That Manasseh ben Hezekiah should have again come under Assyrian suzerainty appears at that time to have made but little impression; since the time of Ahaz Judah had been accustomed to this relation.  The Book of Kings speaks only of internal affairs under the reign of Manasseh.  According to it, he was a bad ruler, who permitted, and even caused, innocent blood to flow like water.  But what was of greater consequence for the future, he took up an attitude of hostility towards the prophetic party of reform, and put himself on the side of the reaction which would fain bring back to the place of honour the old popular half-pagan conception of Jehovah, as against the pure and holy God whom the prophets worshipped.  The revulsion manifested itself as the reform had done, chiefly in matters of worship.  The old idolatrous furniture of the sanctuaries was reinstated in its place, and new frippery was imported from all quarters, especially from Assyria and Babylon, to renovate the old religion; with Jehovah was now associated a “queen of heaven.”  Yet, as usual, the restoration did more than merely bring back the old order of things.  What at an earlier period had been mere naivete now became superstition, and could hold its ground only by having imparted to it artificially a deeper meaning which was itself borrowed from the prophetical circle of ideas.  Again, earnestness superseded the old joyousness of the cultus; this now had reference principally to sin and its atonement.  Value was attached to services rendered to the Deity, just in proportion to their hardness and unnaturalness; at this period it was that the old precept to sacrifice to Jehovah the male that opens the matrix was extended to children.  The counter-reformation was far from being unaffected by the preceding reformation, although it understood religious earnestness in quite another sense, and sought, not to eliminate heathenism from the cultus, but to animate it with new life.  On the other hand, the reaction was, in the end, found to have left distinct traces of its influence in the ultimate issue of the reformation.

We possess one document dating from Manasseh’s time in Micah vi. 1- vii. 6.  Here, where the lawlessness and utter disregard of every moral restraint in Judah are set in a hideous light, the prophetic point of view, as contrasted with the new refinements in worship, attains also its simplest and purest expression.  Perhaps to this period the Decalogue also, which is so eloquently silent in regard to cultus, is to be assigned.  Jehovah demands nothing for Himself, all that He asks is only for men; this is here the fundamental law of the theocracy.