The Prayer of Manasseh is a short penitential prayer — just fifteen verses — attributed to Manasseh, the king the Bible remembers as the worst Judah ever had. It was most likely composed in the 2nd or 1st century BC, filling a famous gap in Scripture: 2 Chronicles says the captive king prayed and was heard, but never records a word of the prayer. Printed in the Apocrypha of many historic Bibles and still recited in Orthodox worship, it is one of the most moving expressions of repentance to survive from the ancient world.
Few texts this brief carry this much weight. The Prayer of Manasseh takes the Bible's darkest royal biography and asks: if that man could be forgiven, what does that mean for everyone else? This guide covers the story behind the prayer, what it says, why it isn't in most Bibles, who really wrote it, and its afterlife in liturgy and music.
Manasseh son of Hezekiah reigned in Jerusalem for fifty-five years — longer than any other king of Judah — beginning around 697 BC. His father had been a reformer, tearing down pagan shrines and centralizing worship at the temple. Manasseh, according to 2 Kings 21, reversed all of it.
The catalog of his offenses is the longest indictment leveled at any king in the historical books. He rebuilt the high places, raised altars to Baal, and set up a carved image of Asherah inside the temple itself. He worshiped the stars, practiced soothsaying, consulted mediums — and, most damning of all, sacrificed his own son in fire. The narrator adds that he shed so much innocent blood that it filled Jerusalem from one end to the other.
In 2 Kings, the verdict is final. There is no repentance, no reprieve, and the book goes on to blame the eventual destruction of Jerusalem itself on Manasseh's sins. He dies in his bed, unpunished and unredeemed.
Then Chronicles retells the story — and adds an ending no reader of Kings would see coming. According to 2 Chronicles 33, the commanders of the Assyrian army captured Manasseh with hooks, bound him in bronze fetters, and hauled him to Babylon. There, in genuine distress, the king who had defiled the temple humbled himself deeply before the God of his ancestors and prayed. God was moved by his entreaty, the text says, and restored him to Jerusalem and his kingdom — and only then did Manasseh know that the Lord was God. He spent his remaining years removing the idols and restoring the altar.
Chronicles then does something tantalizing. It tells us, twice, that the prayer existed in writing — recorded in the annals of the kings of Israel and in the records of the seers. But the chronicler never quotes it. The most consequential prayer in Israel's royal history — the one that turned the worst king into a penitent — is referenced, footnoted, and left blank.
Ancient readers found that silence irresistible. Somewhere in the last centuries before Christ, a devout Jewish writer composed the words the Bible had left out. The result fills scripture's silence so beautifully that churches went on reading it for two thousand years.
The prayer unfolds in five clear movements.
The invocation (verses 1–7). Manasseh begins not with himself but with God — the Lord Almighty, God of the fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their righteous descendants, the maker of heaven and earth who confined the sea and sealed the deep by his fearful and glorious name. All creation trembles before his power, the prayer says — and yet his merciful promise is beyond measuring, for he is the God of those who repent. The strategy is deliberate: before the king dares mention his sins, he establishes that the God he is addressing is both terrifyingly powerful and immeasurably kind.
The hinge (verse 8). Then comes the prayer's boldest theological move. God appointed repentance, Manasseh says, not for the righteous — not for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who did not sin against him — but for sinners like himself. The line overstates the patriarchs' sinlessness for rhetorical effect, and it remains the prayer's most debated verse. But its point is clear: repentance is not a loophole for the mostly-good. It exists precisely for the worst cases.
The confession (verses 9–10). Now the king turns to himself, and the language becomes physical. His sins outnumber the sand of the sea, he confesses; his transgressions are multiplied beyond counting; he is not worthy to lift his eyes toward heaven. He describes himself as bent beneath a heavy chain of iron — deliberately echoing the bronze fetters of Chronicles, turning the Assyrian shackles into a picture of the soul's condition. He admits, without excuse, that he set up abominations and multiplied offenses.
The bending of the heart's knee (verses 11–13). Here comes the phrase the prayer is famous for: "And now I bend the knee of my heart." A captive king in chains may not be able to kneel — but the heart can. He asks for what he knows he has not earned: forgive me, do not destroy me with my sins, do not be angry forever, do not condemn me to the depths of the earth — because you, Lord, are the God of those who repent.
The doxology (verses 14–15). The prayer ends in confidence rather than groveling. In me, unworthy as I am, you will show your goodness, Manasseh declares — and I will praise you all the days of my life, joining the whole host of heaven that sings forever. A prayer that began with a God who makes creation tremble ends with a forgiven sinner joining the angels' song.
All fifteen verses in clear modern English, with the full story from Kings and Chronicles that frames them — instant eBook, and members read free online.
