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September 2023
Vol. 11, No. 9
“Sin”: The Hidden History
By David Konstan
Sin is a religious concept. In civil law, one is accused of committing a crime, not a sin. But sin is often still more narrowly understood as pertaining specifically to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For example, the word “sin” is avoided in English translations of classical Greek and Roman texts, even in the case of the very same words which, when they occur in Christian literature, are standardly rendered as “sin.” Is there a real difference in meaning in the different literary contexts? Or is it just a matter of custom, or of setting the Abrahamic religions firmly apart from paganism?
Relying on dictionary definitions of sin, even theological lexica, is of little help. Take the one offered in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “an offense against religious or moral law. . . transgression of the law of God.” How does this not apply equally to Antigone’s refusal to obey the edict of the tyrant Creon (in Sophocles’ tragedy), which forbade her to bury her fallen brother? Antigone declares:
It was not Zeus who decreed that edict, and not of that kind are the laws which Justice who dwells with the gods below established among men. Nor did I think that your decrees were of such force that a mortal could override the unwritten and secure statutes of the gods. For their life is not of today or yesterday, but for all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth. Not for fear of any man’s pride was I about to owe a penalty to the gods for breaking these. (Sophocles, Antigone, 450–459)
Here, Antigone appeals to higher laws, or nomoi, to justify her action. These are sacred, established by the gods; they differ from Creon’s edict or decree (kêrugma), which is transient and issued by a mortal ruler. If the two kinds of law are in conflict, then violation of the god-given statutes might well be regarded as a sin, that is, a “transgression against divine law.” Defying Creon’s edict, on the contrary, would seem more like a crime or infraction, in the judicial sense. There are other passages of this tenor in Greek and Roman tradition (though I must confess that there are not very many).
To see whether there was some more special sense of sin in the Bible, I sought first to isolate the words in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that seemed most specifically to designate sin. Hebrew and Greek, like all languages, have a rich variety of terms for evil, iniquity, wrongdoing, injustice, offense, or just plain bad. However, there is one word in Hebrew and one in Greek that seem to have a narrower reference. These are the Hebrew ḥāṭā’ (חָטָא), cognate with the Arabic khatiya (خطيئة), and the Greek hamartia (ἁμαρτία), which in classical Greek means something more like error or fault. So, I decided to track these terms, in the hope that they would reveal some special configuration that was not there in the classical passages. And indeed, I found such a paradigmatic sense for both the Hebrew and the Biblical Greek words, with important differences between the two that indicated a unique conception of sin that did not simply spill over into “badness” of any kind.
In a nutshell, Hebrew ḥāṭā’ pertained above all to worshipping (or “chasing after”) foreign gods, in violation of the commandments:
Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus 20:3-5)
The Israelites seem to backslide compulsively, as the books of Kings and Chronicles and the Prophets amply testify. Each time, God punishes the people, and they mend their ways for a short time, confessing their sin, begging God’s forgiveness, and promising never again to stray from His worship. Two points invite attention in this scenario. First, the essence of sin lies in violating the covenant with God. And this pertains only to the Israelites, who are the only people who have such a covenant. Other ethnic groups practice idolatry, to be sure; but they are not worshipping foreign gods, but their own. Strange as it may seem, it appears that only Israelites can sin, in this narrow technical sense of sinning.
The second point is that sin is not simply a matter of worshipping foreign gods but is also part of a script or scenario. There is a narrative quality to it, involving breaking faith with God, acknowledging the wrong, repenting, and seeking forgiveness, which may or may not be granted: no one can compel God’s will. There is, indeed, a verb for forgiveness in the Bible, salakha (סָלַח), of which only God is the subject. When it comes to sin, He alone can forgive. This complex of features, which involves not just failing to worship God faithfully but also the possibility of atonement and a return to God’s path, is the proper context for sin in the Hebrew Bible. And there is nothing like it in pagan religions of the period.
When it comes to the New Testament, and more especially the Gospels, the situation changes. For one thing, Jesus can forgive sins, a power that he bestows also upon his disciples, and which appalls the rabbis, as we see in the famous parable of the paralytic:
And when he [that is, Jesus] returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. And many were gathered together, so that there was no longer room for them, not even about the door; and he was preaching the word to them. And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, “Why does this man speak thus? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question thus in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your pallet and walk’”? (Mark 2:1–12).
It is important to note that there are two distinct acts that Jesus performs. On the one hand, he forgives the sins of the lame man; on the other, he restores his ability to walk. He does the latter because of the faith that his companions, and presumably the lame man himself, manifest in Jesus’ powers. Jesus heals those who believe in him, as in the following story:
And as Jesus passed on from there, two blind men followed him, crying aloud, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.” When he entered the house, the blind men came to him; and Jesus said to them, “Do you believe [pisteuein] that I am able to do this?” They said to him, “Yes, Lord.” Then he touched their eyes, saying, “According to your belief [pistis] be it done to you.” And their eyes were opened. (Matthew 9:27–31)
What, then, about the sins that are forgiven? The text gives no hint as to what they might have been, nor is there any suggestion that the paralyzed man is expected to confess or to repent. Confession is absent from the Gospels: no one confesses, in sharp contrast with the Hebrew Bible. And without confession, repentance too has no role. The Greek word that is frequently translated as “repentance,” dianoia, has several meanings, among which are “a change of heart” or “conversion.” These are recognized by the main Biblical dictionaries, but the conclusion is rarely drawn that what John the Baptist preaches is not “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2), but more like “Convert!” This certainly is the way Jesus uses the word. Convert to what? To belief in Jesus Christ as the Lord. That is the only way to enter the kingdom of heaven, once Jesus has appeared in the world, and performed the miracles necessary to attest to the truth of his message.
A striking passage in the Gospel of John seems to make the point most explicitly. Jesus says: “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin [hamartia]; but now they have no excuse for their sin . . . If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not have sin” (John 15:22, 24). The passage has evoked much commentary. John Calvin, for example, wrote: “It may be thought that Christ intended by these words to say, that there is no other sin but unbelief; and there are some who think so.” Calvin himself rejected this interpretation (though he ascribed it tentatively to Saint Augustine), but there is good reason to take it literally. Sin, now, is defined not as “turning away from God” but as “failing to turn to” (the root sense of “conversion”) Jesus. There are still many forms of wrongdoing, of course, including murder, adultery, and much more. But when Jesus speaks of these offenses, he employs words other than hamartia.
These very precise usages of the terms for sin in the Bible tended to be lost and assimilated to all forms of wrongdoing as the Church (and to some extent Rabbinical legal traditions) developed into global institutions, responsible for the behavior of its congregants. Threats of eternal damnation were extended from the simple question of faith to cover all kinds of misbehavior, and hamartia was readily applied to murder, incest, and other evil actions. That looser way of speaking has survived to our time. In my research, I have attempted to uncover the original uses, and thereby recover a sense of sin that clearly set the Bible apart from related ideas in the circumambient cultures in which it evolved.
David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University. His book, The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity, was recently published by Bloomsbury Press.
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