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Prayer of Manasseh - Overview

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A king who had taught Judah to worship false gods is carried away in chains. When Manasseh finally prays, the astonishing event is not that he discovers words for his shame, but that God hears him. Second Chronicles 33:12-13 preserves that turn. The Prayer of Manasseh gives it a voice: a sinner bound by his own evil addresses the God of his fathers, asks for release, and promises that his remaining days will become praise. The Church has preserved this short prayer both as a biblical canticle and as a lesson in receiving those who repent. In the Coptic Orthodox Church, it is read among the prophecies of Bright Saturday, immediately after Hezekiah’s prayer and before the prayers of Isaiah.1

Where this prayer stands in Scripture

The Prayer of Manasseh is a single penitential prayer, not another account of the king’s reign. Its narrative home is 2 Chronicles 33. Its opening nevertheless reaches farther back, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to the Lord who made heaven and earth. It begins with God, not with the sinner’s feelings. The king can return because the God of his fathers is still the God who gives repentance unto salvation.

The prayer is absent from the Hebrew Bible. Most common NKJV editions follow the Protestant 66-book canon and therefore omit it; this is an issue of the collection being printed, not evidence that Christians did not know or pray it. In Greek Christian biblical transmission, the prayer appears among the Odes, a collection of scriptural songs associated with the Psalter. Codex Alexandrinus is one witness to that setting. Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty and Deacon Bishoy Boshra Behnam identify its place alongside the Odes in their The Prayer of Manasseh the Wicked King, p. 5.2 It is also transmitted within ancient church orders and in Latin biblical traditions. The Church’s prayer life and manuscript history help explain why this small text is familiar to Orthodox worshipers but unfamiliar to many other English Bible readers.

The distinction matters without becoming a quarrel. A Bible edition’s table of contents tells us what that edition prints. It cannot by itself tell the whole history of what Christians preserved and used in worship. Nor should the prayer’s association with the Septuagint be described as if every Greek manuscript contained it in the same place.

The king whose prayer the Church remembers

Portrait of Manasseh from Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum Guillaume Rouille, Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum (1553), public domain. An imaginative historical portrait, not a contemporary likeness or a Coptic icon. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Manasseh was the son of Hezekiah, whose reforms he overturned. Second Chronicles 33:1-10 records his accession at twelve, his fifty-five-year reign, the rebuilding of idolatrous shrines, worship of the host of heaven, altars within the Lord’s house, divination, and the passing of his children through fire. Second Kings 21:16 records the innocent blood with which he filled Jerusalem. His evil was neither private nor harmless: a king’s false worship taught a people how to sin, while the temple itself was made to serve the betrayal.

Chronicles then records his captivity, humiliation, prayer, restoration, and reform (2 Chronicles 33:11-16). The restored king removes foreign gods and the image from the Lord’s house, repairs the Lord’s altar, and tells Judah to serve the Lord God of Israel. His repentance reaches the worship he had corrupted. A changed heart begins to dismantle what an unrepentant heart built.

Kings and Jeremiah keep the cost of that history in view. Even after Josiah’s reform, Judah remains under judgment connected with Manasseh’s provocations and innocent bloodshed (2 Kings 23:26; 24:3-4; Jeremiah 15:4). These witnesses belong together: mercy received by the person, consequences borne by the nation. Manasseh’s return is no license to dismiss the lives harmed under his rule. For a reader who has caused damage, the distinction is both humbling and hopeful. God may hear a repentant cry before the damage can be repaired; receiving that mercy begins a duty of truth and care, not an escape from it.

How the Church preserved the prayer

Chronicles reports Manasseh’s prayer and refers to accounts of it among the records of the seers (2 Chronicles 33:18-19), but does not reproduce its words. The received Prayer of Manasseh voices the repentance described there. The ancient Christian witnesses show how it was handed down; they do not establish that its surviving wording is a court transcript from the king’s own lifetime.

Two settings are especially revealing. Among the Odes, the prayer stands with other songs of Scripture and becomes words the faithful can pray. Within the Didascalia Apostolorum and Apostolic Constitutions, it stands inside instruction about repentance and the pastoral care of sinners. A text addressed to God thus also teaches the Church how to receive a person who returns to Him.

