King Manasseh of Judah reigned fifty-five years, longer than any other king of David's line, and the book of Kings accuses him of a staggering catalog of evils (2 Kings 21:1-18). He rebuilt the shrines his father had torn down. He raised altars to Baal in the courts of the Temple. He even passed his own son through the fire of Molech. The Talmud in Sanhedrin 90a lists him among the kings who lose their share in the olam haba, the world to come.
And yet, the same tradition preserves his repentance. The book of Chronicles (2 Chronicles 33:11-13) tells how the Assyrians took him captive, bound him in bronze fetters, and carried him to Babylon. The midrash, elaborating on these verses and preserved as exemplum 252 in Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis, tells what happened in that captivity.
His Assyrian captors, or in another version his Babylonian ones, placed him inside a hollow statue of a bronze bull and kindled a furnace beneath it. It was a torture device the ancients called the bull of Phalaris. The king cried out. He called on every idol he had served, every Baal whose altar he had built, every carved god he had once worshiped in the Temple itself. None answered. At last, in the furnace, he called on the God of his fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Ribbono shel olam, Master of the universe, if you save me now I will repent with my whole heart.
The angels in heaven, horrified that such a sinner might be heard, tried to block the gates of prayer. The Holy One bored a hole beneath His Throne of Glory so that Manasseh's prayer could come up directly, bypassing the angelic blockade. He was heard. The fire died. The king was restored to his throne in Jerusalem, and according to Chronicles he spent the last years of his life removing the idols he had set up. This midrash, preserved in Gaster's 1924 collection, teaches a truth that unsettles angels and comforts sinners. The gates of repentance never close, even for a king in a bull in a furnace.