The Bible contains a footnote that sends the reader somewhere else. After describing the repentance of King Manasseh, the Chronicler mentions his prayer and how God heard his entreaty. Both, he says, stand in the annals of the kings and in the records of the seers.

The Chronicler does not give the prayer itself. A book that quotes freely, at length and often, points at this one text and declines to reproduce it. Somebody decided to fill that gap, and the result is the fifteen verses we call the Prayer of Manasseh.

The King the Prayer of Manasseh Belongs To

Manasseh of Judah has the worst reputation of any king in the Hebrew Bible. The book of Kings gives him fifty-five years on the throne and almost nothing good. The charges are idolatry, child sacrifice, and innocent blood shed across Jerusalem.

Then 2 Chronicles 33 tells a different ending. Assyrian officers take him with hooks, bind him in bronze fetters, and carry him to Babylon. In his distress he humbles himself, prays, and returns to his throne in Jerusalem.

Kings knows nothing of this. The two accounts disagree about whether the worst king in the record ever repented. The Chronicler is the one who says he did.

Who Wrote the Prayer of Manasseh, and When

Nobody knows, and the honest position is to say so before saying what the evidence can narrow. Three things can: the language its author used, the century it belongs to, and the literary habit that produced it. None of the three gives a name.

The Greek of the prayer is competent and idiomatic, and most scholars judge it a Greek composition rather than a translation. Some have argued for a Semitic original, and nobody can rule it out, but the evidence for it is thin.

Datings cluster between the second century before the common era and the first century after it. The text belongs to a period when Jewish writers produced prayers for biblical figures, filling out interior lives scripture had left blank. It fits that pattern exactly.

Why the Chronicler Added a Repentance

The disagreement between Kings and Chronicles is not a copying error. It follows from a problem the Chronicler could not leave alone.

His history works on a principle: obedience brings prosperity and wickedness brings disaster, visibly and within a lifetime. Manasseh breaks that principle badly. He is the worst king in the record, yet he reigns longest of all and dies in his bed.

A repentance solves the difficulty. If the long reign followed a genuine conversion, the principle holds after all. The exile to Babylon then supplies the punishment the scheme requires. Historians differ on whether the Chronicler used a source or supplied the episode himself. Assyrian records neither confirm nor exclude a deportation.

Either way the effect is the same. A gap opened in the story, marked by a reference to a document nobody had, and it stayed open for centuries.

The Other Prayer of Manasseh

There is a second text with the same title, and it is not the one in the Bibles.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a fragmentary manuscript catalogued as 4Q381 preserves a collection of psalms attributed to biblical figures. One of them carries a heading naming Manasseh, king of Judah, when the king of Assyria imprisoned him.

The Hebrew that survives is broken, but enough remains to show that it is a different composition from the Greek prayer. Two writers, working independently, had the same idea and produced different texts.

That coincidence is the most useful single fact about the whole tradition. Filling this particular gap was evidently an obvious thing to attempt, and at least two people attempted it. The version we inherited won by transmission rather than by merit.

How the Text Reaches Us

Its earliest surviving witness is not a Bible at all. The prayer appears in the Didascalia Apostolorum, a Syriac church manual from the third century. There it stands as an example for penitents to follow.

A century later it appears again in the Apostolic Constitutions, this time in Greek and in the same instructional setting. Only afterwards does it start showing up in biblical manuscripts.

When it does, its position is telling. The Codex Alexandrinus, from the fifth century, places it among the Odes, a collection of songs appended after the Psalms. It arrives in the Bible as an appendix, and an appendix is roughly where it stays.

Why It Sits in an Appendix Everywhere

The canonical history of this text is unusual, because no major tradition either accepted it fully or rejected it outright.

