A Window Beneath the Throne for the Worst King of Judah

The commanders of Assyria did not lead Manasseh out of Judah by the wrist. They drove a hook through his nose and dragged him to Babylon the way a herdsman drags a stubborn animal, and the king who had filled Jerusalem with idols and innocent blood went stumbling east on the end of a chain.

What waited for him there was a beast made of bronze. The smiths had cast it in the shape of a mule, hollow, its hide drilled through with holes, and they pried open its flank and shoved the king inside. Then they stacked wood beneath its belly and lit it. The metal heated slowly. Manasseh's own screams came out through the holes as smoke.

He Called Every Idol He Had Ever Built

From inside the glowing bronze he began to pray, and he prayed first to the gods he knew. He named the image he had set up in the Sanctuary itself. He named every carved thing he had bowed to, every altar he had raised, every demon he had courted on the rooftops of Jerusalem. "Let such an image come and save me," he cried, and he went down the list of them one by one, leaving out nothing he had ever worshiped.

Not one of them answered. The bronze only grew hotter. The gods he had served his whole reign were exactly as deaf as the metal pressing against his skin.

A Verse From His Father's Synagogue

When nothing he could name availed him at all, an older voice surfaced in him. He remembered being a boy, standing in the synagogue, his father Hezekiah making him read a verse aloud: "When you are in distress, and all these things have come upon you, in the latter days you will return to the LORD your God and obey His voice. For the LORD your God is a merciful God; He will not fail you nor destroy you nor forget the covenant of your fathers."

He had idols still on his tongue and a furnace around his body, and he made a gambler's wager out of the verse. "Behold, I will call upon Him," he said. "If He answers me, well and good. And if not, then all faces are alike, and one god is no better than another." Then the worst king Judah had produced turned, from inside a burning bull, to the God of his father.

The Angels Stopped Up the Windows of the Firmament

The prayer rose. It did not get far. The ministering angels were already at the windows of the firmament, sealing them, packing the openings shut so that nothing from Manasseh could climb past the sky.

They had their argument ready, and they brought it before the Holy One. "Master of the world," they said, "a man who worshiped idols, a man who set up an image in Your own Sanctuary. Will You receive him back? Can there be repentance for him?" They were not wild with rage. They were precise, and they were certain they were right, and they held the windows closed while they made their case.

The answer they got was not the one they expected. "If I do not receive him in repentance," the Holy One told them, "behold, I am locking the door before every penitent who will ever come." The whole future of return hung on this one ruined king screaming inside bronze, and heaven's gatekeepers were holding the door shut against it.

God Dug a Tunnel Beneath His Own Throne

So the Holy One did not order the windows opened. He did not overrule the angels at their posts. He went around them.

Beneath the Throne of Glory He bored a passage, a narrow tunnel cut into the floor of heaven itself, opening somewhere under the seat of His own kingship. The angels guarded the gates above. They could not guard a hole that had not existed until this moment, dug in the one place they would never think to watch. Up through that breach, while every proper window stayed sealed, Manasseh's voice came climbing, and it arrived directly beneath the Throne, and the Holy One bent and listened to it.

In the deserts of Arabia, they say, a tunnel is called a breach, and to dig one is to entreat. So when Scripture says God was entreated of him, it is saying God dug for him. The same wind that the Holy One sets loose across the world swept the king up out of the bronze, lifted him clear of Babylon, and set him back down in Jerusalem on his own throne.

There Is Judgment and There Is a Judge

Manasseh stood again in the city he had defiled, alive, restored, a man who had felt the metal cooling around a prayer that should never have reached anyone. He did not boast. He said one thing, and the sages preserved it as the whole of what the furnace taught him. "There is justice," he said, "and there is a Judge."

Above him the angels still stood at their sealed windows, every gate shut, every charge against him true. They had simply lost the argument to a tunnel.