General Notes

BIOGRAPHY:  MANASSEH A king of Judah, son and successor of Hezekiah; reigned 55 years (2 Kings 21:1; 2 Chronicle s 33:1), from circa 685 onward. His was one of the few royal names not compounded with the na me of Yahweh (his son Amon's was the only other if, as an Assyrian inscription gives it, th e full name of Ahaz was Jehoahaz or Ahaziah); but it was no heathen name like Amon, but ident ical with that of the elder son of Joseph. Born within Hezekiah's added 15 years, years of tr embling faith and tender hope (compare Isaiah 38:15 f), his name may perhaps memorialize th e father's sacred feelings; the name of his mother Hephzibah too was used long afterward as t he symbol of the happy union of the land with its loyal sons (Isaiah 62:4). All this, however , was long forgotten in the memory of Manasseh's apostate career.   I. Sources of His Life.   The history (2 Kings 1-18) refers for "the rest of his acts" to "the book of the chronicles o f the kings of Judah," but the body of the account, instead of reading like state annals, i s almost entirely a censure of his idolatrous reign in the spirit of the prophets and of th e Deuteronomic strain of literature. The parallel history (2 Chronicles 33:1-20) puts "the re st of his acts" "among the acts of the kings of Israel," and mentions his prayer (a prayer as cribed to him is in the Apocrypha) and "the words of the seers that spoke to him in the nam e of Yahweh." This history of Chronicles mentions his captive journey to Babylon and his repe ntance (2 Chronicles 33:10-13), also his building operations in Jerusalem and his resumptio n of Yahweh-worship (2 Chronicles 33:14-17), which the earlier source lacks. From these sourc es, which it is not the business of this article either to verify or question, the estimate o f his reign is to be deduced.   II. Character of His Reign.   1. Political Situation:   During his reign, Assyria, principally under Esar-haddon and Assur-banipal, was at the heigh t of its arrogance and power; and his long reign was the peaceful and uneventful life of a wi lling vassal, contented to count as tributary king in an illustrious world-empire, hospitabl e to all its religious and cultural ideas, and ready to take his part in its military and oth er enterprises. The two mentions of his name in Assyrian inscriptions (see G.A. Smith, Jerusa lem, II, 182) both represent him in this tributary light. His journey to Babylon mentioned i n 2 Chronicles 33:11 need not have been the penalty of rebellion; more likely it was such a n enforced act of allegiance as was perhaps imposed on all provincial rulers who had incurre d or would avert suspicion of disloyalty. Nor was his fortification of Jerusalem after his re turn less necessary against domestic than foreign aggression; the more so, indeed, as in so l ong and undisturbed a reign his capital, which was now practically synonymous with his real m (Esar-haddon calls him "king of the city of Judah"), became increasingly an important cente r of wealth and commercial prosperity. Of the specific events of his reign, however, other th an religious, less is known than of almost any other.   2. Reactionary Idolatry:   That the wholesale idolatry by which his reign is mainly distinguished was of a reactionary a nd indeed conservative nature may be understood alike from what it sought to maintain and fro m what it had to react against. On the one side was the tremendous wave of ritual and mechani cal heathen cults which, proceeding from the world-centers of culture and civilization (compa re Isaiah 2:6-8), was drawing all the tributary lands, Judah with the rest, into its almost i rresistible sweep. Manasseh, it would seem, met this not in the temper of an amateur, as ha d his grandfather Ahaz, but in the temper of a fanatic. Everything old and new that came to h is purview was of momentous religious value--except only the simple and austere demands of pr ophetic insight. He restored the debasing cults of the aboriginal Nature-worship which his fa ther had suppressed, thus making Judah revert to the sterile Baal-cults of Ahab; but his blin d credence in the black arts so prevalent in all the surrounding nations, imported the elabor ate worship of the heavenly bodies from Babylon, invading even the temple-courts with its num erous rites and altars; even went to the horrid extreme of human sacrifice, making an institu tion of what Ahaz had tried as a desperate expedient. All this, which to the matured propheti c sense was headlong wickedness, was the mark of a desperately earnest soul, seeking blindl y in this wholesale way to propitiate the mysterious Divine powers, his nation's God among th em, who seemed so to have the world's affairs in their inscrutable control. On the other side , there confronted him the prophetic voice of a religion which decried all insincere ritual ( `wickedness and worship,' Isaiah 1:13), made straight demands on heart and conscience, and ha d already vindicated itself in the faith which had wrought the deliverance of 701. It was th e fight of the decadent formal against the uprising spiritual; and, as in all such struggles , it would grasp at any expedient save the one plain duty of yielding the heart to repentanc e and trust.   3. Persecution:   Meanwhile, the saving intelligence and integrity of Israel, though still the secret of the lo wly, was making itself felt in the spiritual movement that Isaiah had labored to promote; thr ough the permeating influence of literature and education the "remnant" was becoming a powe r to be reckoned with. It is in the nature of things that such an innovating movement must en counter persecution; the significant thing is that already there was so much to persecute. Pe rsecution is as truly the offspring of fear as of fanaticism. Manasseh's persecution of the p rophets and their adherents (tradition has it that the aged Isaiah was one of his victims) wa s from their point of view an enormity of wickedness. To us the analysis is not quite so simp le; it looks also like the antipathy of an inveterate formal order to a vital movement that i t cannot understand. The vested interests of almost universal heathenism must needs die hard , and "much innocent blood" was its desperate price before it would yield the upper hand. T o say this of Manasseh's murderous zeal is not to justify it; it is merely to concede its sad ly mistaken sincerity. It may well have seemed to him that a nation's piety was at stake, a s if a world's religious culture were in peril.   4. Return to Better Mind:   The Chronicler, less austere in tone than the earlier historian, preserves for us the story t hat, like Saul of Tarsus after him, Manasseh got his eyes open to the truer meaning of things ; that after his humiliation and repentance in Babylon he "knew that Yahweh he was God" (2 Ch ronicles 33:10-13). He had the opportunity to see a despotic idolatry, its evils with its spl endors, in its own home; a first-fruit of the thing that the Hebrew exiles were afterward t o realize. On his return, accordingly, he removed the altars that had encroached upon the sac red precincts of the temple, and restored the ritual of the Yahweh-service, without, however , removing the high places. It would seem to have been merely the concession of Yahweh's righ t to a specific cult of His own, with perhaps a mitigation of the more offensive extremes o f exotic worship, while the toleration of the various fashionable forms remained much as befo re. But this in itself was something, was much; it gave Yahweh His chance, so to say, among r ivals; and the growing spiritual fiber of the heart of Israel could be trusted to do the rest . It helps us also the better to understand the situation when, only two years after Manasseh 's death, Josiah came to the throne, and to understand why he and his people were so ready t o accept the religious sanity of the Deuteronomic law. He did not succeed, after all, in comm itting his nation to the wholesale sway of heathenism. Manasseh's reactionary reign was indee d not without its good fruits; the crisis of religious syncretism and externalism was met an d passed.   John Franklin Genung    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright Statement These files are public domain and are a derivative of an electronic edition that is available from Crosswire Software.  Bibliography Information Orr, James, M.A., D.D. General Editor. "Entry for 'MANASSEH (3)'". "International Standard Bi ble Encyclopedia". <http://www.studylight.org/enc/isb/view.cgi?number=T5760>. 1915.   <http://www.studylight.org/enc/isb/view.cgi?number=T5760>