Page:The Books of Chronicles (1916).djvu/390

326 sight of the, to provoke him to anger. And he set the graven image of the idol, which he had made, in the house of God, of which God said to David and to Solomon his son, In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, will I put my name for ever: neither will I any more remove the foot ofIsrael from off the land which I have appointed for your fathers; if only they will observe to do all that I have commanded them, even all the law and the statutes and the ordinances by the hand of Moses. And Manasseh made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to err, so that they did evil more than did the nations, whom the destroyed before the children of Israel. And the spake to Manasseh, and to his people: but they gave no

7. the graven image of the idol] In 2 Kin. xxi. 7, R.V. "the graven image of Asherah." For Asherah cp. xv. 16 (note).

9. And Manasseh made Judah, etc.] Cp. Jer. xv. 4, where the captivity itself is referred back for its cause to the evil deeds of Manasseh.

10. the spake] i.e. by prophets; cp. 2 Kin. xxi. 10—15.

11—13 (not in 2 Kin.).&emsp;

It has been urged that the tradition of Manasseh's captivity in Babylon, his restoration to the throne of Judah, and his attempt at reformation—events related only by the Chronicler—ought not to be regarded as historically true, but are simply inventions put forward as a possible explanation of the (to the Chronicler) strange fact that the wicked king Manasseh reigned for no less than fifty and five years. The objections to the tradition are not slight—in view of the general character of the Chronicler's work. In particular, the story of Manasseh's penitence might easily be an assumption to justify the fact of his long reign, and it is very difficult to correlate it with Jer. xv. 4, where the captivity of the nation is expressly declared to be due to Manasseh's wickedness. The evidence is not decisive, however; and a brief and perhaps half-hearted repentance towards the close of his reign might well be forgotten or deemed negligible. The evidence against the historicity of the tradition of the captivity of Manasseh is much less strong, being chiefly the silence of Kings. The facts mentioned in the following note indicate that there is nothing inherently improbable in the tradition, and it is therefore legitimate to accept it as very possibly correct, although we are not yet able to confirm it from the Assyrian records.