Page:The Books of Chronicles (1916).djvu/392

328 Ophel, and raised it up a very great height: and he put valiant captains in all the fenced cities of Judah. And he took away the strange gods, and the idol out of the house of the, and all the altars that he had built in the mount of the house of the, and in Jerusalem, and cast them out of the city. And he built up the altar of the, and offered thereon sacrifices of peace offerings and of thanksgiving, and commanded Judah to serve the , the God of Israel. Nevertheless the people did sacrifice still in the high places, but only unto the their God. Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, and his prayer unto his God, and the words of the seers that spake to him in the name of the, the God of Israel, behold, they are written among the acts of the kings of Israel. His prayer also, and how God was intreated of him,

Ophel] Cp. xxvii. 3 (note).

15. he took away the strange gods] Cp. ver. 7.

16. he built up] or he rebuilt, cp. xi. 5 (note).

peace offerings] Cp. 1 Chr. xvi. 1 (note).

commanded Judah] Cp. ver. 9; 2 Kin. xxi. 11.

17. but only, etc.] See note on xxxii. 12.

18—20 (cp. 2 Kin. xxi. 17, 18).&emsp;

18. his prayer] It was probably upon the ground of this remark that the so-called Prayer of Manasses, which in the English editions of the Apocrypha occurs just before 1 Maccabees, was composed. The "prayer" referred to by the Chronicler is quite certainly not to be associated even remotely with this apocryphal work, which by some is thought to have been written originally in Greek, though it has also been regarded as a Greek translation from some Hebrew midrashic source. Its date is uncertain. It is given in a collection of hymns appended to the Psalter in the Alexandrine MS. (A) of the LXX. (Swete's ed. vol. p. 824), and is also found in the Latin Vulgate, though the translation is not by Jerome. See the edition by Ryle in Charles' Apocrypha, vol. 1.

the acts of the kings of Israel] See Introd. § 5, p. xxxii. Here, since canonical Kings contains no mention whatever of Manasseh's prayer or the words of the seers to him, we see very plainly that this source to which the Chronicler so often refers cannot be identical with the canonical books of Kings.