In Didascalia Apostolorum, chapter 7, an extended retelling of Manasseh’s captivity leads directly into the prayer. The chapter addresses bishops and tells them to admit the person who repents back into the Church. In R. Hugh Connolly’s translation, the Manasseh prayer and its sequel appear on pp. 72-74.3 This is an ancient church order, not a work assigned here to an individual Father. The related fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions develops the same pastoral setting in Book II, chapter 22.4 These are witnesses to Christian transmission and reception; their titles do not make them writings composed by the Twelve Apostles.

The prayer that teaches shepherds to receive penitents

Apostolic Constitutions, Book II, chapter 22, begins by telling bishops to keep earlier examples before them and to act toward sinners in accordance with God’s treatment of those who return. Its expanded Manasseh narrative recounts the king’s crimes, his captivity, and his prayer. After the prayer, a flame appears around him, his iron shackles and chains fall away, and he returns to Jerusalem.4 The flame and falling chains are features of this ancient tradition, not events narrated in 2 Chronicles 33.

The conclusion explains why a church order would preserve the whole prayer:

“For He not only forgives the penitent, but reinstates them in their former dignity.”4

That sentence looks backward to Manasseh’s restored kingship, but its setting turns the lesson toward the Church’s shepherds. A genuinely repentant sinner is not to be treated as though his past has made fellowship with God permanently impossible. The purpose of correction is a healed return, not the satisfaction of keeping someone outside. This does not promise automatic restoration to every office, position of trust, or authority over those harmed. Forgiveness and the protection of others must remain together. The church order’s demand is that shepherds imitate God’s mercy rather than make exclusion an end in itself.

Amon: the danger of planning to repent later

The next chapter refuses a dangerous misuse of the story. Apostolic Constitutions, Book II, chapter 23, describes Amon reasoning that his father had lived wickedly and repented in old age. Amon therefore plans to enjoy his desires now and return to God later:

“My father from his childhood was a great transgressor, and repented in his old age; and now I will walk as my soul lusts, and afterwards I will return unto the Lord.”5

Second Chronicles 33:21-25 records Amon’s evil, his refusal to humble himself, his two-year reign, and his death at the hands of his servants. His explicit calculation about repentance belongs to the church order’s expanded narrative. That distinction leaves the warning intact without making the Bible say more than it says.

Manasseh’s return is mercy to someone who finally comes home. Amon’s calculation attempts to turn that mercy into a timetable for disobedience. The two attitudes are spiritually opposite. The person who says, “I can still repent,” may be gathering courage to confess; the person who says, “I need not repent yet,” may be giving sin permission to deepen its hold. An old wound, a concealed habit, or a deferred apology does not become easier to surrender merely because we have allowed it another year.

St. Cyril’s catechesis: do not distrust repentance

St. Cyril of Jerusalem brings Manasseh before those preparing for baptism in Catechetical Lecture 2: On Repentance, section 14. He calls the king utterly wicked, names his idolatry and innocent bloodshed, and reports the tradition that he sawed Isaiah apart. Captivity becomes a course of healing through repentance. Cyril then turns the example toward the hearer: if such a man was saved through repentance, the hearer must not regard his own return as impossible.6

Section 15 passes directly to Hezekiah and the power of his prayer. Its opening makes the pastoral purpose plain:

“Take heed lest without reason you mistrust the power of repentance.”6

Cyril’s examples work against despair without reducing the severity of sin. Manasseh’s crimes are named, and the hearer is called to confession. The history is not a spectacle from which we pronounce a verdict on an ancient king. It asks whether we will entrust our own sin to the God who heard him. Repentance kills self-salvation, not hope: helplessness before our own chains is a reason to ask for release.

A roadmap to the prayer

The chapter study, The Knee of the Heart follows the prayer from the Creator’s majesty and mercy (1:1-7), through the sinner’s confession (1:8-10), to the bent heart and repeated plea for release (1:11-13), and finally to lifelong praise (1:14-15). Its comparison with the patriarchs concerns covenant faithfulness against Manasseh’s apostasy, not the claim that other human beings are absolutely sinless. The Gospel parallel is a posture, not only a mood: Manasseh cannot lift his head or look toward heaven, and the publican in Luke 18:13 will not raise his eyes to heaven. The words “according to thy great mercy” in verse 14 also match Psalm 51:1 (LXX 50:3), Brenton’s verse 3 because the superscription occupies verses 1-2. At the end, the former worshiper of the host of heaven joins that host’s praise of God.

