2. like the abominations of the nations. The formulaic language for reporting the cultic divagations of an Israelite king is stepped up here, and it will continue to be intensified in the verses to follow. Manasseh, the son of one of the two most virtuous kings of Judah, is cast as the most egregious of evil kings. It is historically plausible that he would have encouraged pagan cults—he was a vassal to Assyria, a fact not mentioned in our text but registered in Assyrian inscriptions—but it appears that his religious and moral turpitude is stressed in order to explain how the kingdom of Judah was destroyed four generations later, despite Hezekiah and his virtuous grandson Josiah. This impending destruction is the burden of the dire prophecy in verses 11–15.

3. he made a sacred pole. The Hebrew ʾasherah can refer either to a special pole used in the pagan cult or to the goddess Asherah, depending on the context. In verse 7, the reference is clearly to Asherah because there could not be a statue of a sacred pole.

and he bowed down to all the array of the heavens. The worship of astral deities, not especially prominent in Canaanite religion, was widespread in Assyria, and the biblical literature produced in the last century of the First Temple period abounds in objections to it.

4. And he built altars in the house of the LORD. Introducing pagan worship into the Jerusalem temple was an especially heinous act, far worse than reestablishing the cult of the high places.

5. both courts of the house of the LORD. These are the inner and outer courts of the Temple.

6. And he passed his son through the fire. The ambiguity of the Hebrew wording, as noted earlier, allows one to construe this either as child sacrifice or as a nonlethal magical/cultic rite.

to vex Him. The object of the verb is merely implied in the Hebrew.

7. Jerusalem, which I have chosen from all the tribes of Israel. The language of the election of Jerusalem is emphatically Deuteronomistic.

9. to do what was evil more than the nations that the LORD had destroyed. Manasseh’s offenses are so great that they even outdo those of the surrounding nations. A grim a fortiori notion is intimated here: if the Canaanite nations were dispossessed because of their evil acts, how much more so will this be the fate of Judah, which under their king surpassed the Canaanites in culpable behavior.

11. foul idols. As before, the writer uses an invented invective term, gilulim, coined from gelalim, “turds.”

13. the line . . . and the weight. In the construction of buildings, in order to ensure that the walls would be vertical, walls were measured against a plumb line—a line with a weight attached to its bottom end. The line and the weight are thus a metaphor for the rigorous measuring of the integrity of Jerusalem. Ironically, it is not a correction in building that will ensue but destruction, as Samaria was measured and destroyed.

as one wipes a bowl clean, wiping and turning it on its face. This is a homey and vivid image of total destruction: when the last remnant of food is wiped from the bowl, leaving no drop or crumb, the bowl can be turned upside down.

15. and have been vexing Me from the day their fathers came out of Egypt to this day. In the explanation put forth here for the imminent national catastrophe, the evil Manasseh is not unique but rather the culmination of all the backsliding and rebellion of the Israelites from the generation of the wilderness wanderings onward.

16. Manasseh also had shed innocent blood in great abundance. Moral offense compounds the cultic offenses. The victims of these many murders are in all likelihood loyalists to YHWH, perhaps the prophets of the LORD just mentioned, who were slaughtered as Jezebel slaughtered the prophets of the LORD. It may have been this that led the Israeli biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann to describe Manasseh as “the Jezebel of the South.”

23. And Amon’s servants hatched a plot against him. Whenever the connection is with a king, “servants” means “courtiers.” The reason for the court conspiracy is not stated. Some have interpreted the regicide as a response to Amon’s paganizing ways, and the fact that “the people of the land” (whether the phrase indicates the general populace or a particular political group within it) kill the conspirators and promote Josiah to the throne argues for this understanding. Josiah was only eight years old at the time, and given his later record of unflagging loyalty to YHWH and his devotion to the centrality of the Jerusalem cult, those who instated him and looked after his education must surely have themselves been loyalists to YHWH.