2 Kings — Chapter 21

He made his son pass through fire, and divined by soothsayers, and observed omens, and appointed python spirits, and multiplied diviners. Lapide: Manasseh's sins are enumerated in a catalogue of horror: he restored all the high places his father had destroyed, rebuilt altars to Baal, offered his son to Moloch, practised all forms of divination, and finally shed so much innocent blood that \"he filled Jerusalem from end to end\" (v. 16). Lapide cites Josephus (Antiq. X.iv) that Manasseh slew a prophet every single day. Isaiah, his kinsman, was sawn in two by his order — a type of Christ crucified.

I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria, and the weight of the house of Achab. Lapide explains the metaphor: as a builder uses a measuring line to level a wall for demolition, so God will apply the same measure of punishment to Jerusalem that He applied to Samaria and Ahab's dynasty. The line will reduce Jerusalem to rubble; the stylus will wipe it clean as wax tablets are smoothed for re-writing. Five such strokes of the stylus are enumerated by Lapide, ending with the final captivity under Nebuchadnezzar.

Moreover Manasses shed also very much innocent blood, till he filled Jerusalem, so that besides his sin, wherewith he made Juda to sin. Lapide: The two sins most severely punished in the history of Judah were idolatry and the shedding of innocent blood. The blood of God's prophets cried to heaven. Lapide applies this to persecutors of the Church in his own day: the blood of martyrs is never without its harvest of divine vengeance.