The Church’s Voice in Worship ⛪

The Prayer of King Manasseh is read among the Bright Saturday prophecies. The St. Bishoy Apocalypse Night service book groups it under “Prayers of the Old Testament Prophets”: Hezekiah’s prayer (Isaiah 38:10-20) comes immediately before it, and Isaiah’s First Prayer (Isaiah 26:9-20) immediately after it. The order is printed on pp. 22-24.1 Its inclusion among these readings does not change its literary form: it remains a penitential prayer, heard within the Church’s prophetic witness to God’s saving work.

The father and son stand beside one another at the edge of death. Hezekiah prays from the gates of Sheol, which Brenton renders “the gates of the grave” (Isaiah 38:10). Manasseh asks not to be condemned to “the lowest parts of the earth” (Prayer of Manasseh 1:13). Both are heard. Cyril also treats them together, though in the reverse order, in Catechetical Lecture 2, sections 14-15.6 The service then gives voice to Isaiah himself. According to the tradition Cyril records in section 14, Manasseh killed Isaiah; compare Hebrews 11:37, which mentions sawing but does not identify the prophet or the king. The murderer and the prophet are thus heard beside one another in this service book, without excusing the crime or denying the murderer the call to repentance.61

The night gives verse 13 a particularly strong scriptural connection. Manasseh fears the “lowest parts of the earth,” language also heard in Psalm 63:9 (LXX 62:10). Ephesians 4:9 speaks of Christ having “descended into the lower parts of the earth.” The place the sinner begs not to enter is the depth into which the Savior goes willingly. Christ is not another penitent. He has no sin to confess and no captivity He cannot overcome. His descent into death and Hades is sovereign and free, the saving act of the Lord who comes to release those whom sin and death have bound.

Later that same night, the whole book of Revelation is read; the St. Bishoy book prints it on pp. 190-272.1 The abyss “closed” and “sealed” in Prayer of Manasseh 1:3 therefore resonates with the shutting and sealing of the abyss in Revelation 20:1-3. These are connections between scriptural words heard in the same vigil, not a claim that the service book explains them as the reason for its sequence. They help the worshiper hear a larger confession: neither the sinner’s chains nor the depths of death lie outside the Lord’s authority.

Spiritual Fruit 🍇

Receive the returning person without making yourself the judge of his whole future. The church orders preserved this prayer partly to form shepherds. In family or parish life, a confession should not become material for humiliation or gossip. Listen truthfully, encourage a concrete return to Christ, and leave sacramental judgment to the person’s priest. Mercy does not require the person harmed to abandon needed boundaries or pretend that trust is already restored.

Do not schedule obedience for a later life. Amon’s calculation brings the overview’s history close to our own day. If you have already recognized one thing that must change, begin with the next faithful act rather than promising a grand conversion when circumstances improve. Contact the person you need to apologize to, ask for confession, or stop sustaining the hidden wrong. Grace is received in the life we actually have.

Let another person’s repentance enlarge your hope. Cyril names an appalling sinner in order to open a door for the hearer. When shame says that your case is uniquely hopeless, place that claim beside the God who heard Manasseh. The path is confession, not a better defense of yourself. Deacons serve the LORD, and every servant’s work should help people turn toward Him rather than secure the servant’s importance.

At the Bright Saturday reading, hear the father pray from the grave’s gates and the son ask for release from the depths. Then hear the prayer within the victory of Christ. He is not another penitent; He enters death willingly as Lord and Savior. Let the history of mercy become the courage to return today.

Footnotes

  1. St. Bishoy Coptic Orthodox Church, Rites of Pascha, Book 6: Apocalypse Night, pp. 22-24 for Hezekiah, Manasseh, and Isaiah’s First Prayer; pp. 190-272 for Revelation: service book. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty and Deacon Bishoy Boshra Behnam, The Prayer of Manasseh the Wicked King (2020), p. 5: study. ↩

  3. Didascalia Apostolorum, chapter 7, R. Hugh Connolly translation (1929), pp. 72-74: text. The chapter addresses bishops; the Manasseh narrative is a pastoral example for receiving penitents. ↩

  4. Apostolic Constitutions, Book II, chapter 22, translated by James Donaldson, ANF, vol. 7: text. The flame and falling chains belong to its expanded narrative, not to 2 Chronicles 33. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Apostolic Constitutions, Book II, chapter 23, Donaldson translation, ANF, vol. 7: text. The quoted words are Amon’s reasoning in the church order, not a quotation of 2 Chronicles 33:21-25. ↩

  6. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 2: On Repentance, sections 14-15; the quotation comes from section 15. Translated by Edwin Hamilton Gifford, NPNF, Second Series, vol. 7: text. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

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