Prayer of Manasseh, The

A penitential prayer composed sometime during the second or first century BCE. It is typical of Jewish prayer during the intertestamental period (ca. 160 BCE–45 CE). Protestants include it among the Apocrypha; when printed in Catholic Bibles, it is placed with 1 and 2 Esdras in an appendix to the NT. It is considered canonical in Eastern Orthodoxy.