2 Reis 24:4

The innocent blood. — Heb., blood of the innocent; an expression like hand of the right, i.e., the right hand; or, day of the sixth, i.e., the sixth day. Thenius thinks the murder of some prominent personage, such as Isaiah, may be intended, and wishes to distinguish between the statement of the first clause of the verse and the second; but 2 Reis 21:16, where the two statements are connected more closely, does not favour this view.

Which the Lord would not pardon. — Literally, and Jehovah willed not to pardon. We must not soften the statement of 2 Reis 24:3, as Bähr does, by asserting the meaning to be that the nation was punished, not for the sins of Manasseh, but for its persistence in the same kind of sins. The sins of Manasseh are regarded as a climax in Judah’s long course of provocation: the cup was full, and judgment ready to fall. It was only suspended for a time, not revoked, in the reign of the good king Josiah. In short, the idea of the writer is that the innocent blood shed by Manasseh cried to heaven for vengeance, and that the ruin of the kingdom was the answer of the All righteous Judge. It is no objection to say, that in that case children suffered for their fathers’ misdeeds; that was precisely the Old Testament doctrine, until Ezekiel proclaimed another (Ezequiel 18:19; comp. Êxodo 20:5; Deuteronômio 5:9). Looking at the catastrophe from a different standpoint, we may remember that national iniquities must be chastised in the present life, if at all; and that the sufferings of the exile were necessary for the purification of Israel from its inveterate tendency to apostatise from Jehovah.