Fifteen verses of repentance · likely 2nd-1st century BC
Prayer of Manasseh
The worst king in Judah's history prays, and this is what a later writer imagined he said.
- 1Chapter
- 15Verses
- c. 150 BCE - 100 CEWritten
Original language: Greek (likely composed, not translated)
King James Version Apocrypha (1769 standardized text) · public domain
Read Prayer of Manasseh
King James Version + Apocrypha (standardized 1769 text), eBible.org USFX edition of the Crosswire/eBible KJV — Public Domain
Plain answers first
What this book is
This is the shortest book on the shelf: fifteen verses, one prayer, no story around it.
The background is 2 Chronicles 33. Manasseh reigned in Jerusalem longer than any other king and did more damage than any other, filling the temple with idols and shedding innocent blood. Assyria took him away with hooks and bronze chains. In captivity he humbled himself, prayed, and God brought him back to Jerusalem. Chronicles then says his prayer was written down among the records of the seers, but it does not give us the words.
This piece supplies them. It is not a transcript. It is a devotional composition written in Manasseh's voice, most likely by a Greek-speaking Jew somewhere around the second or first century BC, though the dating is uncertain and some place it later.
The prayer moves in three steps. It begins by naming who God is, the maker of heaven and earth, terrible and merciful, whose anger is heavy but whose promise of mercy is beyond measuring. Then it confesses: my sins are more than the sand of the sea, I am not worthy to look up. Then it bends: I bow the knee of my heart, and asks for forgiveness.
It is not attached to any book. In some Greek manuscripts it sits with a collection of biblical songs after the Psalms, and it circulated in early Christian church orders.
The canon question, honestly
Why it stands outside the 66
The prayer is not in the Hebrew Bible and never was. Its own history is unusually telling: even the Roman Catholic Church, which affirmed most of the apocrypha at Trent in 1546, did not include this one. It was printed in an appendix at the back of the official Latin Bible, outside the canon, along with 1 and 2 Esdras. Eastern Orthodox churches receive it as Scripture; Protestants place it among the apocrypha. So here almost everyone agrees it is not part of the canon, and almost everyone keeps reading it anyway.
Why a student of the 66 should still open it
Why read it — and how
It is one of the finest penitential prayers ever written in any language, and the church has treated it that way for a very long time. It appears in early Christian church orders, and Anglican and Lutheran service books still set it as a song of penitence. The phrase the knee of my heart has outlived every argument about the book's canonical standing. And it answers a real pastoral question that 2 Chronicles 33 raises and does not settle: if Manasseh could be forgiven, who cannot be?
Read 2 Chronicles 33:1-13 first, so you know who is speaking and what he did. Then read the prayer slowly, twice. It is short enough to pray. Just hold the frame steady: these are a devout writer's words put in a king's mouth, valuable as devotion and as a window into how Jews thought about repentance, not as a record of what Manasseh actually said.
Doors into the text
Key moments
Verses 1-4. The prayer opens by naming the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God who made the sea and the earth.
Verses 5-7. God's anger is heavy, but his promised mercy is unmeasurable, and he has appointed repentance for sinners.
Verse 9. The confession that has made this prayer famous: sins beyond counting, bowed down by an iron weight.
Verses 11-12. The image the church has never let go of: not just the knee bending, but the heart.
Verses 13-14. He asks not to be destroyed with his sins, and stakes everything on God's goodness rather than his own record.
Verse 15. The prayer ends where a forgiven man ends: praising God forever.
The disagreement is old — here it is plainly
Where the traditions stand
| Tradition | Where this book stands |
|---|---|
| jewish | not canonical |
| anglican | apocryphal — included in 1611 KJV Apocrypha |
| catholic | in Vulgate as appendix, NOT canonical |
| protestant | non-canonical |
| eastern orthodox | canonical (anagignoskomena) |
| oriental orthodox | canonical |