Read the complete Prayer of Manasseh →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryThe power of the Prayer of Manasseh comes from who is praying it. This is not David composing a psalm. This is the king who put an idol in the temple and burned his own son — the man 2 Kings holds responsible for the fall of Jerusalem itself. If the Bible has a villain among its kings, it is Manasseh.
And the prayer takes that verdict seriously. It offers no excuses, no shifting of blame onto advisors or circumstances. Its theology is stark: God's mercy is greater than the worst documented life in the historical books, and repentance exists for exactly this kind of case. Generations of readers have found in it the most complete anatomy of repentance in ancient literature — honest confession, no self-justification, a plea grounded entirely in God's character rather than the sinner's merits, and an ending that dares to expect mercy.
That is also why the early church loved it. A third-century Christian manual known as the Didascalia quotes the entire prayer within a retelling of Manasseh's story, holding him up as proof that no one is beyond restoration. The message was pastoral: if God received Manasseh, he will receive you.
It depends on whose Bible you open. The prayer was never part of the Hebrew Bible, so it never entered the Old Testament canon that Jews and most Protestants recognize. But it circulated widely in Greek: several Septuagint manuscripts, including the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, preserve it among the Odes — a collection of biblical canticles appended to the Psalms for worship. (For how the Greek Old Testament came to differ from the Hebrew, see our guide to the Septuagint.)
In the Latin West, its status was always marginal. Jerome did not translate it for the Vulgate, though medieval Vulgate manuscripts often carried it anyway. When the Council of Trent defined the Catholic canon in 1546, the Prayer of Manasseh was not included — so the official Clementine Vulgate of 1592 printed it in an appendix after the New Testament, alongside 3 and 4 Esdras, with a note explaining the books were preserved there lest they perish entirely. Few canonical rulings have been so reluctant.
Protestant Bibles took a similar middle path. Luther included the prayer in his Apocrypha, and the original King James Bible of 1611 printed it in its Apocrypha section between the Testaments — read for edification, not doctrine. It only vanished from ordinary English Bibles when publishers began dropping the Apocrypha altogether in the nineteenth century. In the East it fared best of all: Orthodox tradition holds the prayer in high honor, recites it during Great Compline — the solemn night service used especially in Lent — and Slavonic and Russian Bibles print it at the end of 2 Chronicles, restoring it to the very gap it was written to fill. The full story of how books ended up inside, outside, or between the covers is told in our guides to the Apocrypha and the books removed from the Bible.
Honesty first: no scholar believes King Manasseh wrote this prayer. The historical Manasseh reigned in the seventh century BC; the prayer is generally dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC, with some scholars allowing a date into the first century AD. Its earliest sure attestation is that third-century Didascalia, and whether it was composed in Greek or translated from a Hebrew or Aramaic original is still debated — the Greek is polished, but the piety is thoroughly Jewish.
That makes it a work of pseudepigrapha — literature written in the voice of a famous figure from the past, a common practice in the ancient world (our guide to the pseudepigrapha explains the genre). The author was answering a question devout readers kept asking: what would the worst king have said to God from a Babylonian prison?
Intriguingly, more than one ancient writer tried. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a fragmentary Hebrew text (4Q381) carries a heading identifying part of it as a prayer of Manasseh, king of Judah, when the king of Assyria imprisoned him — yet its wording is entirely different from the Greek prayer. The gap in Chronicles was so inviting that at least two independent authors filled it; the version that survived complete is the one whose words proved unforgettable.
For a text that never secured a place in the canon, the prayer has had a remarkable liturgical career. In the Byzantine rite it is recited near the end of Great Compline, where its confession gives voice to the whole congregation's penitence — the worst king's words placed, deliberately, in every worshiper's mouth. In the Anglican tradition, the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer adapted it as a canticle, A Song of Penitence, for daily worship.
Its central image traveled into music as well. The confession that one's sins outnumber the sand of the sea passed into a Latin penitential responsory, Peccavi super numerum arenae maris, set polyphonically by Renaissance composers — the Franco-Flemish master Jacobus Clemens non Papa among them. And the image of bending the knee of the heart escaped the prayer entirely, entering the devotional vocabulary of East and West alike as a five-word definition of repentance itself.
Yes — and it may be the easiest recommendation in ancient literature, because the whole text takes about three minutes to read. The best approach is to read it in context: first 2 Kings 21, to feel the weight of the indictment; then 2 Chronicles 33, to watch the story turn; then the prayer itself, in the king's voice, from the prison in Babylon. Read that way, it lands with the force its author intended.
It also opens a door into the wider world of Jewish writing between the Testaments. Readers who respond to it usually go on to the Wisdom of Solomon — another Greek-era masterpiece written in the voice of a famous king — and from there into the broader library of texts the Bible's editors left at the threshold.
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