Manasseh I of Judah

“ Manasseh was succeeded by his son Amon, who after a brief reign of two years perished in a conspiracy, his place being taken by Amon’s son (or brother) Josiah (q.v.) . A lament formerly ascribed to Manasseh (cf. 2 Chron. xxxiii. 18) is preserved in the Apocrypha (see Manasses, Prayer of; and Apocryphal Literature) . On Judg. xviii. 30 (marg.) ”

“ And even if it were conceivable that any king of Israel or Judah could carry on such traffic in men, as to sell his own subjects to the Egyptians for horses, it is very certain that the prophets, who condemned every alliance with foreign kings, and were not silent with regard to Manasseh's idolatry, would not have passed over such an abomination as this without remark or without reproof. ”

“ Precisely what form his worship took is a matter of conjecture; but it is possible that the religion must not be judged too strictly from the standpoint of the late compiler, and that Manasseh merely assimilated the older Yahweh-worship to new Assyrian forms. [29] Politics and religion, however, were inseparable, and the supremacy of Assyria meant the supremacy of the Assyrian pantheon.
If Judah was compelled to take part in the Assyrian campaigns against Egypt, Arabia (the Syrian desert) and Tyre, this would only be in accordance with a vassal’s duty. ”

“ The son of Hezekiah and Hephzibah was the worst of all the kings of Judah, and had the longest reign.
The tender age of Manasseh when he came to the throne may perhaps account for the fact that the [Pg 352] "forgetfulness" which his name implied [625] was not a forgetting of other sorrows, but of all that was noble and righteous in the attempted reformation which had been the main religious work of his father's life. In Judah, as in England, a king was not supposed to be of age until he was eighteen. ”

“ Alike the sight of Manasseh's long reign and Josiah's undeserved death in battle would give a powerful shock to their fixed convictions.
Far different is the end of the story in the Book of Chronicles. The records of Esarhaddon tell us that [Pg 366] in 680 he made an expedition into Palestine to restore the shaken influence of his father, [643] and about 647 he mentions among his submissive tributaries the kings of Tyre, Edom, Moab, Gaza, Ekron, Askelon, Gebal, Ammon, Ashdod, and Manasseh, King of Judah ("Minasi-sar-Yahudi") , as well as ten princes of Cyprus. ”

“ Indeed if such wanton kings be not thrust away, the whole nation will be punished for it. Hence, when Manasseh, King of Judah, had done the most wicked abominations, 'thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Behold I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah, that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle.' In short, if the Jews had not suffered their King to riot thus unpunished, God had not punished them. We must pluck out the offending eye and cut off the diseased hand and foot. ”

“ But Manasseh, who became king when Isaiah was an old man, was opposed to all these new ideas. Most of the people of Judah probably agreed with him. They still clung to the belief that the one sure way for a nation to be prosperous was to offer sacrifices to the most powerful gods. Now the kingdom of Judah, in spite of all their worship of Jehovah, was still subject to the empire of Assyria. Great sums had to be paid every year as tribute. "What fools those prophets are!" men said, as they talked together in the streets. "See how much stronger the Assyrian gods are than Jehovah!" ”

“ In times of prosperity the children of Israel were apt to go after false Gods, and in times of affliction to repent and turn to the Lord. So Manasseh a very wicked King, being captivated by the Assyrians, repented; and being released from captivity restored the worship of the true God: So when we are told that Josiah in the eighth year of his Reign, while he was yet young, began to seek after the God of David his father, and in the twelfth year of his Reign began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from Idolatry, and to destroy the High Places, and Groves, and Altars and Images of Baalim, 2 Chron. ”

“ The nation appears to have loved Amon, for the people rose in rebellion against the conspirators, killed them, and placed Amon's son Josiah, who was eight years of age, on the throne (638–608) . This change of rule was not immediately felt. The nobles and princes of Judah continued to govern in the name of the king during his minority, and maintained the innovations of Manasseh, which they sought to establish firmly.
But the number of 'the sufferers of the land,' who clung to the precepts of the God of Israel, increased daily, and these formed themselves into an active body. ”

