Manasseh: Fifty-Five Years and Repentance

Manasseh was twelve when he became king, and he reigned fifty-five years—longer than any other king of Judah. He rebuilt the high places his father had torn down, raised altars to Baal, worshipped the host of heaven in the very courts of the Temple, passed his son through fire, practiced sorcery and necromancy, and set a carved image inside the House of which God had said, "In it I will put My name forever." He "shed very much innocent blood, until he filled Jerusalem from end to end."

Chronicles tells what Kings leaves out. God spoke to Manasseh and to the people and they did not listen. So the commanders of Assyria came, took him with hooks, bound him in bronze fetters and carried him to Babylon. "In his distress he entreated the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers… and God heard his plea and brought him back to Jerusalem, to his kingdom. And Manasseh knew that the Lord is God."

He returned, threw the idol out of the Temple and restored the service. But the people had grown used to the high places, and half a century of idolatry was not erased in the years left.

Manasseh's son Amon reigned two years. He did not inherit his father's repentance: "he did what was evil in the eyes of the LORD, as Manasseh his father had done," and served the same idols. His own servants killed him in his own house; the people of the land struck down the conspirators and made his eight-year-old son Josiah king.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.