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
Featured studies on this book
— the deep dives, each its own page
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.
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.
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.
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.
Plainly told
The story it tells
The king Chronicles doesn’t quote
2 Chronicles 33 tells of Manasseh, the worst and longest-reigning king in Judah’s history, dragged off to Babylon in bronze chains. There, humbled, he prayed, and God brought him home. Chronicles says the prayer was written down among the records of the seers, but never gives the words. This fifteen-verse piece supplies them.
Who God is
The prayer opens by naming the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, maker of heaven and earth, whose anger against sin is heavy but whose promised mercy cannot be measured: a God who has “appointed repentance unto sinners.”
Sins like the sand of the sea
The confession that made the prayer famous: sins beyond counting, “above the number of the sands of the sea,” a life bowed down under their weight, unworthy even to lift the eyes to heaven.
The knee of my heart
“Now therefore I bow the knee of mine heart, beseeching thee of grace”: the image the church has never let go of, not just the knee bending, but the heart itself.
Not destroyed, not condemned
He asks not to be destroyed along with his sins, staking everything on God’s goodness rather than any claim of his own.
Praise forever
The prayer ends where a forgiven man ends: praising God forever, for “all the powers of the heavens do praise thee.”
Dates hedged where scholarship hedges
Where it sits in history
- c. 2nd century BC – early 3rd century AD
Composed, likely in Greek, to supply the words 2 Chronicles 33:18–19 says were recorded but does not give. It must predate its earliest known quotation.
- c. AD 200–250
The prayer appears (its earliest known appearance in literature) quoted in the Didascalia Apostolorum, a Syrian Christian church-order text, and is later carried into the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions.
- 1546
The Council of Trent sets the Prayer of Manasseh aside, together with 3 and 4 Esdras, outside its own list of canonical books.
- 1571
Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles places it among the books read for example of life, not for doctrine.
- later, undated
Pope Clement VIII prints it in a non-canonical appendix at the back of the official Vulgate, “lest it perish entirely.”
The disagreement is old: here it is plainly
Where the traditions stand
This is the one book on the shelf where almost every tradition agrees, from a different direction, that it stands outside the canon, and the agreement is worth noticing precisely because it is so rare. The Hebrew Bible never had it; it exists only because 2 Chronicles 33 mentions a prayer without preserving it.
What is unusual is that Rome did not receive it either. At Trent in 1546, where nearly every other book on this shelf was affirmed as Scripture, the Prayer of Manasseh was set aside along with 3 and 4 Esdras, named as outside the canonical series. It was kept anyway, printed later in a non-canonical appendix at the back of the official Vulgate so that a text this loved would not simply disappear from circulation.
The Reformers reached the same practical destination from their own starting point, placing it among the books read for the example of a godly life rather than for doctrine. So on this one book, Protestant and Catholic tradition land within sight of each other, even though they got there by different roads.
Eastern Orthodoxy is the exception that proves how much this prayer is carried by use rather than by canon lists: its status is mixed even within Orthodoxy: deuterocanonical in some Slavonic and Greek-tradition Bibles, absent from others, but it is chanted every single year regardless, at the service that opens Great Lent.
| 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 |
2 threads into the 66
Its connections into Scripture
The Prayer of Manasseh is the Old Testament's most dramatic statement that repentance is available even to the worst sinner: Manasseh (who had set up idols in the temple and sacrificed his own son) confesses ("I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned"), and God receives him. Jesus' parable of the prodigal son — where the father runs to embrace the returning sinner — narrates the same theological truth in Gospel form.
Paul's confession in 1 Timothy 1:15 — "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost" — is structurally identical to the Prayer of Manasseh: a self-identified worst-case sinner receiving mercy as the archetypal demonstration of God's patience. The two passages together became the liturgical backbone of Christian penitential tradition.
Reception history, never our confession
What the church has made of it
Its first appearance in any surviving literature is liturgical, not canonical: the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum, a Syrian church manual, quotes it as a model of repentance, and the piece was carried from there into the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions: evidence the prayer was already in church use well before anyone was debating whether it belonged in the Bible.
That liturgical life has never stopped. Anglican and Lutheran service books still set it as a canticle of penitence, and Eastern Orthodox churches chant it every year at Great Compline, the service that opens Great Lent on the evening after Clean Monday: a fifteen-verse prayer doing more devotional work, century after century, than its canonical status would predict.
It answers a question 2 Chronicles 33 raises and does not itself resolve in words: if Manasseh, the king who filled the temple with idols and shed innocent blood across Jerusalem, could be forgiven, who cannot be? The prayer’s two most quoted lines, sins “above the number of the sands of the sea” and bowing “the knee of mine heart,” have outlived every argument about whether the book that carries them is Scripture.
The voices
What the teachers have said
“the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine”
“Now therefore I bow the knee of mine heart, beseeching thee of grace.”
Every claim above rests on these
Where this comes from
- Bruce M. Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (Oxford, 1957)
- David A. deSilva, Introducing the Apocrypha: Message, Context, and Significance (Baker Academic)
- R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol. 2: Pseudepigrapha (Oxford, 1913)