Prayer of Manasseh 1: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter is a single prayer spoken to the Lord. It begins with praise: God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the maker of the heavens and the earth, whose anger toward sinners cannot be endured and whose promised mercy cannot be measured. The speaker then confesses that his sins are more than the sand of the sea, begs to be forgiven and not destroyed, and ends by saying he will praise God all his life.

Claim by Claim

1. 1:1
   • The speaker addresses the Lord, the Almighty God of the fathers.
   • The fathers named are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
   • God is the God of the righteous offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
2. 1:2
   • God made heaven and earth.
   • God made all the adornment of heaven and earth.
3. 1:3
   • God confined the sea by the word of his command.
   • God shut up the deep.
   • God sealed the deep by his fearful and glorious name.
4. 1:4
   • All things fear God.
   • All things tremble before God's power.
   • The majesty of God's glory cannot be endured.
   • God's angry threatening toward sinners cannot be withstood.
5. 1:5
   • God's merciful promise is immeasurable.
   • God's merciful promise is unsearchable.
6. 1:6
   • God is the Lord Most High.
   • God is of great compassion.
   • God is longsuffering.
   • God is very merciful.
   • God relents concerning the evils of men.
   • God, according to his great goodness, has promised repentance and forgiveness to those who have sinned against him.
   • God, out of his boundless mercies, has appointed repentance for sinners.
   • The purpose of appointing repentance for sinners is that they may be saved.
7. 1:7
   • God is the God of the just.
   • God has not appointed repentance for the just.
   • Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are named as just men for whom repentance was not appointed.
   • Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did not sin against God.
   • God has appointed repentance for the speaker.
   • The speaker is a sinner.
8. 1:8
   • The speaker has sinned more times than the number of the sands of the sea.
   • The speaker's transgressions are multiplied.
   • The speaker repeats that his transgressions are multiplied.
   • The speaker is not worthy to look up and see the height of heaven.
   • The reason the speaker is not worthy is the multitude of his iniquities.
9. 1:9
   • The speaker is bowed down with many iron bands.
   • The speaker cannot lift up his head.
   • The speaker has no release.
   • The speaker has provoked God's wrath.
   • The speaker has done evil before God.
   • The speaker did not do God's will.
   • The speaker did not keep God's commandments.
   • The speaker set up abominations.
   • The speaker multiplied offences.
10. 1:10
    • The speaker now bows the knee of his heart.
    • The speaker begs God for grace.
11. 1:11
    • The speaker says he has sinned.
    • The speaker repeats that he has sinned.
    • The speaker acknowledges his iniquities.
12. 1:12
    • The speaker humbly begs God to forgive him.
    • The speaker repeats the request for forgiveness.
    • The speaker asks God not to destroy him along with his iniquities.
    • The speaker asks God not to be angry with him forever.
    • The speaker asks God not to reserve evil for him.
    • The speaker asks God not to condemn him to the lowest parts of the earth.
    • God is the God of those who repent.
13. 1:13
    • God will show all his goodness in the speaker.
    • God will save the speaker.
    • The speaker is unworthy.
    • God will save him according to God's great mercy.
14. 1:14
    • The speaker will praise God forever all the days of his life.
    • All the powers of the heavens praise God.
    • The glory belongs to God forever and ever.
    • Amen.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1

The speaker is Manasseh, king of Judah in the seventh century BC, remembered in 2 Kings 21 for filling Jerusalem with idols. 2 Chronicles 33 adds that the Assyrians carried him off to Babylon in chains, that he prayed there, and that the prayer was written down in the royal records. This short piece, composed in Greek several centuries later, supplies the prayer that record mentions. It stands in the Apocrypha rather than in the Hebrew Bible, and in Greek manuscripts it is usually attached to the Psalms rather than placed with the histories.

1:2

KJV "all the ornament thereof" translates the Greek word kosmos, which meant both the ordered arrangement of a thing and its decoration, and which later came to mean the universe itself. The line echoes Genesis 2:1, "the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them": not just the container but everything that fills and orders it.

1:3

Ancient Hebrew poetry pictures the sea as a force that has to be penned in, with a shoreline set as its legal limit; see Job 38:8 to 11 and Proverbs 8:29. "The deep" is the mass of water below the world, the same word used in Genesis 1:2. To seal something was to close it and stamp it with the owner's mark, as with a document or a tomb door, making it binding and not to be opened by anyone else; here the seal is God's own name. KJV "terrible" carries its 1611 sense of dread-inspiring, not its modern sense of bad or of poor quality.

1:4

KJV "importable" is not a printer's error and has nothing to do with importing goods. It is an older English word, from Latin importabilis, meaning unbearable, impossible to carry.

1:5

The two words picture two failed attempts: no one can take the measure of this promise, and no one can explore it to its far end. The pair is a standard way of saying a thing has no limit that can be reached.

1:6

KJV "repentest of the evils of men" does not mean God is sorry for what people have done. The Greek verb means to change one's mind or relent, and the clause is read in two ways: that God relents from the harm he had announced against people, or that he holds back over human wickedness instead of punishing it at once. The prayer does not settle between them. "Repentance" here translates metanoia, a change of mind that turns a person around and back; "hast appointed repentance" means God has established that turning as the way back for sinners, not that he assigns a mood to them.

1:7

In Jewish writings of this period Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were often spoken of as men with nothing to repent of, a way of naming an extreme of righteousness against which the speaker measures himself. The Greek can also be read more broadly as "the righteous" as a class, with the three named as its examples.

1:8

"The sands of the sea" is a fixed idiom for a quantity past counting, used all through the Hebrew Bible. The standing posture for prayer was upright with the eyes and hands lifted toward the sky, so saying he is not worthy to look up and see the height of heaven is saying he is unfit even to take the ordinary position of someone praying.

1:9

2 Chronicles 33:11 says Manasseh was taken to Babylon with a hook in his nose and bound in fetters, and the prayer pictures him still in them, bent under their weight so that he cannot straighten up. "Abominations" in the Old Testament usually means idols and the equipment set up for their worship; 2 Chronicles 33 lists the altars, the carved images and the idol Manasseh placed inside the temple itself.

1:10

"The knee of mine heart" is a phrase found nowhere else in the Bible. Kneeling was the body's way of admitting someone else's authority, and a man in irons cannot kneel, so the prayer moves the gesture inward.

1:12

"Reserving evil for me" means storing up punishment to be paid out later, like a debt kept on the books rather than cancelled. "The lower parts of the earth" is the world of the dead, called Sheol in Hebrew and Hades in Greek, pictured as lying beneath the ground, the place people go down to when they die.

1:14

"The powers of the heavens" translates a Greek phrase covering the armies of heaven, understood either as the angelic beings who serve God or as the sun, moon and stars drawn up in their ranks. Ancient readers did not always draw a sharp line between the two.