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Before the Church · c. 150 BC – AD 50

The Prayer of Manasseh

Anonymous

Full text

What it is

Fifteen verses supplying the prayer Chronicles says the worst king of Judah prayed in captivity and does not quote. The sins are more in number than the sand of the sea; the knees of the heart are bent; and the God who appointed repentance did so not for the righteous, who never needed it, but for the sinner.

Why it lasted

The most concentrated statement of repentance in the Bible or its margins, used as a canticle in the Byzantine office and in Anglican penitential services, and printed in the Apocrypha of the King James Bible.

Scripture it works from

Read it here

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1 sections · complete, from Bible (King James)/Prayer of Manasseh.

Elsewhere

The complete text is held here and can be read in the reader.

These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.

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