1. Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned fifty-five years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Hephzibah.
2. He did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, following the abominable practices of the nations whom the Lord had dispossessed before the Israelites.
3. He rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed. He set up altars to Baal and also made an asherah, as Ahab, king of Israel, had done. He bowed down to the whole host of heaven and served them.
4. He built altars in the house of the Lord, of which the Lord had said: In Jerusalem I will set my name.
5. And he built altars for the whole host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord.
6. He immolated his child by fire. He practiced soothsaying and divination, and reintroduced the consulting of ghosts and spirits.He did much evil in the Lord’s sight and provoked him to anger.
7. The Asherah idol he had made, he placed in the Lord’s house, of which the Lord had said to David and to his son Solomon: In this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I shall set my name forever.
8. I will no longer make Israel step out of the land I gave their ancestors, provided that they are careful to observe all I have commanded them and the entire law which Moses my servant enjoined upon them.
9. But they did not listen.Manasseh misled them into doing even greater evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed at the coming of the Israelites.
10. Then the Lord spoke through his servants the prophets:
11. “Because Manasseh, king of Judah, has practiced these abominations, and has done greater evil than all that was done by the Amorites before him, and has led Judah into sin by his idols,
12. therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I am about to bring such evil on Jerusalem and Judah that, when any hear of it, their ears shall ring:
13. I will measure Jerusalem with the same cord as I did Samaria, and with the plummet I used for the house of Ahab. I will wipe Jerusalem clean as one wipes a dish, wiping it inside and out.
14. I will cast off the survivors of my inheritance. I will deliver them into enemy hands, to become prey and booty for all their enemies,
15. because they have done what is evil in my sight and provoked me from the day their ancestors came forth from Egypt until this very day.”