LITMIR.BIZ

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Breuggemann’s metaphor of the Empire, to focus on my sins serves to imply the sinlessness or incorrectability of the Empire, and thereby serves to isolate me, disempower me, to make me less important to the community and the Empire.

      This individualized sin has become less than useless, and instead rather dysfunctional and misdirecting, even counter-productive, because it blinds me (makes me inattentive) to some larger realities of this world, our attention is diverted from the greater evils in our world. Thereby some far greater forces of evil are safely hidden from our scrutiny and we become unwitting collaborators in those greater evils, complicit, enabling them by allowing our eyes to be diverted into watching the puny evils on our own hands while ignoring the greater evil, or by thinking ourselves too small, too powerless, too stupid and inept to be able to do anything about them.

      Evil Reprised

      At the risk of being repetitive I need to back up and be clear what I am not talking about when I say “Forces of evil.” I am not talking about the natural forces of this physical world which cause events we thoughtlessly or hyperbolically call evil and tragic: Those events themselves I cannot really label evil. Let me lay those to the side as not part of this conversation.

      On the other hand, I do need to restate firmly that there is evil in this world; evil is not a fiction. My burden in this chapter is not to identify all the evils, but to point in their direction and examine how sin is related to those evils.

      The boundaries enclosing what we can call evil are mushy, unclear, muddied. I cannot draw them specifically. Only one word from my thesaurus rings true for me: malevolent. Evil is human-caused, not natural or random; it intends to do ill, mainly to other but sometimes to self; and it involves some willfulness, however consciously and deliberately, or unconsciously and seemingly accidental (not really so).

      The History of Sin

      In the Hebrew Scriptures

      For myself I must start from our deep cultural roots in the Hebrew Scriptures. I have found profound insights in those writings, though mixed with stuff peculiar to that age and culture so no longer applicable, and also with stuff uninsightful ergo stupid, insipid, sometimes dead wrong (e.g., erroneous reproductive biology, misogyny, women as chattel property). So I read those Scriptures with great caution, taking away what has been insightful across the centuries, considering what might be useful when translated into twenty-first-century realities, and discarding the useless and flat out wrong.

      The Vocabulary

      In Leviticus we are given a fundamental Jewish understanding of man. First, a little midrash: the student asks, “Rabbi, why is the bet doubled in lab?”10 And the rabbi’s response is “Because the heart (lab)has two yetzers (impulses), the yetzer ha-rah and the yetzer tov (the impulse to evil and the impulse to good).” In the Levitical law it is clear that YHWH understands man has built into him both impulses, and that man must be choosing between them. And it follows inevitably that sometimes man will choose the impulse to evil rather than the impulse to good. Understanding this, YHWH gives man in the Levitical law a means for coping on those occasions when man chooses the evil impulse, namely the sacrificial law through which the evil is undone and the impurity washed away. So the purpose of the Levitical law is to enable man, when he commits sin, to return to YHWH with the impurity expunged so that he can again be in right relationship with YHWH.

      The Levitical law11 recognizes two types of sins: injunctive sins (aseh) “Thou shalt love YHWH elohim . . .” and prohibitive (ta-aseh) “Steal not.” The law also recognizes three categories of sin:

      1. Khet (in the Hebrew ’ṭḥ meaning “to miss the mark”): inadvertent unintentional sins, mistakes, errors, and

      2. Avon [also zdon] (in the Hebrew m’l meaning “to act unfaithfully, treacherously, to trespass”): advertent trespasses (crookedness) e.g., a man is hungry and eats the available pork knowing it’s against dietary law e.g., probably the sort of thing intended in the Lord’s Prayer “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and

      3. Pesha (in the Hebrew ‘šp meaning “to rebel”): demonstrative sin (rebelliousness, breaking a covenantal relationship) e.g., Absalom raising an army to usurp his father’s throne.

      So some sins are seen as unintentional, others as intentional but not earth-shaking, and some as very heinous, basically rebellious, and ultimately rebellious against YHWH. The Levitical law, recognizing those gradations, then prescribes specific sacrifices for the first two gradations, khet and avon but has none for pesha. It appears that pesha must instead be publicly confessed, which would seem to then reduce the pesha to the severity of avon for which sacrifice can be made.

      1. The verb “to sin” ’ṭḥ) is much used, the noun less so (but then Hebrew is a verb-based language). What does the word mean? Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon says that the core meaning is “to miss the mark/goal/way/path, to do/go wrong, commit a mistake.” The Holladay Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon makes the verb “to be at fault, offend” and “be blame-worthy.” It would seem to carry no shading about intent or guiltiness. It refers to an action, not an intention or a motivation. One hurls a stone with a sling but misses the objective, Goliath.

      2. The verb “to trespass” (ml‘) is less used in the Hebrew text. Brown-Driver-Briggs cites the core meaning as “to act unfaithfully, treacherously,” while Holladay altogether fails to cite it. In noun form this root means “an unfaithful, treacherous act.” And,

      3. The verb “to rebel” (‘šp) Brown-Driver-Briggs translates as “to rebel, transgress” and is used much more frequently in the noun form to simply mean “transgression” though in several degrees of severity.

      The other word crucial to our understanding is kaparah (atonement), (in the Hebrew rpk ) which means basically to wash away (i.e., ablution) and in some contexts is translated “ransom.” In the Pi’el (the intensive mood) kiper is translated “to cover over, pacify, propitiate.”

      In the Levitical law the commission of sin causes uncleanness to accrue to the sinner. That uncleanness is not in itself evil, rather it renders the person impure, therefore unable to enter the presence of YHWH to worship. The uncleanness itself is amoral, without moral value or implication (e.g., leprosy is neither immoral, nor the result of an immorality, an infraction of the law. It is simply an uncleanness which would contaminate others and must be quarantined. Likewise a nocturnal emission and menstruation are not bad or immoral, but simply unclean, i.e., rendering the person too impure to withstand the purity of YHWH’s presence). The uncleanness must be washed away before approaching YHWH’s presence. In the atoning sacrifice the sin is not forgiven, nor does the sacrifice remove responsibility for the sin. The offence must first be restituted/redressed, and after that the accrued uncleanness can be washed away, removing the impurity of the offering-bringer so that he can enter YHWH’s presence.

      One other word shuv (in the Hebrew šub) should be reviewed, one which we regularly translate “repent.” The Hebrew verb shuv means basically “to turn” or “to turn aside” or “return,” hence to change direction. One is walking the path and chooses to take the left/right-branching path. It implies a choice, an act of the will. It is sometimes translated “to repent.”

      Two Sorts of Laws

      Scholars have been clear there are two strains within the Hebrew law. One I judge to be concerned about the orderliness of tribal living; it sets standards and limits and sanctions to enforce those limits. The other (Lev 17–26, dubbed the Holiness Code) is concerned about the purity of the nation, the quality of its worthiness to be YHWH’s people. If we intend to pay attention to the Mosaic law (e.g., by citing it as reason for our biases, phobias and irrationalities), then we need to be very clear that these two strains of the law, while woven together in the Hebrew text somewhat seamlessly, are quite different, serve different purposes, and are dealt with in different ways. The infractions of the first strain, those that disrupt relations within the tribe are sins, but infractions of the holiness code are abominations (not sins), offenses which render the tribe so impure that YHWH will not (or cannot?) relate to it (e.g., a man lying with a man as with a woman is not a sin but an abomination, because it is a form of worship

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