“ Manasseh is mentioned here and at 2Ki 24:3 and Jer 15:4 as the person who, by his idolatry and his unrighteousness, with which he provoked God to anger, had brought upon Judah and Jerusalem the unavoidable judgment of rejection. It is true that Josiah had exterminated outward and gross idolatry throughout the land by his sincere conversion to the Lord, and by his zeal for the restoration of the lawful worship of Jehovah, and had persuaded the people to enter into covenant with its God once more ”

“ There could be nothing but gloom in the story of that northern kingdom in which king after king was dogged to ruin by the politic unfaithfulness of the rebel by whom it had been founded. Nor could there be much real brightness in the story of humiliated Judah. There also many kings preferred a diplomatic worldliness to reliance on their true source of strength. Even in Judah there were kings who defiled God's own [Pg 42] temple with heathen abominations; and a saint like Hezekiah had been followed by an apostate like Manasseh. ”

“ Yet Jehovah declared to Jeremiah that Manasseh's sins had irrevocably fixed the doom of Judah, so that not even the intercession of Moses and Samuel could procure her pardon. [420] Men might well doubt whether the guilt of that wicked reign was even yet fully expiated, whether their teeth might not still be set on edge because of the sour grapes which Manasseh had eaten. Therefore the prophet continues: "In those days men shall no longer say, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge ”

“ The Prophet adds in ver. 13, The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off. For then there shall be no contention between Iudah, and the ten Tribes, which are comprehended under the name of Ephraim, because their first King Jeroboam was of that Tribe. And then, as it is in Ezek. 37.22. One King shall be King over them all, and they shall be no more two Nations, neither shall they be divided any more into two Kingdoms. There shall be one King to them both, of the family of David. ”

“ Another anonymous theologian published in 1674, A Paper, shewing that the great ... Restauration of all Israel and Judah will be fulfilled ... and that the New Jerusalem is most probably then to be set up (Appendix xvii) .
Among the Christian friends of Manasseh, the following distinguished persons may be named: Edward Nicholas, the author of An Apology for the Honorable Nation of the Jews, 1648 (Appendix xviii) ; the above-mentioned John Sadler, who petitioned Richard Cromwell (1626‒1712) for a pension for Manasseh’s widow ”

“ You say, The call of Judah and Benjamin is not so likely, because Christ and the Apostles preached to them already. I answer; that by their preaching, all of those living, who were elected, were converted; but after-ages have a new race, and God hath his number among them too; yea the words run high, then All Israel shall be saved. You say, those two Tribes who crucified Christ, not so likely to be converted. I answer, by how much their sin is greater, by so much the greater will Gods mercy be ”

“ I doe firmly beleeve, and feare not to professe it; That the Jewes shall be called as a Nation, both Judah and Israel, and shall returne to their owne Land, and have an earthly Kingdome againe. For the proofe of which, I could say much, but shall now but little; and if possibly I cite any thing which Menasseh Ben Israel brings for himselfe, beleeve me that I have it not from him, but from my owne observations out of Scripture, some yeares since. There is weight in that place of Mic. 4.8. The first dominion, the Kingdome shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem ”

“ Though affliction drive us to God, he will not therefore reject us if in sincerity we seek him, for afflictions are sent on purpose to bring us to him. As a token of God's favour to him, he made a way for his escape. Afflictions are continued no longer than till they have done their work. When Manasseh is brought back to his God and to his duty he shall soon be brought back to his kingdom. See how ready God is to accept and welcome returning sinners, and how swift to show mercy. Let not great sinners despair, when Manasseh himself, upon his repentance, found favour with God ”

“ We may surmise, too, that a kind of bastard culture became popular when the Jewish mind had opened to it, for good and evil, a world of myth and song and legend which, if known before, had until now been barred from complete and triumphant entrance by faith in a living God. Once only would Manasseh appear to have asserted himself, and, according to the Book of Chronicles, he was taken prisoner in Jerusalem by the master he had served so well, and learned to know in the bitterness of a Babylonian prison that sycophancy does not always lead to safety. ”

