Manasseh Is Carried Away, Heard, and Brought Back

Fifty-five years is the longest reign of any king of Judah or Israel, probably counting a period as co-regent with his father. Twelve years old means Manasseh was born in the fifteen years added to Hezekiah’s life in 2 Kings 20:6, a son of the extension.

The comparison is to the Canaanite peoples whose removal the land was supposed to mark. The king of the people God planted is measured against the people God uprooted, and the verse does not soften it with any phrase about partial faithfulness.

“Built again” uses the Hebrew idiom “he returned and built”, a reversal verb aimed squarely at his father. “Groves” is the King James rendering of asherim, wooden cult poles for the goddess Asherah. “The host of heaven” is astral worship, much encouraged under Assyrian influence.

The quotation from God is given in the middle of the charge, so the altars are set in the place of which the promise was spoken. Manasseh did not build a rival temple elsewhere; he brought the rivals into the one that bore the LORD’s name.

“The two courts” are the inner priests’ court and the great outer court. Idol altars in both means that no worshipper, priest or layman, could approach the LORD’s altar without passing someone else’s. 2 Kings 23:12 has Josiah tearing these down.

The list closely tracks Deuteronomy 18:10-11, where the same practices are forbidden in nearly the same order, as if Manasseh worked through the prohibitions one by one. The valley of the son of Hinnom, Ge Hinnom, gives its name to Gehenna. “Children” is plural here; 2 Kings 21:6 says “his son”.

“A carved image” is pesel ha-semel; the rare word semel means a figure or statue. 2 Kings 21:7 identifies it as an image of Asherah. The promise is quoted a second time and at greater length, to David and to Solomon, as if the verse is holding the two side by side.

The promise of a settled foot in the land came with a condition, “so that they will take heed”. The Book of 2 Chronicles leaves the condition standing at the end of the sentence, which the rest of the book then tests to its end in chapter 36.

“Made … to err” is to lead astray, the verb used of a shepherd misleading sheep. “Worse than the heathen” is a strong claim; the nations had never had the law, the temple or the prophets Judah had, and so their evil is measured as less.

One sentence covers what 2 Kings 21:10-15 expands into a prophetic oracle about wiping Jerusalem “as a man wipeth a dish”. Here the point is the refusal alone: the LORD spoke, and they would not hearken, the failure the next verses reverse.

Assyrian records name “Menasi king of Yaudi” among Esarhaddon’s and Ashurbanipal’s vassals, but no Assyrian text mentions his capture. Babylon rather than Nineveh fits the years after 648 BC, when Ashurbanipal crushed a revolt there. “Among the thorns” is probably “with hooks”, the nose rings by which the Assyrians led captives (compare 2 Kings 19:28).

“In affliction” is literally “when it was narrow for him”, a Hebrew idiom of distress as tightness. He “humbled himself greatly”, the same verb the book applies to Rehoboam, Hezekiah and Josiah, but only here with the intensifying adverb.

“He was intreated of him” means God allowed himself to be moved by the prayer. A later composition, the Prayer of Manasseh, found in some Greek and Latin Bibles and printed among the King James Apocrypha, tried to supply the words this verse does not give. The last sentence is the payoff: Manasseh came to know.

The wall ran on the west side of the Gihon spring in the Kidron valley and up to the Fish Gate on the north, where Tyrian traders later sold fish (Nehemiah 13:16). Ophel is the ridge between the city of David and the temple. Building projects are, in Chronicles, a mark of a king blessed.

The verbs are removal verbs, and the idol comes out of the same house where verse 7 put it. “Cast them out of the city” is where Hezekiah and Asa had thrown the defilements before him, often into the Kidron valley. The man who installed is the man who clears.

Peace offerings and thank offerings are the sacrifices of fellowship and gratitude, much of their meat eaten by the worshippers. Manasseh chooses offerings of thanks for a restored man rather than only sin offerings. The imperative to serve the LORD comes from the same mouth that led Judah astray in verse 9.

The qualification is honest. High-place worship continued, but directed to the LORD alone. The reform changed the object of worship without restoring the one altar Hezekiah had insisted on, a gap Josiah would have to close.

“The book of the kings of Israel” is the Chronicler’s general name for a source covering the monarchy, even for a Judean king. “The seers” who spoke to him are not named in either account, though later tradition held that Isaiah was killed under Manasseh.

“The sayings of the seers” translates a phrase some take as a named prophet, Hozai, as the margin of some Bibles and the Septuagint suggest. The prayer and the sins are archived together, and “before he was humbled” draws the line down the middle of his reign.

“In his own house” is the garden of Uzza, according to 2 Kings 21:18, not the royal tombs of the city of David. The Book of 2 Chronicles does not comment, but the lesser burial is in keeping with how Judah treated kings whose record was mixed.

Twenty-two at accession and dead two years later, Amon was sixteen when Josiah was born (34:1 makes Josiah eight at his father’s death). His name matches the Egyptian god Amun, though it may simply be the Hebrew word for “faithful” or “skilled”.

Manasseh had cast out the altars, but the carved images themselves seem to have survived somewhere for Amon to sacrifice to. The phrase “all the carved images which Manasseh his father had made” lets the son pick up exactly what the father abandoned.

The contrast is set out as a mirror sentence: humbled not himself, as his father had humbled himself. “Trespassed more and more” is literally “multiplied guilt”, the word asham used of the guilt that needs a guilt offering.

“His servants” are court officials, and he dies “in his own house”, the same place his father was buried. 2 Kings 21:23 gives no motive for the conspiracy; some historians connect it with factions for and against Assyria or Egypt, which is inference.

“The people of the land”, the landed free citizens of Judah, act twice: they kill the conspirators and crown an eight-year-old. They had also installed Uzziah (26:1) and would later install Jehoahaz (36:1). Josiah’s reign begins with a popular restoration of the house of David.