18–20 (compare 2 Kings xxi. 17, 18).
The Epilogue to Manasseh’s Reign.
¹⁸Now 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 Lord, the God of Israel, behold, they are written among the acts of the kings of Israel.
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 edition vol. III. 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 Introduction § 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.
¹⁹His prayer also, and how God was intreated of him, and all his sin and his trespass, and the places wherein he built high places, and set up the Asherim and the graven images, before he humbled himself: behold, they are written in the history of Hozai[¹].
[¹] Or, the seers So the Septuagint.
19. in the history of Hozai] Render, in the history of the seers; compare margin and LXX., slightly emending the Hebrew text. To take the Hebrew word (ḥōzai) as a proper name is unsuitable, since the same word occurs as a common noun (“seers”) in the preceding verse.
²⁰So Manasseh slept with his fathers, and they buried him in his own house: and Amon his son reigned in his stead.
20. in his own house] i.e. as in 2 Kings “in the garden of his own house.”
21–25 (= 2 Kings xxi. 19–26).
Amon’s short Reign. Josiah succeeds him.