“ In the great crisis of Manasseh's spiritual life, the Levitical ordinances played no part; they moved on a lower level, and ministered to less urgent needs. Probably the worship of Jehovah was still suspended during Manasseh's captivity; none the less Manasseh was able to make his peace with God. Even if they were punctually observed, of what use were services at the Temple in Jerusalem to a penitent sinner at Babylon? When Manasseh returned to Jerusalem, he restored the Temple worship, and offered sacrifices of peace-offerings and of thanksgiving; nothing is said about sin-offerings. ”

“ But when God sought the man upon whose shoulders rested the chief responsibility for the wreck of the nation, He fixed on this man. When Manasseh stood on trial before Him, charged with the terrible crime of blasting a kingdom, he was found guilty.
It was a startling verdict. It is all the more startling when we realize that Manasseh in the last years of his life was a good man. It was only his earlier years that were spent in sin. In his old age he was a saint. In the last years of his reign he knew God and did all that he could to undo the evils of an ill-spent yesterday. ”

“ Whatever influence Manasseh's reformation exercised over his people generally, the taint of idolatry was not removed from his own family. His son Amon succeeded him at the age of two-and-twenty. Into his reign of two years he compressed all the varieties of wickedness once practised by his father, and undid the good work of Manasseh's later years. He recovered the graven images which Manasseh had discarded, replaced them in their shrines, and worshipped them instead of Jehovah. But in his case there was no repentance, and he was cut off in his youth. ”

“ Whenever, wherever, the practice exists, he frankly denounces it as ‘infamous.’ But he will not admit that ‘usury’ is in any sense a Jewish principle, nor in any but a cruelly acquired one a Jewish practice. ‘The sacred Scriptures,’ says Manasseh, ‘forbid absolutely the robbing of all men, whatsoever religion they be of. In our Law it is a greater sinne to rob or defraud a stranger than if I did it to one of my owne profession. A Jew is bound to shew his charity to all men: he hath a precept not to abhor an Idumean or an Egyptian ”

“ Such a career would undoubtedly perplex and confound all the preconceived opinions of Jewish orthodoxy. The prosperity of Manasseh would have presented as great a problem to them as the miseries of Job. They looked to temporal prosperity as the reward of righteousness, and to acute misery as the retribution of apostasy and sin. ”

“ The treatment of the covenant by the author of Jubilees (xxiv. 28 sqq.) , on the other hand, is only intelligible when one recalls the attitude of Judah to the Philistine cities in the 2nd century B.C.; see R.H. Charles, ad loc.
26 In 2 Sam. xix. 43 (original text) the men of Israel claim to be the first-born rather than Judah; cf. 1 Chron. v. 1 seq., where the birthright (after Reuben was degraded) is explicitly conferred upon Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh) .
27 Cf. Josephus, Antiq. ii. 8, 2; Test. of xii. Patriarchs; Acts vii. 16 (where Shechem is an error) ”

“ Jaddua succeeded to the high-priesthood, B.C. 341, and distinguished himself by zealously maintaining the Mosaic institutions as restored by Ezra and Nehemiah. Manasseh, on the other hand, married the daughter of Sanballat the Horonite3, thus contracting one of those alliances, against which the Princes of the Captivity had so energetically protested. This roused the indignation of the elders in Jerusalem, and of Jaddua himself, who declared that Manasseh must put away his wife, or be no longer associated in the priesthood. ”

“ His sacrifices were not the condition of his pardon, but the seal and token of a reconciliation already effected. The experience of Manasseh anticipated that of the Jews of the Captivity: he discovered the possibility of fellowship with Jehovah, far away from the Holy Land, without temple, priest, or sacrifice. The chronicler, perhaps unconsciously already foreshadows the coming of the hour when men should worship the Father neither in the holy mountain of Samaria nor yet in Jerusalem. ”