The Crisis of the Heart

The Spiritual Roots of Israel's Exile

The great challenge throughout the Old Testament history is the perpetuation of the sanctification of the nation. There is a natural tendency towards decay and disintegration that emerges out of the reality of the fall. The principle of the world’s being is the divine Word, but a schism was created between the divine Word and the world through the fall. In view of this schism, the tendency of things is towards disintegration and nonbeing. This tendency is manifest at every layer of reality. At the core of the human hypostasis is our power of willing, of making choices one way or the other.

Yet because death has infected the will, we perceive within ourselves, at a conscious level, a movement or tendency towards sin, which is nonbeing.

This is why it is in the unfolding of time that a tendency towards degeneration afflicted mankind in the Old Testament. With the Incarnation of the Word, this tendency was rectified, and divine life was embedded in the heart of the cosmos. This is why the Old Testament speaks of the redemption as the circumcision of the heart. Circumcision is performed on the organ of generation, to speak of the circumcised heart is to speak of a heart which, by the Spirit, sheds life into the world and creates other hearts like itself.

This is what we consistently see in the history of the Old Testament: even where one generation is faithful, there is a consistent tendency towards apostasy that brings about God’s mode of working through small remnant populations. He then creates out of that remnant: the Theotokos and the Apostolic Church: an entirely new humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. I say all this in order to emphasize the logic of the OT description of Manasseh and its attribution of the exile to the sins of Manasseh, despite his repentance.

Manasseh of Judah is the worst king of Israel and Judah. All of the sins of all the royalty of both kingdoms are summed up in him. Without provocation from the outside- he had no Jezebel to blame- he walked after the way of Ahab and after the way of the “nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel.” Why? There seems to be a politico-spiritual crisis which unfolds in Judah: with the rise of Assyrian hegemony, there is a crisis of faith in the political class in the fidelity of Israel’s God to the nation. While we see the exile of the north as natural, given God’s concern about idolatry, it was likely perceived as a sign that God was incapable or unwilling to protect His people.

Manasseh is also attempting to reconstitute the nation on stable spiritual and political grounds for the future. We can see, in his activity, something like what happens in the days of Belshazzar the king of Babylon. Belshazzar, faced with the Persian onslaught, unboxes all the gods of the nations and invokes them all- the idea being that it’s better to have five gods than two. Similarly, Manasseh pursues here a false ecumenism which draws together all the religious traditions of the region’s entire history as a mode of protection against Assyrian domination. Manasseh was, in a way, a very deeply religious person. He was not playing realpolitik here. He believed in all of these gods and sought their protection.

Manasseh offers his own son as a sacrifice. He spent time with occultists and fortune tellers. Manasseh filled the whole city with blood not because he was a cynic playing the hard game of Machievellian politics, but because of his intensely sincere religiousity towards evil gods.

It is in the days of Manasseh that the prophets declare that Judah will go into exile: we hear echoes of the Shiloh desolation in the time of Eli: God will do something that will make the ears who ear of it “tingle.” Why? Because Manasseh has taken the totality of Israel’s sin and concretized it in a single person. The forces of evil have gathered to one place and are openly manifest. This makes the exile an inevitability.