentance defines a particular relationship with God — the God who stands ready to receive is precisely the God whose character is revealed in that readiness. This is closely parallel to the theology of Luke 15, where the father runs to meet the returning son before any speech of confession is made. The structural movement of the prayer follows the classic penitential pattern: address and praise of God's majesty, acknowledgment of divine mercy, confession of sin in increasingly vivid terms ("I am bowed down with many iron bands"), the act of penitential prostration ("I bow the knee of mine heart"), direct petition for forgiveness, confidence in being heard, and concluding doxology. This structure closely parallels Psalm 51 — the great Davidic penitential psalm — and the two prayers have often been read together in Jewish and Christian tradition as complementary expressions of the repentant heart.

The Prayer of Manasseh is best approached as a model for what might be called extreme penitential prayer — prayer that does not minimize, excuse, or contextualize sin but presents it to God with complete honesty. Begin with the prayer's opening doxology, which establishes who God is before addressing what the speaker has done. This sequence — praise before confession — follows the pattern of the great penitential psalms. Naming God's power, mercy, and longsuffering before naming one's own sin places the confession in its proper context: not as an accusation before a tribunal but as a disclosure before a Father whose mercy has already been declared. The lines "I have sinned above the number of the sands of the sea" and "I am bowed down with many iron bands" invite a form of prayer that does not carefully calibrate how much contrition is merited. The prayer of Manasseh is total: it does not bargain or compare, does not argue mitigating circumstances, does not note the good deeds that might be weighed against the bad. This totality is its therapeutic force. Praying it honestly means resisting the impulse to mentally footnote each admission with qualifications. The pivot phrase — "Now therefore I bow the knee of mine heart, beseeching thee of grace" — is one of the most striking images in ancient penitential literature. The heart has knees; the inward faculty of the will can prostrate itself before God in a gesture the body may or may not be able to perform. This phrase invites physical posture to match inward intention: many who pray this prayer do so kneeling, with hands pressed to the floor, as an embodied expression of the interior bow. After the petition for forgiveness, the prayer moves without hesitation to confidence: "thou art the God of them that repent; and in me thou wilt shew all thy goodness." This confidence is not presumption but trust grounded in the character of God as established in the prayer's opening. Praying this section involves deliberately choosing to rest in that trust rather than lingering in the guilt of the preceding confession. The prayer closes with a vow of praise: "I will praise thee for ever all the days of my life." Received prayer always issues in praise; this is the trajectory the prayer inscribes. After praying the Manasseh, a natural continuation is the singing or reading of Psalm 51, whose conclusion ("Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee") carries the same movement from forgiveness to witness. In the Orthodox tradition, the Prayer of Manasseh is sung to a specific tone in Great Compline. Even outside this liturgical context, praying it within a larger framework of penitential worship — perhaps during Lent, or at a time of particular moral failure — honors the context in which the church has found it most powerful.