• Jerome left it out of the Vulgate. Copies of the Latin Bible nonetheless carry it in an appendix from the ninth century onward, added by scribes who evidently wanted it available.
• Trent, in 1546, defined the Catholic canon and placed the Prayer of Manasseh outside it, in an appendix after the New Testament, together with 3 and 4 Esdras.
• Orthodox churches include it among the Odes, where congregations read it liturgically rather than argue about it.
• The King James translators printed it in 1611 in the section headed Apocrypha, between the Testaments.

Four different decisions, and none of them is a clean exclusion. A short penitential prayer proved too useful to discard and too poorly attested to canonise, and the compromise was to keep it just outside the wall.

What the Prayer of Manasseh Is Doing Historically

Read as a historical object rather than as devotion, the text is evidence of a practice.

Jewish and early Christian writers regularly composed speeches and prayers for figures whose words scripture had summarised without recording. Everyone understood the convention, and it carried no charge of forgery: attributing a prayer to Manasseh claimed a fitting voice, not a documentary source, exactly as with the Testament of Solomon.

What makes this instance unusual is the explicit invitation. Chronicles did not merely leave a silence; it advertised the existence of a document and gave a reference for it. The writer of the prayer accepted an invitation the Bible had issued.

That distinguishes it from the Odes of Solomon or from the material attached to other biblical names, where no such reference waits for an answer.

What the Prayer Meant to the Churches That Used It

Before it became a canonical question, this was a pastoral text, and the record shows its uses.

The Didascalia introduces it inside an argument about discipline. A bishop, the manual says, must receive a penitent back rather than drive him away, and Manasseh is the proof that even the gravest sinner can return. The manual quotes the prayer as its evidence.

The Apostolic Constitutions repeat the argument a century later, in a church that had grown considerably and faced the same question more often. Both documents are addressing clergy who had to decide whether to readmit people, and both reach for the same fifteen verses.

Eastern liturgy went further and gave the prayer a place in worship. Congregations read it during Great Compline in the Byzantine rite, in the penitential seasons, where it functions exactly as its first users intended.

That history explains the appendix. Nobody can simply drop a text embedded in church practice, even by traditions that decline to call it scripture, and an appendix is what you build when you can neither include something nor discard it.

Reading It Alongside the Text Itself

The historical question and the literary one pull in different directions, and both are worth asking.

This article has followed the first: where the prayer came from, how it travelled, and why it ended up in an appendix. What the fifteen verses actually argue, and why their theology is more pointed than a penitential formula usually is, gets its own treatment in the meaning of the Prayer of Manasseh.

A reader coming to the text for the first time can take either route. The full text in English takes about three minutes to read, which is less time than this article about it.

What Cannot Be Established

Three questions about the Prayer of Manasseh have no answer, and a reader deserves to know which they are.

The first is authorship. No name attaches to the text, no early source proposes one, and the attribution to Manasseh is a literary convention rather than a claim anyone defended.

The second is the language of composition. Its Greek reads as original. Scholars have argued for a Semitic source from Hebrew idiom showing through in places, and nobody can settle that argument without a manuscript nobody has.

Third comes the date, which floats across three centuries. Proposals range from the Maccabean period to the first century of the common era, and each rests on judgments about vocabulary and theological affinity rather than on external evidence.

None of this stops anyone from reading the text. It does mean that any confident statement about who wrote the Prayer of Manasseh, or exactly when, is going beyond what survives.

What Survives the Questions

Take away what nobody can establish and something solid remains. A prayer exists that no canon fully claims, sitting near 2 Esdras in that respect. An unknown author wrote it in Greek, probably before the second century closed. It entered Christian use as a model for penitents before it entered any Bible, and copyists have kept it in circulation for at least seventeen hundred years.

The manuscripts bear that out. It travels in Greek Bibles among the Odes, in Latin ones as an appendix, in Syriac inside a church manual, and in English between the Testaments, and in each case somebody had to decide where to put a text nobody would name as scripture.

Its survival owes nothing to authority, since no authority ever fully granted it any. It survived because people kept finding it useful, and that is a different kind of endorsement, and in some ways a more interesting one.

Check out the author’s book here: The Complete Apocrypha.